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Feasting on Film : Slow Food Festival

Slow food? Supposedly an ‘eco-gastronomic movement that champions the protection of food diversity by encouraging regional production, taste education and pleasure’. Naturally Melbourne has a festival for Slow Foodies, complete with film festival @ ACMI from Feb 25th – Mar 5th.

We Feed The World
Erwin Wagenhofer, 96 mins, Austria, 2005
Wed 5 Mar 2008, 9.30pm

Why doesn’t a tomato taste like a tomato? How does one explain that 200 million people in India, supplier of 80% of Switzerland’s wheat, suffer from malnutrition? These questions and more are investigated as filmmaker Erwin Wagenhofer charts a contentious course through the processes of production of our food from Austria to Brazil, France to Africa. This is a film about scarcity amidst plenty, answering the question of what world hunger has to do with us.

((Saw this at Melbourne International film festival a few years ago – very provocative. Found myself really bewildered while watching it in the middle of a city of 3million people, thinking if all of Melbourne wanted say an egg on toast and a glass of fresh orange juice for breakfast tomorrow, what a crazy amount of food that is to try and provide.. Film’s worth it for the United Nations talker (Jean Ziegler ) in the middle somewhere, who nails a very lucid perspective on the politics of farming subsidies and people starving. ))

The Future of Food
Deborah Koons Garcia, 88 mins, USA, 2004
Mon 25 Feb 2008, 6.30pm

Shot in the US, Canada and Mexico, this film examines the complex web of market and political forces that are changing what we eat and presents a disturbing investigation into the genetically engineered foods that have surreptitiously filled our supermarket shelves. The screening will be introduced by Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian farmer who became an international spokesperson for farmers’ rights during his protracted legal battle with agrichemical giant Monsanto.

One Man, One Cow, One Planet
Thomas and Barbara Burstyn, 56 mins, New Zealand, 2006
Mon 25 Feb 2008, 9pm, Screening introduced by the filmmakers, Tom and Barbara Burstyn.

Peter Proctor is a 78-year-old with a glass eye and partial deafness. He is also widely known as the father of modern biodynamic farming, an arcane form of agriculture. This film follows Proctor’s journey to India where he works with marginal farmers to revive this traditional agricultural method to save their poisoned lands. It exposes globalisation’s mantra of infinite growth for the environmental and human disaster it really is.

Slow Food Revolution
Carlo Buralli, 52 mins, Australia, 2003
Tue 26 Feb 2008, 6.30pm, Screening introduced by Kelly Donati, Director, Slow Food Victoria.

Slow Food Revolution records the growing phenomenon of Slow Food in Italy, Mexico and Australia.. celebrating our natural bounty and a seriously sensual journey from earth to table.

Double feature: Tue 26 Feb 2008, 8.30pm
These compelling stories from Israel and Australia use food to examine the impact of war and conflict on communities.
Liam Ward’s Refugee: a recipe (24 mins, 2005, Australia) is part animation, part cooking show and an exploration of the impact of mandatory detention and temporary visas. ((+ Looks like I’ll be teaching with Liam @ RMIT this semester.. ))

Ayelet Heller’s Strawberry Fields (60 mins, 2006, Israel) tells of the daily struggles of strawberry farmers in the north of the Gaza Strip, whose crop has to be exported to the rest of the world via Israeli-controlled checkpoints. When problems arise, the strawberry fields become battlefields.

food and community – two shorts
Tue 4 Mar 2008, 6.30pm

Faith Morgan’s The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (53 mins, USA, 2006) tells the fascinating story of how Cuba turned to organic farming and urban agriculture after a collapse* in its supply of cheap oil from the Soviet Union. (( *Hello 21st century ))

Daniele Atzeni’s The Legend of the Holy Fisherman (18 mins, Italy, 2005) spotlights San Pietro Island where tuna fishing has been practiced for hundreds of years according to an ancient ritual.

Black Gold
Wed 5 Mar 2008, 6.30pm

Marc and Nick Francis’ Black Gold (78 mins, UK, 2006) is an eye-opening exposÃ© of the multi-billion dollar coffee industry that traces one man’s fight for a fair price. As westerners revel in designer lattes and cappuccinos, impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers suffer the bitter taste of injustice. Screening with ‘Squeezed: The Cost of Free Trade in the Asia-Pacific‘ (40 mins, Australia, 2007). Travelling from the lush rice paddies of Thailand to squatter settlements in a Manila rubbish dump, Michael Cebon and Dominic Allen’s film creates an emotional document of how globalisation affects farmers in the Asia-Pacific.

Also of note – short film festival competition with two categories: best overall film and Soft Boiled Egg, a three-minute film category. Also playing at the festival – artists who look equally at home on a menu, as on a party poster : ‘Melbourne trip hop masters Miso as well as DJs Wasabi and Duck Roast’ – Feb 22, Edge, Fed square.

by Sean Healy, February 1, 2008 0 comments

Gorgeously Visualised Tasmanian Sci-Fi

Had a craving for some good head-bending sci-fi lately, so was delighted to stumble across Nawlz, an exquisitely executed piece of illustrated writing from Tasmania’s Sutu, that uses clever and very appropriate layering, styling, sound and animation to navigate the story’s arc in a kind of visually messier, street arty update on the 90’s cyber aesthetic still being abused to this day. Go play.

