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Revisiting A Forgotten High-seas Struggle
As filmmaker Elaine Brière tells it, the merchant seamen emerged from WWII with a strong, progressive union, publicly lauded for their war effort, straddling a hugely profitable public enterprise that gave Canada the fourth-largest shipping fleet in the world. Yet just five years later, the ships were sold, the union was broken and most of the seamen were blacklisted as “Communists.” How and why this was orchestrated — and the ways it was resisted unsuccessfully — is the remarkable and moving story told in Betrayed, mostly by the now-aging seamen themselves.
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Strike! The Musical
The Winnipeg General Strike as a musical? I must admit to having had mixed feelings about the project when I learned about it. The drama and scale of the confrontation create immense artistic possibilities, of course — but also present just as many challenges. I’ve taught the history of the strike for many years and have always been frustrated at the difficulties of conveying to students the drama and importance of these six weeks in the spring of 1919. Academic treatments and documentaries have often been of little help, as they saw the strike a mere episode (a helpful or unhelpful one, depending on one’s politics) on the road to modern liberal democracy.
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New Cinema from Winnipeg Streets
I thought I would dislike Stryker, the newest film by acclaimed indie filmmaker Noam Gonick. The story is relatively simple: a struggle between two street gangs, certainly not an overly original story line and one which hollywood trots out on a regular basis. From West Side Story to Boyz ‘N the Hood, we’ve all seen the formula. But this is certainly no West Side Story.
In the case of Stryker, the protagonists are Native on one side and Filipino on the other, and the struggle is for control of drugs and prostitution in a rundown Winnipeg neighbourhood. Well, that’s kind of new, but…
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Resolutely Hopeful
Finally, it is finished. After spending six months in Argentina and shooting 350 hours of footage, Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein have completed their first documentary film. “The Take” is a riveting story about a group of metal workers from Buenos Aires who form a worker co-operative and take over the abandoned auto-parts factory where they once earned a good living. In the background, presidential candidates Néstor Kirchner and Carlos Menem go head-to-head in the first major elections in Argentina since the devastating economic collapse of 2001. Argentina is polarized between those who support the nascent worker democracy movement, and those who want to see a return to the elitist politics of the Menem era. Meanwhile, Maty, a young trainee at the worker-controlled Zanon Ceramics Factory will boycott the election process under the slogan: “Our Dreams Won’t Fit on Your Ballots.”
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Cutting Through Life under Corporate Rule
The first thing the young man sees as he emerges from The Corporation is the theatre’s bright, shiny Pepsi Machine. Where once he saw a harmless soft drink, he now sees a bloated and arrogant corporate product. He gives the machine a slap.
“So long, sucker. It’s over. I’m ready to give you up.”
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