Fela Kuti is to African music what Bob Marley is to reggae: its prophet. All contemporary forms of black music, from funk to electronic, owe something to the irresistible groove of the Afrobeat sound that he created. He recorded more than 60 albums and spent a lifetime fighting against political corruption in his homeland of Nigeria, where the people affectionately called him their “Black President.”

Shot in Lagos at the peak of his career in 1982, this documentary contains interviews with Fela detailing his thoughts on politics, Pan-Africanism, music and religion, alongside unpublished versions of songs like ITT, Army Arrangement and Power Show. For all who wish to know more about an artist at the heart of African musical history, Fela Kuti: Music is the Weapon is an essential film.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Fela Kuti: Music is the Weapon Product Information

Grade Level: College and University
Subjects: African Studies, Arts, Music & Ethnology and Gender Studies
Copyright: © 1985 Francis Kertekian
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 53 minutes with bonus footage

Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)

Educational with Public Performance Rights: $249.00

Public Library Price (does not include public performance rights): (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
$149.00

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Finding Depth in Fela’s Women
By Felia R. Lee, The New York Times

This is the short list of how the women of “Fela!,” the Broadway musical about the Nigerian Afrobeat musician and political agitator, do not see their characters: victims, go-go dancers, sex objects. The nine women in tight outfits, elaborate hairdos and painted faces represent the 27 real-life co-wives of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, who married them collectively in what he considered a personal and political gesture as he fought against Nigeria’s corrupt authoritarian regime and defended traditional African culture.

The women have no individual lines; their characters aren’t even named onstage. In any other show they would be considered part of the chorus. Yet they maintain a constant, magnetic stage presence, dancing and singing at Fela’s nightclub, the Shrine, in the Lagos of the late ’70s. While their stories are not told, their characters have been thoroughly studied and embodied by the performers, who see them as an integral part of the complex and contradictory tale of the man who inspired the musical.

Read the article here.

The Elvis phenomenon has its roots in his birthplace where Presley began a musical journey that would take him from the wrong side of the tracks in Tupelo through Memphis to worldwide iconic status. Using interviews, recordings, photographs and rare home movies, Elvis: Return to Tupelo is the rock n’ roll adventure story of one of the greatest cultural forces of the twentieth century.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

• College / University: $249.00
  
  
  

• Library / High School: $129.00
  
  
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!
 

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Additional Information
• Production Photos - Coming Soon!
• Full Reviews - Coming Soon!
• Credits - Coming Soon!

 

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theEYE is a series of interview-based profiles of contemporary visual artists. Each film provides a thought-provoking survey of an artist’s work and ideas, featuring the artist in discussion and illustrated by sequences captured of key exhibitions and installations around the world.

The beautifully produced films offer a rare and personal insight into the influences and creative processes that lie behind the artist’s creations, and provide an accessible means of engaging with the pleasures and puzzles of art in the 21st century.

An excellent introduction to contemporary artists and their works, theEYE is an ideal resource for a wide range of audience, including galleries, museums and colleges, as well as the individual art-lover.

NOTE: All DVDs from theEYE Series are in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

Anthony Caro
Tracey Emin
Gilbert and George
Howard Hodgkin
Anish Kapoor
Malcolm Morley
Chris Ofili
Rachel Whiteread

To purchase all eight titles in theEYE Series: $499.00

In the early 1960s Anthony Caro led a revolution in sculpture in Britain. His abstract steel constructions, often painted in bold colors, forged a new and internationally influential sculptural language. In the years since his fertile and diverse practice has consistently challenged and extended what sculpture is, and what it might be.

At the age of 80, Anthony Caro remains intensely active, working each day in his studio and overseeing every detail of an extensive retrospective at Tate. Preparations for the show are featured in this profile, along with many of his major works, filmed in Britain, Germany and the United States.

In interview Anthony Caro speaks about the development of his art from the bronze figures of the 1950s through the many variations of his work with metals, his hybrids of sculpture and architecture, and his recent large-scale, multi-part responses to Old Master painting and the worlds of myth and Christianity. The film is a portrait of an artist of great distinction whose inventiveness and creative vigor are undiminished.

Anthony Caro Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

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Although at times obscured by the artist’s celebrity, the art of Tracey Emin is serious and focused, challenging and at times startlingly beautiful. In this film, she speaks frankly about her career, the craft of her immensely varied work, and the immediate, personal themes with which she engages: autobiography, memory, desire, and identity.

