We feed the world

Directed by Erwin Wagenhofer
Playing time: 96 min
Every day in Vienna the amount of unsold bread sent back to be disposed of is enough to supply Austria's second-largest city, Graz. Around 350,000 hectares of agricultural land, above all in Latin America, are dedicated to the cultivation of soybeans to feed Austria's livestock while one quarter of the local population starves. Every European eats ten kilograms a year of artificially irrigated greenhouse vegetables from southern Spain, with water shortages the result.

In WE FEED THE WORLD, Austrian filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer traces the origins of the food we eat. His journey takes him to France, Spain, Romania, Switzerland, Brazil and back to Austria.

Leading us through the film is an interview with Jean Ziegler, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

WE FEED THE WORLD is a film about food and globalisation, fishermen and farmers, long-distance lorry drivers and high-powered corporate executives, the flow of goods and cash flow–a film about scarcity amid plenty. With its unforgettable images, the film provides insight into the production of our food and answers the question what world hunger has to do with us .

Interviewed are not only fishermen, farmers, agronomists, biologists and the UN's Jean Ziegler, but also the director of production at Pioneer, the world's largest seed company, as well as Peter Brabeck, Chairman and CEO of Nestlé International, the largest food company in the world.

English / Spanish version:

Nablus: Ciudad fantasma

Directeed by Alberto Arce
Playing time: 30 min
Una visión desde dentro y a pie de calle de lo sucedido en esa ciudad Palestina a lo largo de una semana del mes de agosto del año 2004. La cámara se acerca a la realidad de niños que juegan a ser soldados de un ejército tan solo armado de piedras y razones. En medio de las bombas y los disparos del ejército israelí se establece un diálogo con soldados que parecen a veces más asustados que sus propias víctimas. La cámara, junto a un grupo de paramédicos y activistas internacionales, sigue los pasos del ejército en su registro de la ciudad casa por casa. Al mismo tiempo la presencia internacional actúa como "testigo ocupante" del espacio de impunidad en el que Israel se comporta habitualmente.


Spanish version:

Argentina, The take (La Toma)

Directed by Avis Lewis y Naomi Klein.
Playing time: 146 min
La película describe el proceso de recuperación de empresas en Argentina por parte de los trabajadores. Con voluntad "subversiva" y "de emocionar" gracias a "una historia humana" en los antípodas del reality show, Klein y Lewis pretenden que La toma dé "un giro de 180 grados al debate sobre la globalización". ¿Cómo? "Presentando alternativas" a una problemática, la de la fuga de capitales y la deslocalización de empresas, capaz de "arrasar un país fronterizo entre el primer y el tercer mundo como Argentina pero que amenaza por igual a Barcelona, Toronto y Caracas".
Lewis admite que se han ocupado fábricas en otros lugares y momentos de la historia, pero destaca del caso argentino "un énfasis nuevo en la democracia de base asamblearia" y el ejemplo de una lucha obrera que sustituye "la tradición de la huelga" por la "insistencia en el derecho y la necesidad de trabajar con dignidad".
Klein puntualiza: "Si en los años 70 la ocupación de fábricas fue fruto de una ideología que iba de la cabeza a los pies, hoy se ha invertido el proceso y la política nace y crece en acciones como la de ocupar no sólo una fábrica, sino una casa, un centro social o --tomados de internet-- un programa de software libre o una canción"

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Super rich: The greed game

Directed by Robert Peston.
Playing time: 58 min
As the credit crunch bites and a global economic crisis threatens, Robert Peston reveals how the super-rich have made their fortunes, and the rest of us are picking up the bill.

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Face to Face

Directed by Thomas Aubry and Adria Fernandez.
Playing time: 28 min

“Face to Face” it is a documentary talking about the comun unknowledge of the two cultures, the arab and the jewish who, even if they share the same land, have almost any contact.

Trough the Givat Haviva association who promote peace between Palestiniens and Israelies in Israel, Face to Face try to open mind of people about knowing the others moving further the stereotypes made by medias, nationalities, races or religions.

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Grizzly Man

Directed by Werner Herzog.

Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers in Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Over time, he believed he was trusted by the bears, who would allow him to approach them, and sometimes even touch them. Treadwell was repeatedly warned by park officials that his interaction with the bears was unsafe to both him and to the bears.
"At best he's misguided," Deb Liggett, superintendent at Katmai and Lake Clark national parks, told the Anchorage Daily News in 2001.
"At worst, he's dangerous. If Timothy models unsafe behavior, that ultimately puts bears and other visitors at risk." Treadwell filmed his exploits, and used the films to raise public awareness of the problems faced by bears in North America. In 2003, at the end of his thirteenth visit, he and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard were attacked, killed, and eaten by a bear.

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Looking for the Revolution

Directed by Rodrigo Vazquez.
Che Guevara died in Southern Bolivia while trying to ignite the sparks of revolution throughout South America. His death at the hands of Bolivian Rangers trained and financed by the US Government, marked the beginning of the cocaine era in Bolivia. Forty years later and under pressure from the masses who gave him a clear mandate, the first indigenous President Evo Morales (an ex-coca leaf farmer) is promising to continue the revolution. He has nationalised the oil industry and passed laws on Agrarian reform. Despite the revolutionary-sounding election speeches and campaign iconography that accompanied his landslide victory, on closer inspection it emerges that the old system is pretty much alive inside the new one. Corruption, nepotism and old-fashioned populism are at the core of this movement.
The more Morales does to create employment, the more the landowners conspire against him and paralyse Bolivia’s economy. As a result, no jobs are created and the pressure from the poor increases. The cycle of tension threatens to crush both the country and the indigenous revolution. Looking for the Revolution is about the dynamics of that tension as witnessed by the characters of the film - the struggle for power between landowners and the indigenous movement, and the continuation of a revolution Morales-style, started so long ago.

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Rize

Directed by David LaChapelle.
Playing time: 87 min

Rize is a documentary which follows an interview schedule of two related dancing sub-cultures of Los Angeles: clowning and krumping. The first series of interviews develop the idea of clowning, the second series the idea of krumping, the third section of the film depicts a dance battle between clowns and krumpers. An atypical sequence in the film uses montage to compare 1960s era anthropological films of African dance ritual with contemporary clowning and krumping dance maneuvers.

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Bloody Cartoons

Bloody Cartoons is a documentary about how and why 12 drawings in a Danish provincial paper could whirl a small country into a confrontation with Muslims all over the world. He asks whether respect for Islam combined with the heated response to the cartoons is now leading us towards self-censorship. How tolerant should we be, he wonders, of the intolerant. And what limits should there be, if any, to freedom of speech in a democracy.

The director films in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Qatar, France, Turkey and Denmark, talking to some of the people that played key roles during the cartoon crisis.

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Baraka

Directed by Ron Fricke.
Baraka (1992) is a Todd-AO (70 mm) non-narrative film.
Often compared to Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka's subject matter has some similarities—including footage of various landscapes, churches, ruins, religious ceremonies, and cities thrumming with life, filmed using time-lapse photography in order to capture the great pulse of humanity as it flocks and swarms in daily activity. The film also features a number of long tracking shots through various settings, including one through former concentration camps at Auschwitz (in Nazi-occupied Poland) and Tuol Sleng (in Cambodia) turned into museums honoring their victims: over photos of the people involved, past skulls stacked in a room, to a spread of bones. In addition to making comparisons between natural and technological phenomena, such as in Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka searches for a universal cultural perspective: for instance, following a shot of an elaborate tattoo on a bathing Japanese yakuza mobster with one of Native Australian tribal paint.

The movie was filmed at 152 locations of 24 countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Nepal, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States. It contains no dialogue. Instead of a story or plot, the film uses themes to present new perspectives and evoke emotion purely through cinema.

All Languages: Here

Ilha das Flores - Isle of flowers

Ilha das Flores is a short film (13 minutes) that's a sort of social documentary with biting criticism of civilization's hierarchical system (meritocracy out of control with no empathy) and capitalism sprinkled with irony. Though ostensibly about the journey of a tomato, it's beautiful and devastatingly horrific and truthful. It may be the best documentary ever made. The film ends with an ironic reference to a poem by the Brazilian bourgeois poet Cecília Benevides Meireles, who is considered one of the most important poets of the second phase of the Brazilian Modernism:

"Freedom" is a word that fires the dreams of human beings. No-one can explain what it means, and no-one understands it.

English version:

Spanish Version: Here

French version: