RiP! A REMIX MANIFESTO plays VICTORIA FILM FESTIVAL!

The Victoria Film Festival gets a chance to premiere Brett Gaylor's doc RiP: A REMIX MANIFESTO. The Times Colonist got a chance to interview Brett this weekend - here's their article.

-------------

Rip: A Remix Manifesto
Screening: Monday, 7 p.m. @ Odeon Theatre
Tickets: $9 in advance at the VFF Box Office (1215 Blanshard St.)

--------------

Director looks at what's wrong with copyright

Galiano Island-raised filmmaker aims to raise awareness about
'who owns our culture'

TIMES COLONIST (VICTORIA) - MIKE DEVLIN
Saturday, January 31, 2009

- - -

RiP: A Remix Manifesto is a documentary concerned primarily with the issue of copyright, intellectual property and the effects of piracy in the Internet age. But it's really about war.

The culture battle rages, but it isn't being fought by two sides. According to the film's Montreal-based director, Brett Gaylor, every member of society has not only a role to play but a stake in the outcome, whether they know or care about the issue.

"One of our goals for the film was to make people realize this was an issue that affected them, not simply because they could be sued for downloading their favourite TV show. There are greater issues at play. In the same way we care about the environment, we need to care about who owns our culture and who dictates how we enjoy it and experience it."

During the six years he spent making the film, Gaylor, 32, who born and raised on Galiano Island, saw himself become part of the battle. Images he used, songs he included, were not given clearance for use in RiP, making him and those involved with it guilty of copyright infringement.

"The amount of material we used in this film, by documentary standards, is grand larceny. But we feel this is a fair deal. We actually have the right to do this."

Technically, he doesn't. The art of others is legally off-limits unless you are willing to pay.

Forget about fair use, an aspect of copyright legislation that allows for a certain degree of free speech by those who do not hold the copyright to a book, image or song. The gloves are now off on the issue, thanks to the companies which control the majority of media we, as a society, are exposed to.

When people think downloading and copyright violations, they often think Napster, the pioneering peer-to-peer service which forever altered the consumption of music. That's only the tip of the argument, according to Gaylor.

"My goal [with RiP] is for you to see that as ground zero. This issue is really huge -- it affects our economy, education, health and the future that we want to leave for our kids. It affects all that."

The warring factions in Gaylor's film are those who support the copyright-holders and those who want to share ideas by expanding upon the work of others.

The most provocative example of the latter is Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, a revolutionary recording artist whose "mash-up" music is composed solely of music created by others -- not a note of which he is legally licensed to use. If Girl Talk played ball and cleared all the samples on his record, Feed the Animals, which he released on the Internet for free, it would cost roughly $4.2 million.

During an interview with the Times Colonist in July, Gillis said he felt "morally sound" about his decision to remix chart-topping classic rock, pop and rap tracks together. "You can make transformative music out of samples, and if it is not negatively impacting the artist's potential sales then it should be legal," he said.

Gaylor's film traces the trickle-down issue of copyright infringement through the ages. Here's where RiP really gets interesting.

Led Zeppelin widely interpolated the music of Muddy Waters, but we should assume that Waters never got paid for his art, nor did he sue. And although the Rolling Stones borrowed liberally from the Staple Singers, we're sure Pops Staples never took the rockers to court.

But when the Verve borrowed from a song written by the Stones, the young British band was sued successfully by lawyers representing Mick and Keith -- and lost all songwriting credits on the tune. The Verve, facing bankruptcy, disbanded soon after. Ironically, the Stones then allowed Nike to use it in a television commercial, although for what was likely a handsome fee.

This course of action is nothing new, according to Gaylor. When the player piano came out, songwriters issued lawsuits. When the VCR came out, same deal. Gaylor is hopeful nonetheless. He expects the tide will change, as it always does -- and did during the creation of his film.

"When I started making the movie, YouTube didn't exist, Facebook

wasn't there, so none of these people had any idea about any of these issues. It just so happened that Girl Talk got quite a lot of notoriety as we were making the movie. That helped. You could tell that there was a zeitgeist that was forming around remix culture and a rethinking of intellectual property that he personified."

Gaylor is walking the walk. He has posted raw footage of RiP to the website www.opensourcecinema.org, with hopes that users will make their own version of the film. By doing so, he hopes a new strain of the concept behind Girl Talk will emerge.

"People we are calling pirates now are going to be called admirals in 15 years. Let's stop suing these kids who are using this technology to express themselves, stop calling them criminals and look at it for what it is -- an explosion of creativity. Let's look at business models emerging from what we are now calling piracy."