Many of her best-known works, including Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995) and My Bed (1998), are illustrated and discussed, as is a wide selection of drawings, prints, paintings, neons, appliqué blankets and installations.

“I always say if I didn’t make art, I’d probably be dead,” she reflects. “But let’s be more realistic about that. If I didn’t make art and I’d done well in life, then I might have gone into retail. I would probably be the person in the shop that would be always organizing the displays, and always making the noticeboard look nice in the canteen, stuff like that. I’m a genuinely creative person.”

Please note that this video contains explicit images and adult language featured in artworks by Tracey Emin.

Tracey Emin Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Gilbert Prousch met George Passmore at St Martin’s School of Art in 1967. Since then they have famously lived and worked together as Gilbert & George, creating an extraordinary body of provocative artworks. They have exhibited themselves as “Living Sculptures”, documented the banality of their daily lives in London’s East End, and, since the late 1970s, produced vibrant, challenging photographic collages.

This video profile of Gilbert & George features a characteristically deadpan performance of themselves. Sex, money, race and religion, they explain, are four themes at the heart of their art. Their interview is complemented by images of many of their works, including the remarkable Dirty Words Pictures made in 1977, together with important collages of the 1980s and 1990s.

Asked if their work, and their personas, are ironic, Gilbert says, ” We always think it’s struggle enough to drag something out from inside of ourselves onto that wall without trying to be strange or odd about it. We wanted to be absolutely painful truth,” George adds. “I really believe it has to be painful.”

“1980’s The World of Gilbert and George is really only interesting as an unwitting document of its time, but theEYE, an extended interview on the pair, is fascinating…”
-Guardian Guide, February 2007

Gilbert and George Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Howard Hodgkin is one of the world’s leading painters, whose art is admired both by critics and by a wide public. Beginning with a remembered experience, Hodgkin works on his seductive and complex paintings for long periods, characteristically producing richly colored, sweeping compositions, which continue into the picture-frame itself. These paintings uniquely straddle representation and abstraction, at the same time as they demonstrate both an awareness of history and an understanding of art’s potential today. Most recently, his interest in working in different scales, evident particularly in significantly larger paintings such as Americana and After Vuillard, demonstrates his concern to engage the viewer in new and challenging ways.

In this interview, illustrated with many key paintings, Howard Hodgkin speaks with warmth and passion about how his methods, about his influences, about color and composition, and about the fundamental importance of painting. “You need things to look at,” he says simply, “things to affect your feelings, and your intelligence, and your heart.”

Howard Hodgkin Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

In October 2002 Anish Kapoor completed his extraordinary sculpture Marsyas for The Unilever Series of commissions in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. A challenging and overwhelming artwork, Marsyas is a vast red PVC membrane stretched between three massive steel rings. The title refers to a satyr in Greek mythology who was flayed alive by the god Apollo.

This film follows the making of Marsyas, from the earliest maquettes to the complex installation at Tate. Anish Kapoor comments on each stage of the process, and on the ideas and concerns of his art. Also illustrated are a range of his other sculptures and two recent large-scale works: Sky Mirror in Nottingham and Taratantara, created for the empty shell of Baltic as this new art center was being built in Gateshead.
 
 
 
 
 
Anish Kapoor Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Malcolm Morley is one of the most significant and influential painters working today. Born in England but active in the United States since the late 1950s, Morley has developed an intensely individual vision embracing, but never determined by, autobiography, politics, psychoanalysis, myth, the visual culture of his time and the limitless potential of paint.

Filmed as Morley works in his distinctive manner on a spectacular new canvas, this documentary features the artist’s provocative reflections on his life, painting technique, influences and concerns. It also illustrates a wide range of his paintings from the earliest abstract works, through the painstakingly precise depictions of reproductions (on postcards, from travel brochures) of ships, contemporary scenes and Old Masters, to the catastrophe pictures of the 1970s.

Paintings engaging with ancient cultures followed, and then works based on the cardboard cut-out airplane and boat kits which Morley has made since his youth. Most recently, he has returned to paintings of news photographs, exploring a striking and challenging new range of imagery.

Malcolm Morley Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

In 2003 Chris Ofili created the spectacular installation within reach for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Combining a cycle of paintings depicting lovers in a Paradise-like garden with a shimmering glass dome, Ofili plunged visitors into disorienting spaces of dense color and enveloping light.

Shot in London, Germany and Venice, this film relates the creation of Within Reach. Chris Ofili’s reflections on the process are complemented by interviews with his collaborator in Venice, architect David Adjaye, and the structural engineer from Arup Associates, who helped realize the complex dome.

