You are all invited to Awareness Film Night’s virtual screening of “The Need To GROW”, the film that was slated to be screened for April’s Farm and Film Gala.

This is a great and timely film, not to be missed, about growing our own food, about innovative, inspiring new farming practices that don’t harm the ecosystem, about overcoming adversity and the demolishing of one’s dreams, about perseverance and about the need to grow in more ways than just growing food.

Since we were unable to screen the film due to The Need To Isolate during Covid Times, Rob Herring, the filmmaker has agreed that we can substitute, for our screening fees, making this film available for free viewing on-line for 4 days for Awareness Film Night moviegoers.

Here is the link for watching this film: https://tinyurl.com/AwarenessTNTG THIS LINK WILL BE GOOD FOR 4 DAYS FROM THE MOMENT YOU SIGN IN.

Post screening “discussion” is invited on the AFN facebook page: https://facebook.com/AwarenessFilmNight/

Every year semi-trailers crisscross the continent in the dead of night carrying an unsuspected and unusual cargo: Honeybees. Tens of billions of them are transported back and forth in a unique annual migration that’s indispensable to the feeding of North America and beyond.

One out of every three bites we eat and the growth of almost all our fruits, nuts and vegetables would be impossible without pollination from bees.

“Beekeeper and cinematographer Peter Nelson captures this hidden world with an insider’s knowledge and a keen eye for compositions. From stunning landscapes and night photography to intimate close-ups of the bees themselves, the enlightening information found here is told through a seasoned storyteller’s lens” – Vancouver International Film Festival

This 2019 award-winning documentary features beekeepers, farmers, environmentalists and even world reknown chefs.

Post screening discussion and Q & A with local beekeepers extraordinaire, Bob Liptrot and Dana LeComte, owners of Tugwell Creek Honey Farm and Meadery and representatives from Transition Sooke’s Pesticide Education Group.

Bob Liptrot has a Master’s Degree in Entomology, specifically in the parasitology of bees. He is a Master Beekeeper, teaches beekeeping at Royal Roads University and is part of the Capital Regional Beekeepers Association. He has kept bees since the age of 6.

Doors open at 6:30 for honey-tasting and bee and pesticide information in the theatre foyer; film and panel discussion from 7-9:00 p.m.

Admission by donation. Contributions that remain after expenses will be donated to the David Suzuki Pollinator Protection Campaign.

A working disc of “The Pollinators” will be in the AFN Library for those who attended this screening where the disc did not play properly. It will be available until the end of May, 2020. See “Library” #5356 for more details.

Take a break from the December hustle and bustle and surrender to the universal awe that mountainous landscapes evoke. Our backyard is bigger than you think. 75% of B.C. is composed of mountain terrain that almost nobody will ever see, for few people ever actually venture into true wilderness. This film introduces us to that special breed of people, undefined by age, gender, profession or background, whose draw to the mountains is so strong that their lives must revolve around it.

After months of preparation Martina and her 60 year old mother Tania embark on a 6-month, 2300 km. journey from Squamish, B.C. to Alaska through a relentless mountain wilderness.

We meet others who share a passion for the mountain life: a group of nuns inhabiting a mountain retreat to be closer to God; a photographer who was buried in an avalanche; an impassioned alpinist; a focused snow artist; a couple who has been living off grid for nearly 50 years.

Shot in cinematic detail by filmmaker and cinematographer Grant Baldwin (who AFN moviegoers met with his wife Jenny as the stars in “The Clean Bin Project” and “Just Eat It”) as well as by Martina and Tania using their GoPro (charged by a solar panel), this film is a riveting portrait of human passion set high in the peaks of British Columbia.

Trailer: https://mountainlifefilm.com/trailer

Don’t forget to bring a food donation for the EMCS students’ “10,000 Tonight” Sooke Foodbank Drive to be held on the same night.

Citizen Kane is comming to Sooke!

Reviewed and analysed countless times, here are a few examples from over the years since 1941 when it premiered.

 “This Orson Welles film is generally considered the greatest American film of the sound period, and it may be more fun than any other great movie.” 

“The cinematography in this film has never been bettered.” 

“Its surface is as much fun as any movie ever made. Its depths surpass understanding. I have analyzed it a shot at a time with more than 30 groups, and together we have seen, I believe, pretty much everything that is there on the screen. The more clearly I can see its physical manifestation, the more I am stirred by its mystery.”

Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film by Orson Wells, its producer, co-screenwriter, director and star. The picture was Welles’s first feature film. Nominated for Academy Awards in nine categories, it won an Academy Award for Best Writing Screen by Herman J. Mankiewicz and Welles. Considered by many critics, filmmakers, and fans to be the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane was voted as such in five consecutive British Film Institute, and it topped the American Film Institute’s 100 years …100 Movies list in 1998,

The film examines the life and legacy of Charles Foster Kane, played by Welles.

Kane’s career in the publishing world is born of idealistic social service, but gradually evolves into a ruthless pursuit of power. The character was based in part upon the American newspaper magnates William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, Chicago tycoons  Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick, and aspects of the screenwriters’ own lives.

Narrated principally through flashbacks, the story is told through the research of a newsreel reporter seeking to solve the mystery of the newspaper magnate’s dying word: “Rosebud”.

Upon its release, Hearst prohibited mention of the film in any of his newspapers.

Check this: https://youtu.be/qg0j–Kxf0I

See you at the movies!

Wednesday, November 13th at 7 p.m. Admission by donation.

