Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Philippe Diaz's "The Empire in Africa" (trailer), which premieres in theatres across in the United States on 8 December, is a troubling, highly graphic and enlightening film about the civil wars that ravaged Sierra Leone for over a decade. "The Empire in Africa" serves as a poignant counterpoint to the Hollywood vehicle "Blood Diamond" which will be released in US theatres the same day.
Diaz's film, a documentary, is so powerful that after its French language version was played during Critic's Week at the Cannes Film Festival, India - the country contributing the second largest contingent of "peace-keeping" forces in Sierra Leone – withdrew its participation in the effort.
Unlike "Blood Diamond," an action film and garnering Oscar buzz because it features Leonardo DiCaprio, "The Empire in Africa" puts the onus for the bloodletting, the near-genocide, in Sierra Leone squarely at the feet of the United Nations and the "international community" led by the United States and the United Kingdom.
The film is a co-production of Sceneries Europe Production in association with Action Against Hunger and Cinema Libre Studio. It is produced, directed and edited by Philippe Diaz and narrated by musician and activist Richie Havens.
Among the awards already received by the film are:
Grand Jury Prize, Best Documentary – Slamdance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, USA
Grand Prize – African Film Festival, Montreal, CANADA
Most Powerful Film – One World Film Festival, CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Best Documentary – Hollywood Film Festival, Los Angeles, CA, USA
"The Empire in Africa" is not a film for the squeamish. As stated in my
opening paragraph, it is graphic. Anyone familiar with the phenomenon
which brought Sierra Leone, after years of strife and one of the
greatest humanitarian crises of the last decade, to world attention –
the "diamond" amputees - has some sense of what to expect from what
this film reports. What is unexpected is the level of the carnage, its
causes and how – as with Rwanda – it was so easy for those of us in the
West to turn a blind eye.
A fact of modern warfare since World War II, as has been often reported
by dissident journalists but has yet, it seems, registered in the
public consciousness is that the ratio of civilian-to-military deaths
in warfare has increased exponentially over the last century.
You may know this about the different ratio of
civilian-to-military deaths in war, how in World War I, ten military
dead for one civilian dead; in World War II, it was 50-50, half
military, half civilian; in Vietnam, it was 70% civilian and 30%
military; and in the wars since then, it’s 80% and 85% civilian.
I became friends a few years ago with an Italian war surgeon named Gino
Strada. He spent ten years, fifteen years doing surgery on war victims
all over the world. And he wrote a book about it, Green Parrots: Diary of a War Surgeon.
He said in all the patients that he operated on in Iraq and Afghanistan
and everywhere, 85% of them were civilians, one-third of them,
children… – Howard Zinn, address upon receipt of the Haven Center's
Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship, November, 2006
- Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Diaz's film brings home powerfully the fact that the civil wars in
Sierra Leone and the abuses of so-called UN peacekeepers were
atrocities that overwhelmingly victimized women and children.
The film, which also features proceedings in the United Nations, and
the statements of UK Ambassador Peter Pentfold and US Ambassador to the
UN Bill Richardson, as well of those of UN General Secretary Kofi
Annan, show a level of cynicism that is galling in the extreme to
observe. The statements of these gentlemen, placed in counterpoint to
the people on the ground in Sierra Leone, present a damning and
shameful story that is easy to comprehend.
Diaz says this about his film:
We spent more than a
month on the ground fighting the government, the militias and the
military to find and bring back the truth. And the truth is more than
shocking: here again, like in most of Africa, the real authors of these
crimes are… us - Occidental countries trying to retain what we
believed was ours as a result of colonialism.
For that we are ready to go to any extreme, legal or not. And for that
we have a lot of accomplices: our own governments, the United Nations
and, of course, the media.
Like many of the politically independent documentaries that have come
to prominence in this opening decade of the new century, Diaz's film
has an advocacy nature and an undeniable point of view. This is both
good and bad, in that many viewers have begun to become inured to the
facts presented and their implications, unfamiliar as we are to the
notion that good journalism is meant to separate propaganda and "spin"
from the truth on the ground. Our own predilections, then, rather than
a lack of perspective on the part of documentarians, often makes us
turn away from important work like that presented here. Not only to we
suffer from "compassion fatigue," it seems, but also from truth
fatigue.
We would simply rather not know. If it doesn't affect
us personally, it doesn't exist.
That makes efforts like Diaz's harder to put into general release and
usually puts them at the bottom of most DVD purchase lists. In the view
of This Reviewer, such a decision would be a mistake for anyone
committed to critical thinking and civic engagement.
"The Empire in Africa" opens on 8 December at the following US
locations:
NEW YORK, NY – Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, 212-924-3363
LOS ANGELES, CA – Laemmle's Grand 4-Plex, 345 S. Figuerroa Street, 213-617-0268
MADISON, WI – Marcus Westgate Art Cinemas, 340 Westgate Mall, 608-271-4033
Freedom Fries
That a natural affinity between Cinema Libre Studio
and Your World's Magazine should have developed over the years should
come as no surprise to Loyal Readers. After all, we're the sort of Web
publication likely to support Buy Nothing Day and take a shine to
independent films over the usual product-placement-fests that fill the
cineplexes and malls of this country.
Many of you have read our reviews of Cinema Libre projects like
When Cinema Libre sent us the press release on a humorous, almost
B-movie grade documentary entitled "Freedom Fries: And Other
Stupidities We'll Have to Explain to Our Grandchildren," just before
the holidays, we couldn't resist. It's low budget but it also turns
out, in our view, to be the feel-good independent documentary of the
season. It's worth the price of the ticket (or the DVD) for Reverend
Billy and his choir alone. No lie.
"Freedom Fries" has a slow and almost-cheesy opening but then suddenly
you're thrust into a film that operates on two levels. The first level,
the one that begins to engage the viewer and make one take the film
more seriously, goes away from the almost PowerPoint-slide presentation
of the opening frames and begins a discussion about the kinds of
decisions we make in our lives, why we are programmed and motivated to
shop and what the implications of these behaviors are.
The core, and important , message of "Freedom Fries" has to do with
how, here in the United States (The Reviewer often does the Freudian
typo of "Un-tied" States) we have been taught to replace the notion of
civic engagement – and perhaps even common sacrifice – as an evidence
of patriotism and to believe that consumerism equals patriotism.
This
section goes on to extrapolate that buying
is presented as a panacea – for happiness, for identity, for
"American-ness" – from what clothes we wear, to whether we'll be liked,
to our moods and sexual functions. This is not a hard case to make, of
course, but perhaps it is not made enough.
Then you get hit with the second level: the guerilla theater of
Reverend Billy and the notion that even Wal-Mart can be brought down
with a little chutzpah and humor.
I won't give everything away but here's one clue: after the choir's anthem, as the credits are running, don't eject the DVD – there's still more to come. The anthem rocks!
This one is a stocking-stuffer that you'll be thanked for many months to come.
You can buy the film – for under $10! - by going here. Enjoy!
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