Also included is an exploration of The Upper Room, an installation of 13 exquisite canvases by Ofili, which was first shown in 2002. Both this and Within Reach are about “trying to create an atmosphere for people to feel somehow out of themselves.” His aim, the artist explains, is to “do something that is sincerely interesting and can honestly enhance the experience of looking.”

Chris Ofili Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Rachel Whiteread has created some of the most remarkable and resonant public sculptures of recent years. House (now demolished) cast in concrete the interior of a terraced house in London’s East End. Holocaust Memorial is a moving memorial in Vienna to the victims of the holocaust in Austria. Yet she also frequently works on a domestic scale, casting in plaster and resin the spaces inside, around and beneath furniture, floors and staircases. Her art is a uniquely poetic response to the everyday, and to the haunting themes of memory and mortality.

In this video profile Rachel Whiteread speaks about the ideas that prompted a number of her best-known sculptures, including Ghost, her first cast of the space inside a complete room, and Monument, which established a shimmering presence in London’s Trafalgar Square during the summer of 2001. She also outlines the complexities of creating her often technically challenging works, and reflects on the controversies that they have sometimes set off.
 
 
 
Rachel Whiteread Product Information
 
Grade Level: Grades 10-12, College and University
Subjects: Art
Language: English
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 26 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
NOTE: This film is in PAL Region 0, which will play on most computers and some standard North American DVD players.

• College / University: $129.00
• 
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.
  

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

Gandhi called it “Soul Force,” Dr. King called it “Love in Action,” and now, acclaimed filmmaker Velcrow Ripper is calling it “Fierce Light.” It is a universal power that radiates from every human heart, undeniably hopeful, and full of possibility. It holds us to be uncompromisingly nonviolent and drives us to the pentacle of our spiritual excellence. Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action chronicles Ripper’s journey to document examples of this sacred beacon that shines the brightest at the darkest and most dangerous times.

Haunted by the violent death of his friend and fellow media activist Brad Will, who was shot to death in Oaxaca, Mexico while videotaping protests against State Governor Ulises Ruiz, Ripper decided to travel to the scene of the tragedy to finish what Brad began. There, Ripper discovered an electrifying grass-root movement founded on the values of peace and non-violence, but fiercely determined to create a new world of justice, sustainability and global harmony. Spurred by this refreshing find, Ripper embarked on an intercontinental quest to such diverse locales as New Zealand, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and North America in search of more stories of this growing movement.

From Montgomery, Alabama, the epicenter of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, to South Central Los Angeles, where poor farmers desperately strove to save their farms from an urban developer, to Robben Island, South Africa, where peace activist Nelson Mandela and others were imprisoned during the Apartheid era, Ripper realized that this “movement of movements” has swept the planet and astutely captured this global ideological shift on film. Other backdrops of significant spiritual activism highlighted in the documentary include the Dalit community in Pradesh, India, where Gandhi’s legacy of fighting for the rights of the Untouchables is still highly revered, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk and peace activist who was exiled from Vietnam 30 years ago finally returned home. After watching Fierce Light, audiences can find hope in this mass movement founded on the values of compassion, collaboration, and understanding and focuses on what we are trying to accomplish, as opposed to what we are trying to destroy.

The film features Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker, American Civil Rights Leader John Lewis, Buddhist peace activist and monk Thich Nhat Hanh, actor turned activist Daryl Hannah, and famed tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill.
 

Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)
 
College / University: $249.00

 
Library / High School: $129.00

 
Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.

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• Long Synopsis
• Character Biographies
• Filmmaker Biographies
• Director’s Notes
• Get Involved
• Credits

Reviews

One can’t doubt the earnestness of Velcrow Ripper, a Canadian photojournalist who travels the globe recording scenes of protest against oppression, which often place him in serious danger. The death of colleague Brad Will, who was killed while filming a demonstration in Oaxaca, led Ripper to make Fierce Light, an investigation of how spirituality—in various forms—can find expression in social action. The film juxtaposes footage (both from Ripper and archival sources)—of the American Civil Rights movement, the drive for equality among India’s so-called “untouchables,” and a campaign against the School of the Americas (which critics claim teaches techniques of repression) at Fort Benning, GA—with discussions of “soul force,” defined as the spiritually-motivated, nonviolent forms of resistance associated with Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., among others. Interviewees include Congressman John Lewis, writer Alice Walker, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and actress Daryl Hannah, as well as a number of other activists, such as those protesting the decision to close down and sell a community garden in South Central Los Angeles (a story that is the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Garden). A solid discussion starter, Fierce Light is recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)
-Video Librarian Review September/October 2009

“Five stars. A spiritual kaleidoscope of hope and Joy.”
- Green Muze

“A marvelous film made with grace, heart and beauty.”
- Joanna Macy

“This stunningly beautiful film will open new pathways for both personal and planetary transformation.”
-Starhawk

“Fierce Light is an experience of spiritual awakening.”
- Alan Clements

“The most beautiful documentary I have ever seen!
It was one of these experiences that change you forever.”
-Loneshewolf

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!
 