Where: EMCS Community Theatre, 6218 Sooke Rd, Sooke  

Why can’t we afford to live or own businesses in our own cities and towns anymore? How is it that The Commons are being bulldozed to accommodate the “financialization” of the real estate market? Housing affordability is decreasing at a record pace and homelessness is increasing by alarming rates. Who are the players and what are the factors that make housing one of today’s most pressing world issues? Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten (“Big Boys Gone Bananas”, #5242 in the Film Library) follows Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing as she goes from Harlem to Valparaiso, South Korea to Toronto to talk to people who are being PUSHed out of their homes and their communities.

Young people are getting trapped in a cycle of renting apartments that are unaffordable and unreliable. Working people, more and more with children, are facing evictions and are left with no place to live, the number of people in the Global South living in “informal housing” (favelas) is projected to exceed 1 billion by next year.

This isn’t a natural, inevitable development. It can change. The film addresses ideas of what we, the public, need to do to PUSH back.

There will be a post-screening Q&A panel with Kelly Roth, Executive Director and Lisa Crossman, Peer Housing Support Coordinator with the Greater Victoria Coalition to End Homelessness. They are both Sooke residents and, along with members of the Sooke Shelter Society, will be able to enlighten filmgoers and answer questions about homelessness in our area.

7-9 p.m.

Trailer: pushthefilm.com

Interview with Leilani Farha: newint.org/features/2019/06/19/unitednations-leilanifarha-housing.

Intermission Film Series last show of the season:

“DERSU UZALA” Akira Kurosawa, 1975

Set in the forests of Eastern Siberia at the turn of the century, it is a portrait of the friendship that grows between an aging hunter and a Russian surveyor. A romantic hymn to nature and the human spirit.

Speaking of the film in greater detail, Kurosawa said, “The relationship between human beings and nature is getting worse and worse…I wanted to have people all over the world know about this Soviet Asian character who lived in harmony with nature… I think people should be more humble toward nature because we are a part of it and we must become harmonized with it. If nature is destroyed, human beings will be destroyed too. So, we can learn a lot from Dersu,” (quoted in Donald Richie’s The Films of Akira Kurosawa).

Or, as the title character himself says in the film, “Man is very small before the face of nature.”

94% Audience score in Rotten Tomatoes

Dersu Uzala was the second Kurosawa film to earn an Academy Award. His 1950 film Rashomon won Best Foreign Language Film, and the director was awarded an honorary career-achievement Oscar in 1990.

This story of friendship will fill your heart.

Co-presented with Sooke Region Food CHI

6:30-7:45 – in the theatre foyer: vendors of all things from and for the farm and garden, information tables from community organizations, tea, coffee and goodies made by the EMCS Culinary Arts students (by donation).

 7:45-9:00 – in the theatre:  film and gift baskets. 

“After Winter, Spring” is a film about a small rural community in the Perigord region of southwestern France, cultivated for over 6000 years caught between their traditional ways of farming and an uncertain future.  Their story is beautifully and lovingly filmed and recorded by one of their neighbors, filmmaker Judith Lit.  Through the compelling stories of these hard-working farmers inextricably connected to their land and their animals, the film explores the nature of small farmers and the rapid changes of the last 2 decades that have impacted the lives of farmers whose survival is tied to the land.

“This film is never less than a pleasure to watch” Brian Miller, Seattle Weekly

Vendors and community groups attending: ALM Farms, Full Circle Seeds, Bountiful Bay Farm, EMCS Home Ec students, Habitat Acquisition Trust, Honestly Tea, Metchosin Farm, Sea Bluff Farm, Sheila’s Coastal Crunch, Three Sisters Farm, Pesticide Education Group, Zero Waste Sooke, Sooke Fall Fair.

FRIDAY March 15th, 2019

This month scheduling has provided us the opportunity to have a movie night on Friday March 15th instead of the usual 2nd Wednesday.   A great way to begin the weekend.  We’ll be showing Rabbit Proof Fence, a wonderful film from Australia about a 14-year-old courageous girl determined to be free.

EMCS Teathre

Movie begins at 7:00pm. Doors open at 6:30pm

By donation, Thanks!

Co-presented with Transition Sooke

Coming at a moment of profound political and social crisis, “What is Democracy” reflects on a word we too often take for granted. This 2018 National Film Board documentary spans millennia and continents from ancient Athens’ where modern democracy was born to the financial collapse of present-day Greece and from capitalism’s roots in medieval Italy to the U.S., with its growing gap between rich and poor and persistent racism. Featuring a diverse cast, including celebrated theorists, trauma surgeons, activists, factory workers, asylum seekers and former prime ministers, this urgent film connects the past and the present, the emotional and the intellectual, the personal and the political, in order to provoke and inspire.

Director Astra Taylor notes: “A word we say and hear all the time but rarely reflect on, democracy is both an ideal and a reality, a rousing aspiration and a devastating disappointment……(W)ho are the people, especially in this moment of increasing hostility and division? And what about the fact that, as wealth and influence concentrate the people are not very powerful at all? Can self-government even live up to its promise of universal inclusion? Do we even want to rule ourselves? “

“(T)his documentary (is) a deliberate challenge to complacency and, as such, it’s a great watch”____________________The Guardian

After the film Transition Sooke co-president Michael Tacon will facilitate an audience discussion on any topics or thoughts raised by the film.

“It’s still the same old story/ A fight for love and glory/

A case of do or die/

The world will always welcome lovers

As time goes by.”

Intermission Film Series  is opening the 2019 program with a film requested but the audience: Michael Curtiz‘s 1942 classic Casablanca. If you’re seeing it for the first or dozenth time, it’ll be a treat to view this classic in the EMCS Community Theatre ~ Wed. Jan. 9 at 7 p.m. Admission by donation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casablanca_(film)