Mélanie, Mathieu and Annie are inviting the public to live out the Festival du Nouveau Cinema by sharing their festival-going experiences through a videoblog platform. Throughout these 10 days, they’ll be covering the event in real-time, including live feeds of their daily interactions, thoughts, comments, and unexpected outcomes in an alternative way and far from what traditional media can offer. Recently, the Kung-Fu numérik crew joined this special adventure.
Through my 12 years of practice as a Registered Nurse I have looked after and come into contact with drug dependant people. Their addictions ranged everywhere from completely rendering them incapable of maintaining any sort of active role in society, to those still taking pain killers they were prescribed twenty years ago after minor surgery, now complimenting that with a pill to sleep and perhaps a few to wake up in the morning. The difference in these extremes is that the latter do not have the risk of being incarcerated and criminalised.
Damage Done questions how we deal with the drug problem in contemporary society and basically how the international policy on drugs is failing terribly. We are introduced to ex and current members of the police force, from both here in Canada and the US, who want to change those policies and believe drug addiction is a problem best dealt with by health care professionals and not the police. Current drug laws are compared to The Prohibition period in the 1930s, suggesting that by making a substance illegal, it will not necessarily prevent people from acquiring and using the substance. Rather, it will place the supply part of the supply and demand equation in the hands of criminals.
We hear how all these police officers have made the transition in their beliefs regarding drug laws, some of which I found extremely irritating. The straw that broke it for me was the cop who cried about arresting a man when his 8-year-old daughter was looking. This was a terrible argument in this debate. If you are in law enforcement that’s what you do with or without children involved. The showing of his gentle paternal instincts did nothing for me and I am already on their side of the argument.
The case of the narcotics police officer, whose son was arrested when a joint butt was found in his home, was potentially much more thought provoking for drug prohibitionists. This young man who had just finished his education as a pharmacy technician, comes from a respectable family and is not the typical drug convicted criminal presented through the media. If convicted this mans life will be destroyed and he will never work as a pharmacy tech. Just because he smokes marijuana does he deserve to be in prison? Does it make him a criminal who cannot participate positively in society?
We then have the group that is portrayed in the media as the typical drug addicted person. The people who live from one fix to the next, doing anything possible to get it. Are these people criminals? The offenses they are forced to commit to feed their addictions are inarguably criminal, but the drive behind the act comes from a place that renders them incapable of making a rational law abiding decision.
I feel that it is much easier for society in general to place blame on the drug addicted person rather than looking at the bigger picture. Are they to blame for where they are in life? A question that I have put to many of my health professional peers and colleagues is, do you think when this person was five they said when I grow up I want to be a heroin addict? The drug-addicted person is there because his life’s path brought him in that direction and more times than not that journey has been a very difficult one filled with atrocities that many of us cannot even imagine. Society needs to take responsibility for these people and where they are. They need to be given help in the proper environment, which certainly is not a prison cell.
This documentary presents a very important issue that needs to be addressed but I feel that it will take a lot more convincing evidence to change or even capture the attention of a person who has staunch anti drug ideals.
Jennifer Daoust, associate producer at Montreal’s best kept secret, Moment Factory, takes us on a behind the scenes tour of this Mile End Empire, hours before the Minute Moments event at the SAT.
The Double Vision series will culminate this afternoon with a short films screening in the Excentris in the Salla Parallèle. Organized by the Images Festival (Toronto) and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), this show is part of a touring project that takes place in pairs of cities (Berlin-Kitchener, London-London, and Montréal-Paris). Here’s what Pablo de Ocampo from Images Fest had to say about the shows.
After returning from the Bella Tarr film, re-assuring some film buffs that it must have been my headspace that didn’t allow me to fully appreciate it, I was talked into checking out this show, with the promise that it would only be 40 minutes (as opposed to the 6+ hour Tarr film). I was hesitant at first, the sights and sounds felt like an assault of the senses, but the more I let go, the more I was transported. It spoke to a part of myself that must have been locked away deep in my psyche, dormant since my late teens. Brixton, acid, and angst. And perhaps even redemption, change, and growth. I was mesmerized and instantly sold. The Montreal duo, electronic music artist, Alain Thibault, and new media artist Matthew Biederman, base their work around “electronic pulsation iterated through time”, so as to propel the viewer into various “psychological states [that will allow them to] build and shape their own narrative based on the a/v stimuli”.
This is the sister show of the shorts program called, Double Vision, playing tomorrow afternoon at the Excentris. You would be insane to miss it. Seriously.
After attending to a meeting at la S.A.T and being the one of the host for the daily streaming for the Blog. I head down to my office, where my team is there, working hard as usual. Here is a family portrait of KungFuNumerik’s Team…
jason says: (12:52:49 PM) Peter Greenaway’s NightWatching, first thoughts?
Maliboo says: (12:53:36 PM) Well… my overall impression was that I liked it.. and that it held
my attention from the very first moment it started until the very end.
Maliboo says: (12:53:40 PM) how about you?
jason says: (12:54:57 PM) Same. I went into it with a negative perspective on Greenaway because of the impression I had gotten from him on his last visit to the FNC. Very pompous and over-dramatic. But the film proved me wrong. I really enjoyed it.
Maliboo says: (12:57:22 PM) mmm… yes.. Im never quite sure what to expect from him. However, this film was very dramatic? But somehow that was a good thing because it kept my attention. More like suspense.
Maliboo says: (12:57:51 PM) “Period” pieces are sometimes dodgy.. but I felt Greenaway managed to combine historical accuracy with a theatricality that resulted in this drama and suspense.
Maliboo says: (12:58:17 PM) It also helped that the acting was very good for the most part, I thought.
Anna’s an actress, who finds herself with a newborn baby on her hands. Soon on the edge of insanity and despair, she commits an act of radical violence and destruction. Tragically, from there on is born Daisy Diamond. Without doubt a shock wave of a film.
Mélanie, Mathieu and Annie are inviting the public to live out the Festival du Nouveau Cinema by sharing their festival-going experiences through a videoblog platform. Throughout these 10 days, they’ll be covering the event in real-time, including live feeds of their daily interactions, thoughts, comments, and unexpected outcomes in an alternative way and far from what traditional media can offer. Recently, the Kung-Fu numérik crew joined this special adventure.
Annie has traveled the globe documenting the world around her, amassing invaluable riches along the way. She is thrilled to be back in Montreal after a year and a half in Australia working for a national youth arts and media organisation.
CelineCelines is the FNC secret service spy. She works at night. She reveals the hidden side of the festival, and
follows celebrities in the streets of Montreal.
Sometimes she stalks them.
Eric Cinq-Mars is a freelance photographer / videographer who seems to have an artistic outlook on life and its social contexts. As a collaborator for the Videoblog FNC, he will be extremely pleased to share with the public his views on selected movies and the festivals progression.
What is a Capsulette? It is a videomaker who produces videos for the web and watches YouTube more than television. It is a camera person who films from their cell phone and now a videoblogger who will be covering the FNC.
