Documentary Field Notes and Flashpoints

I am screening a ton of rushes, not much time for writing. But I thought I’d pass on a couple of interesting links.

An image from the documentary ‘The Age of Stupid’

First, about the ‘crowd-funded’ documentary The Age of Stupid, by British documentarian Director Franny Armstrong and Producer Lizzie Gillett. Film completed, their aim over the coming months is to “turn 250 million viewers into activists, all focused on the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, December 2009
where the successor to the Kyoto Treaty must be finalized.”

I am familiar with Armstrong’s previous work, because she was one of the co-directors of McLibel, about the young activists in the U.K. who sued McDonald’s. During the same period, I made two films about attempts to unionize McDonald’s in Quebec (see my web site) and of course Morgan Spurlock made Super Size Me.

Making-of film (50 minutes) [here]

Article [here]

(Thanks to Mark Hamilton and the Doc list serve.)

A frame from ‘Slumdog Millionaire’

And now for some fiction, both acclaimed and controversial. Slumdog Millionaire is without any question the most successful film of the year, taking home numerous Oscars, including best film, Golden Globe award in the same category. It’s such a household word by now, I won’t describe it. Personally I liked it a lot, for its clever structure and great camerawork and editing. But I have close friends who are documentary filmmakers from Bombay, and they were not so thrilled. The sent me the following articles:

Mitu Sengupta: “Slumdog Millionaire: a Hollow Message of Social Justice” [here]

Jeremy Seabrook: “Betraying India’s poor” [here]

Aarundhati Roy: “Caught on Film: India ‘not shining’” [here]

(Thanks to Ali Kazimi and Anand Patwardhan.)

Thanks to Jorge Bustos-Estefan for help with this blog.