Awareness Film Night

December 13th is the next Awareness Video Night presentation: “The Power of Community – How Cuba Survived Peak Oil”.  This newly-released documentary explores what happened in Cuba in 1990 when their supply of gas and oil was cut in half. A rare view into this island culture, this film documents how Cuba became a living example of a country successfully transitioning to small organic farms and urban gardens, renewable energy and large scale mass transit. It demonstrates how a society can change from an industrial global focus to a local, community-based one. 7 p.m. EMCS theatre. By donation.

The last screening for the Awareness Video Night season will be held on June 28th at 7 p.m. at Edward Milne Community School Theatre. This month’s film is “Being Caribou”, a National Film Board documentary featuring environmentalist Leanne Allison and wildlife biologist Karsten Heuer as they follow a herd of 120,000 caribou on foot across 1500 kilometres of rugged Arctic tundra. The husband and wife team want to raise awareness of threats to the caribou’s survival. During the 5 month journey they ski and hike across mountains, swim icy rivers, brave Arctic weather and endure hordes of mosquitoes and an encounter with a grizzly bear. An inspiring and beautiful film.  

Awareness Video Night Weds. April 12: ” The Yes Men – Cutting the Corporate Crap”. This film follows a couple of anti-corporate activist-pranksters as they impersonate World Trade Organization spokesmen on TV and at business conferences around the world. The story follows Andy and Mike from their beginnings with GWBush.com and on to their tasteless parody of the WTO website. Some visitors to the site don’t realize that the site is a fake and send speaking invitations meant for the real WTO. Delighted to speak for the organization they oppose, Andy and Mike don thrift-store suits and set out to shock their unwitting audiences with darkly comic satire on global free trade. Weirdly, the experts don’t notice the joke and seem to accept the goofy ideas the two come up with. This hilarious documentary was the feature film at the recent Courtenay Film Fest. 7 p.m. Edward Milne Community School Theatre 6218 Sooke Rd. in Sooke. By donation.

More info at http://www.theyesmen.org

Awareness Video Night presents “Sombrio” . Filmmaker Paul Manly will be on hand for the screening of his recently released film which documents the end of a diverse community of surfers and squatters that existed on Sombrio Beach for more than thirty years. It captures the residents over a two-year period and reveals their personal stories and convictions as they come to terms with their impending eviction. The images of the ocean are stunning and the prowess of virtuoso surfers simply amazing. In recent film festivals in both Victoria and Nanaimo screenings of “Sombrio” have all been sold out.
  
“A surprise hit at the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival” ……….Globe and Mail -Tom Hawthorn

“Wonderful work. Sombrio needs to be seen by a whole lot of people. It certainly makes us think of living and the land in a whole new way” CBC Radio – Paul Vasey

7 p.m. March 8th Edward Milne Community School 6218 Sooke Rd. By donation.

This month’s Awareness Video Night will feature Isaac Isitan’s film “Money”. Who creates it? Who controls it? Who profits? This movie begins in Turkey and Argentina where thousands of people took to the streets, attacking banks when their life savings evaporated overnight. Middle class people who once lined up at the bank were now lining up at food banks. How could these relatively wealthy countries possibly go bankrupt in less than a decade? A moving portrait of the citizens who lost everything, the macro economic policies demanded by the World Bank and the IMF and the ensuing economic and social crises these policies cause. 

Faced with a lack of money, the people have begun to reinvent it, initiating credit and barter systems and inventing local parallel economies.

“If the people really knew the process through which money is created, the system would not hold more than 24 hours.” – Henry Ford

Feb. 8 at 7 p.m. Edward Milne Community School theatre. By donation.

In a world teetering on the edge of self-destruction, filmmaker Velcrow Ripper takes the audience on a visually stunning pilgrimage to Earth’s Ground Zeros searching for hope and meaning in the turmoil of the darkest moments of recent human history. Ripper’s search takes him to the minefields of Cambodia, war torn Afghanistan, the toxic wasteland of Bhopal, post 911 New York, Bosnia, Hiroshima, Palestine and Israel. A favourite at film festivals all over the world.

Admission is by donation.

Info: http://scaredsacred.org/

After assessing today’s dwindling oil reserves and skyrocketing use of oil for fuels, plastics and chemicals, “The Oil Factor” questions the motives for the U.S. wars in the Middle-East and Central Asia where 3/4 of the world’s oil and natural gas is located.

With exclusive footage shot on location in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the film documents the spiraling violence now engulfing both Iraq and Afghanistan, a country conspicuously absent from the commercial media’s news segments.

Interviews gathered throughout the Middle-East, Europe and the United States, including a Bechtel executive in Baghdad, also expose who is cashing in on the tens of billions of dollars requested from congress by the current administration of G. W. Bush.

With detailed maps and graphics, The Oil Factor features many experts and personalities such as former Defense Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky, the Project for the New American Century Executive Director Gary Schmitt, Coalition Provisional Authority Chairman Paul Bremer, former Pentagon analyst Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, current Iraqi government official Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim and authors Ahmed Rashid and Michael C. Ruppert.

Contributing organizations include the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, the Pentagon, Washington’s Institute for Policy Studies, New York’s World Policy Institute, London’s Jane’s Intelligence and Petroleum Economist, Paris’ Agence France Press and Center for Energy Strategy Studies (C.E.P.S.E.) or the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (O.E.C.D.)

Info: http://www.theoilfactor.com/