Reviews

“3.5 out of 4 Stars! Highly Recommended! Not once over the course of six hours does the film
seem self-indulgent: Fox’s soul-baring honesty feels both profound and universal.”
—Video Librarian, March-April 2008

“Luckily for the educational market, Ms. Fox offers the very best way to use her film in a classroom setting. She includes the full series of episodes in an Educational Package, plus discs that contain chunks of her longer film organized by topic. This is an excellent way…to spark discussion or serve as a writing prompt.”
- Educational Media Reviews Online

“What is interesting…is the cross-cultural perspective gained through the many interviews with women in other countries. The educational excerpts (one of two additional DVDs) are…the most useful, as they condense hours of the documentary into themed segments. Fox is to be commended for her candor and for the unique technique of ‘passing the camera’.”
- Library Journal

“In the age of reality TV, this documentary series merges the personal documentary with cultural criticism. Not only is the self reflection fascinating in terms of filmmaking, but Jennifer Fox confronts issues haunting women for decades here and abroad.”
- Marsha Rock, Director of Broadcast Journalism, New York University

“You could happily talk for days about Fox’s Flying: storytelling, filmmaking, genre, globalism, feminism, sexuality, family, repression, aging, love…I’m breathless. What a rich film! An elegant, engaging demonstration, in both form and content, of how the personal is political.”
- Lydia Foerster, The New School

“Jennifer Fox’s Flying should be REQUIRED VIEWING For every woman!”
-Candace Bushnell, Creator, SEX AND THE CITY

“Jennifer Fox’s work sneaks up on you… by turns brave, loving, naive and selfish, Fox embarks
on a three-year odyssey, training her lens on far-flung friends to ignite an intimate, yet global,
conversation on womanhood. Eavesdropping is rarely this rewarding. A- ”
-Entertainment Weekly

“By turns playful, sexy, tragic and contemplative, “Flying” is an
addictive soap about sexuality and sisterhood.”
-The New York Times

“MIRACULOUS! The nerve it takes to expose herself-and her friends, which is another issue-is matched by Fox’s ability to twist the confessional doc into a globetrotting highbrow soap opera. Brutally frank about the vagaries of her erotic romantic relationships… Fox ends up asking, straightforwardly, why woman can’t live the way so many men traditionally have. What she asks, obliquely, is why monogamy is so hard.
What she celebrates, in a subtler way still, is self-determination.”
-Variety

“Fox travels the globe to talk sex, marriage, babies, divorce, work, identity, oppression, socialization and abuse with her fascinating, far-flung friends. And their combined stories add up to something remarkable:
a kaleidoscopic meditation on gender-as-destiny”
-Los Angeles Times

Video Librarian Review
(March/April 2008)

Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman

Rating: 3 1/2 out of 4 Stars

FLYING: CONFESSIONS OF FREE WOMAN is a six-part series (each episode is 60 mins., color) that takes a personal, experimental approach to female life in the 21st century. The series narratively and visually interweaves aspects of filmmaker Jennifer Fox’s own life over five years and across seventeen countries, as she struggles to understand how diverse women define their lives when there is no map. Employing an ingenious new camera technique called “Passing the Camera,” Fox creates a documentary language that mirrors the special way women communicate. Over intimate conversations around kitchen tables from South Africa to Russia, India and Pakistan, she initiates a groundbreaking dialogue among women, illuminating universal concerns across race, class and nationality.