And if still in need of a sci-fi fix after reaching that delicious last page, gotta recommend the Tom Cruise video doing the rounds, where he talks about his favourite religion invented by a sci-fi author, the one connected to beings from outer space.

by Sean Healy, January 18, 2008 0 comments

Videodrome : International Hardcore Videoclash Tournament

videodrome Also by the Atak label, the nicely chopped intro to this, positions 4 different video artists and crews against each other in a battle of AV sampling skills. Quite varied styles on the disc and a bunch of interesting extras to wander through. Worth a look.

fame fame ( toronto )
The Fame Fame disc portion showcases clips from another label who exist for the ‘production and promotion of the aggressive, intense and volatile..’. So when Elvis & James Dean appear, it’s not long before they are whipped and sliced into an AV frenzy. Actutally works well, and followed by a more splattery stroboscopic piece by – cheerfully titled ‘i die u die’ by Jubal Brown. ‘In the eye’ by Tasman Richardson plays with surveillance cameras, mirror effects, layering of extreme close ups, tv glitches, all nicely composed then blending Robert De Niro in with rapid-fire micro-samples. Tasman follows this by remixing vintage guitar concert footage with white stripes drums, Ice cube, Public Enemy video samples..

eclectic method ( london )
Bill themselves as DVJs… “mixing music video and film snips like a DJ mixes records…”. Funny thing is – add together music videos by Blur, Prince, Snoop Dog, Beastie Boys, Aphex Twin, Metallica & Britney Spears etc etc all beat-matched and mashed together in a glossy high value production style, and you end up with a glossy, banal jukebox. Some cool moments, but they should be able to use their talents for far more interesting things than this.

madame chao ( new york )
“Everything is illegal’ – proclaims the intro by madame chao to a video described as ‘Violent slapstick’ best watched with a sword in one hand a drink in the other…’. The title sequence is quickly followed by a fast flickering density of hyper-speed collages, kaleidoscope warping, asian tv edits, and a text announcement that ‘copyright infringement is your patriotic duty’. Some genuinely inventive parts, bit relentless for myself though.

atak ( paris )
The label releasing the DVD leave a quarter of it for themselves, being a ‘hybrid mix of Vjs, movie makers and musicians’. Thusly, we get fed an initially sophisticated blend of medical experiments, horror movie special effects, motion graphics… with film sound bleeding through layered on a bed of industrial beats. Soon becomes a barrage, and a couple of high-speed carnage clips by Rko continue that pace.

by Sean Healy, January 17, 2008 0 comments

V-Atak 01 : ‘Meat’ by Lifesteak, Cinemassaker & Mutation

Atak hails out of Paris, an audiovisual label with a quite a few releases under their gallic belt by now. ‘Meat’ features a series of clips by 3 artists on their roster, on a DVD boasting to be ‘DVJ ready’ – ready for looping and scratching by those with access to DVD turntables. The disc’s cover is a good clue to the content within, an eye-popping collage of photoshopped flesh in various states of life, augmented by various bolted on bits of electronic technology.

Cinemassaker start off with various close up screen textures, layers of surveillance cameras and jolts of colourised tv news, punctuated by beeps and glitches. It’s nicely done, with mostly restrained palettes, and quite hypnotically edited, up to and including the introduction of footage from John Carpenter’s legendary ‘They Live’ movie, where the main characters discover special sunglasses which enable them a capacity to decode all public advertisements ( put the glasses on and a billboard for a car now reads in stark black and white : ‘work, consume, die’ ). Overlaid barcodes and pixelated animations, along with burnt colours help their editing condense the film’s samples down to a bare repetitive essence, and they manage to lock into some kind of ambient audiovisual groove. Next track follows the same recipe, gradually introducing a film I didn’t know and paring it down over time, and the final track is a sequence of ever bloodying hi-speed martial arts chops.

Mutation continue the gore with a chicken killing scene that comes off as some weird voodoo circus scene the way they’ve colorised and framed it. Some wasted human dominates the next clip in eerie close up, and their final clip plays with highway panoramas and nicely overlaid motion graphics with sound on top of footage of overhead power lines sweeping by.

Lifesteak start off in a much more ambient vein, overlaid layers of light streaked plant close-ups, building up in slow intensity, the next clip musically editing and layering the squawks of birds flying from clifffaces. Factory machine close-ups are sequenced in the next clip, getting denser over time and it closes with butcher footage interlaced with motion graphics and some lab hand analysing a human brain.

Not for the squeamish then, but some worthwhile moments on the disc.

by Sean Healy, January 17, 2008 0 comments

Umfeld – Audiovisual DVD Review

Managed to acquire a few discs of bent-pixel booty recently… First up is the tasty piece available for order/download as ‘Umfeld’..

Rotterdam is both the home of musician Jochem Paap aka Speedy J, and the visual source for much of the industrial textures used on this luscious high end DVD. High-end both because it’s an audiovisual production in HD with 5.1 surround sound audio, and because of the sophisticated graphic treatment it is given by the visual half of the producers – Scott Pagano ( who also co-curated the excellent Reline DVD series of clip compilations – reviewed previously). Nicely, the DVD is also available as a free downloadable dvd disk image at umfeld.tv ( though it’s quite a hefty download). The DVD comes with many extras though, including a documentary with Jochem explaining how the step from mono to stereo was much smaller than the step from stereo to 5.1, and how the project was based upon that from the ground up, while Scott explains some of the visual processes he employed to create ‘an abstract graphic piece that is an hour long’.

Admittedly I’m without a 5.1 system to listen to it ( Jochem insists the project should be listened to in the sweet spot of a 5.1 sound system ), but the sound quality is quite impressive even on a stereo system – a gnarled, moody, quickly shapeshifting soundtrack of quite some grunt and density. Matching the sound’s intensity, the visual overload plays the industrial look of Rotterdam well, meshing the geometries of rusted buildings with flickering close-ups, textures that morph from into another, sharp angular layering and machine-speed masking out of imagery. The aim for the DVD was to draw on the dynamic arc of a feature film, but one hour is a long time for such a dense abstract visual style to maintain interest, so it’s to their credit that for the most part, Umfeld remains an engaging experience.

by Sean Healy, January 11, 2008 2 Comments