Videoactive: 7pm - The Miami Model/We Interrupt This Empire

dublin | arts and media | event notice Friday October 22, 2004 16:29 by k

Opening night.

The Videoactive Documentary Festival is being co-hosted by the Cultivate Sustainable Living Centre and Indymedia Ireland. The festival will showcase a series of feature length politically commited documentaries from around the planet, the majority of which have not been screened in Ireland previously. Each feature will be accompanied by a selection of recently produced documentary shorts. These will include a number of vivid street level accounts (recently completed by members of the Indymedia Ireland collective) of the Bush Visit to Shannon and the controversial Mayday protests which took place during Ireland's recent Presidency of the EU. The Videoactive event is a not for profit event. Admission will be five euro for each screening. Season tickets allowing entry to all seven screenings will be available for twenty euro. All funds raised will go towards the purchase of digital video projectors for the Cultivate and Indymedia collectives. The organisers hope to develop this event into a yearly survey of politically engaged filmmaking from around the Globe.

Friday 7pm Screening
The Miami Model (90 mins)
"Amongst the shocking images in the video, the police assault on Elizabeth Ritter, a Miami lawyer, stands out. Dressed in a business suit, wearing high heels, carrying a sign that reads “Fear Another Totalitarian Administration”, she was pelted by rubber bullets and suffered an injury to the head. The soon to be released DVD of The Miami Model will include a post-riot interview with Ritter where she puts what happened to her in a larger context. Those who participated in the activities against the FTAA in Miami will forever be affected by the experience. The extremity of police repression and the range and sophistication of their tactics left scars on us all. The terror created in Miami was painfully obvious with rumors we heard from city residents that “The Anarchists” had collected billiard balls to throw at the police or that they were going to inject feces into civilians. The corporate media was at the helm of the propaganda machine as they pumped the climate of fear into downtown Miami. The marriage between the media and government isn’t a mere conspiracy, either: several reporters, officially “embedded,” in an arrangement similar to that which emerged during the invasion of Iraq, are interviewed in The Miami Model and freely discuss their hand-in-glove relationship with the police.


We Interrupt This Empire (68 mins)
We Interrupt ... covers a huge amount of ground, from corporate war profiteering to post-9/11 ethnic profiling, from the sugarcoating of the war on TV to police brutality (and, at times, police impotence). But the film's power ultimately comes from the footage, shot by approximately twenty contributors, of the massive shutdown of San Francisco. "A friend of mine just got back from England," Sousa says, "and he showed it to hundreds of people over there, and they were really excited to see that people were actively resisting the war here. Because, sometimes, that's hard to communicate across countries. It's nice for them to see that there's resistance happening in the US, because I think there's this perception, especially in Europe, that we're not doing as much as other places."

PDF of the Festvial Programme:

http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/oct2004/timetable.pdf

Posters and Flyers:

http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/oct2004/flyer1.jpg
http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/oct2004/poster1.jpg
http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/oct2004/poster2.jpg
http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/oct2004/poster3.jpg
http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/oct2004/poster4.jpg