FLYING searches for new models of femaleness, examining changing gender roles and the efforts of women everywhere to comprehend and define for themselves what it means to be a woman in these times. The film takes as a hypothesis that owning and controlling one’s own sexuality is the center of a woman’s power and self. It also hypothesizes that the inverse is true: if a woman does not control the emotional and sexual life of her own body, she cannot be fully empowered. The film raises the questions: What are the struggles of women in this era of new sexual and economic freedoms, shifting gender relations, a rise in religious fundamentalism and AIDS? Is there a new model of femaleness that we can now begin to define? Highly Recommended. (M. Johanson)

Reviews

“Brilliant…an engrossing wielding of art and mind games.”
–The New York Times

“…Exceptional…”
- Los Angeles Times

“…delightful…terrifically entertaining…”
–Premiere Magazine

“Keep Survivor and Fear Factor, and give me this spellbinding
mind teaser, the ultimate game for movie buffs.”
– Rolling Stone

“…Dazzling…”
- L.A. Weekly

“The Five Obstructions glories in art, life and the faith that binds them.”
-Entertainment Weekly

There are crimes so unspeakably horrendous they seem unforgivable. And yet, some people do manage to forgive. Forgiveness: Stories for Our Time focuses on four individuals who have lived through events so painful and horrific they are unimaginable to most of us.

Lesley Parrott’s young daughter was stalked, raped and strangled. Anne Marie Hagan’s father was murdered by the next-door neighbour. Alan McBride’s wife and eight others were killed in an IRA bombing in Belfast. Reverend Julie Nicholson’s daughter was killed on the London underground in an al Queda bombing in 2004. Through heartfelt interviews, archival footage and images shot by acclaimed cinematographer John Walker, filmmaker Johanna Lunn tells the stories of these individuals as they absorb, cope with and attempt to move beyond brutal events in their lives.

In a world wracked by increasing violence and horror, Forgiveness: Stories for Our Time brings hope that there are other possibilities beyond blind revenge - and that in forgiving others we can set ourselves free. This program is an excellent resource for grief counseling groups, psychology courses and religion.
 

• College / University: $189.00
  
  

• Library / High School: $89.00
  
  

• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!
 

Video Librarian Review
March-April 2009, Volume 24 Issue 2

Forgiveness: Stories of Our Time

Rating: 3 out of 4 Stars - Recommended!

Filmmaker Johanna Lunn’s documentary Forgiveness tells the storis of four individuals who suffered enormous personal losses but worked hard to overcome their grief and rage, ultimately forgiving those responsible for their pain. Toronto woman Lesley Parrott’s young daughter was raped and brutally murdered (but Parrott’s opposition to the death penalty remains unshaken); Anglican vicar Julie Nicholson’s daughter was killed on the London underground subway during the al Qaeda bombing in 2005; Newfoundland woman Anne Marie Hagan’s father was murdered by a schizophrenic neighbor (a young man he’d known for years and treated as a son); and Belfast man Alan McBride’s wife was killed in an IRA bombing (McBride joined a protest group as a means of coping with his anger). Forgiveness combines home movies, stills, and archival footage to provide background for the interviews with the four principals, who reflect on their experiences. A moving film about human tragedy, Forgiveness illustrates the immense struggle required to relinquish the desire for revenge, but also strikes a hopeful note about the possibility of coping with terrible events in our lives. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)

This award-winning documentary about poet, artist, calligrapher and mystic Brion Gysin, portrays the life and legacy of an artist who believed art could revolutionize human consciousness. FLicKeR chronicles Gison’s complex ideas, friendships and influence with some of the 20th century’s key counterculture figures, such as William Burroughs, Kurt Corbain and Marianne Faithful.

Gysin was fascinated by identity. He saw himself as incarnating the 10th-century King of Assassins, trained in counter-espionage during WWII, and wrote and rewrote his name in countless permutations, as if to make it disappear - in the process, inventing the cut-up technique that his lifelong friend, Beat novelist Burroughs, would make famous. Featuring greats like Burroughs (in archival footage), singer Marianne Faithfull, singer/artist Genesis P-Orridge of Psychic TV, poet John Giorno, punk rocker Iggy Pop, filmmaker Kenneth Anger and artist/turntablist DJ Spooky, FLicKeR is a hypnotic documentary.

Taking the dream machine as the basis of its explorations, FLicKeR asks crucial questions about the nature of art and consciousness, and imagines humanity liberated to explore its creativity in complete freedom.
 

FLicKeR Product Information
 
Grade Level: AP English Literature, college and university
Subjects: Culture Studies, Literature
Copyright: © 2008 Makin’ Movies Inc. and The National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved.
Set: DVD Only
Total Running Time: 75 minutes
Educational Prices: (includes Public Performance Rights)

• College / University: $249.00
  
  
  

• Library / High School: $129.00


• Note: If you are unable to pay via PayPal, please contact info@alivemindeducation.com or call us at 212-398-3112 to order this title.

For public exhibition inquiries please contact us for more details!

• Full Reviews
• International Film Festivals