LUNA OPENS IN OTTAWA TO RAVE REVIEWS

Exclusively at the Bytowne Cinema
Jan.30 to Feb.8

Check out these two great reviews:



A wild, woeful tale
Saving Luna a sad commentary about tensions between human and orca

By Katherine Monk, The Ottawa Citizen
January 30, 2009


SAVING LUNA

****

A documentary by:
Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit
Rating: PG, Coarse language
Playing at: ByTowne Cinema, today through to Feb. 8


It's a story so entirely tragic and nauseatingly sad that some viewers may look at Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit's movie about Luna -- the lone Orca who tried to befriend humans on British Columbia's Nootka Sound -- as an experience too depressing to relive.
After all, it's not like the three-year saga didn't get ample media coverage when it first unfolded as everyone from First Nations oral historians, to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, to schoolchildren across the province found themselves snagged in the gill net of public opinion.

Whether you loved or hated the idea of an orca seeking human company, the story resonated across generational lines and tugged at something deeper, perhaps even primal, in the human psyche.

Because Parfit and Chis- holm explore this psycho-spiritual element of the strange encounter, Saving Luna is more than a simple retelling of a very sad marine mammal tale. It's a thoughtful and often provocative exploration of humanity's larger relationship to the natural world.

It's also deeply personal.

Co-director and narrator Parfit tells us in the opening frames that he and his partner Chisholm intended to stay in Nootka Sound for a mere three weeks after they were asked to write a story about the little killer whale who refused to leave.

The veteran team, with several National Geographic projects under their belt, imagined they would be able to keep their professional distance and remain objective observers in the denouement.

Yet, after three years covering the story and moving into the community, Parfit and Chisholm crossed the line and became participants in the drama. They literally let Luna into their hearts and minds, as everyone around them picked sides. Casual sailors were frightened by the orca's love of nudging boats. First Nations people saw the whale as the reincarnation of their ancestral chief. And fishers swore to put a bullet in the whale's blowhole when no one was looking.

As the tensions swirled, the federal government found itself unable to come up with a consistent plan. At one point, a DFO representative said the only humane thing to do would be ignore the whale for its own good, but the policy was impossible to enforce.

Despite the apparent goodness of their intention to help the whale, DFO looked ill-prepared and wishy-washy -- and given the department's history of species culling (this is the same department that once mounted giant knives to the prows of vessels to cut B.C.'s now non-existent basking sharks in two), as well as the controversial idea of live marine mammal capture -- there's little doubt as to who comes off as the central villain in the piece. The department probably had the most power to help Luna, but red tape, egos, jurisdiction and a growing media circus prevented the creation of a comprehensive and workable policy.

Moreover, other specialists in cetacean behaviour were full of doubts about the establishment school of thought, and began to question previous assumptions about why some whales want to hang out with us landlubbing two-leggeds.

As Parfit and Chisholm watched the "tug-of-whale" unfold, their central focus was always Luna, and watching him pulled in one direction to the next pushed them into an emotional corner.

Their hearts were aching for the whale and, one day, when Luna came up to greet Parfit, he decided to break his own code of journalistic objectivity. He looked into the eye of the orca, and even stretched his hand into the icy waters of Nootka Sound to stroke the creature.

When Parfit describes the moment on film, and tells us about the sensation of touching Luna's warm skin in the cold ocean, it sends a shiver down your spine because the connection between man and creature is suddenly undeniable.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen


---------------------------------------------------------------



Saving Luna: A whale of a true tale

By Liz Braun, Sun Media


SAVING LUNA

Sun Rating: 4 out of 5

Saving Luna is a film about a lonely little whale who tried to befriend humans in Nootka Sound. Just so you know, this is a movie that makes grown men cry.

Luna, a baby Orca, became a cause celebre in Canada several years ago when he was separated from his pod.

Luna came on his own to the west coast of Vancouver Island, a rare event. Orcas are social animals, and Luna was extremely lonely. And so he sought out human company, swimming up to boats in Nootka Sound and allowing people to interact with him.

Filmmakers Suzanne Chisholm and Michael Parfit went to the village of Gold River in 2004 to investigate Luna and write a magazine article about the juvenile whale who was stirring up controversy.

They intended to stay for three weeks. They ended up staying for three years.

Scientists believe that interaction between wild animals and humans generally leads to grief for both parties. As a result, fishery officials involved in the Luna case told people not to befriend the little whale -- in order to keep themselves, and Luna, safe.

Native groups in Gold River, however, saw Luna as a supernatural being, the spirit of a recently deceased chief. They interfered with plans to move the Orca away, fearing that Luna was secretly bound for captivity in a marine amusement park.

Some boat owners and fishermen, meanwhile, saw Luna as a nuisance, a large and uncontrolled force whose 'playing' damaged boats. And when Luna began trying to play with the expensive float planes that landed in the area, there were those who wanted the Orca shot.

Saving Luna examines the various viewpoints involved in the situation of the orphan whale, but the filmmakers seem most interested in the idea of friendship and communication among species.

What did Luna need from humans? What was at stake for him? What should have been done to protect him?

Extraordinary footage is the highlight of Saving Luna. It is truly mind-boggling to see and hear the Orca, an endearing creature whose playfulness is unexpected and surprisingly moving. Everyone charged with not showing friendship to Luna (including the officials who threatened to fine people for patting the whale) wound up being won over by the whale.

Luna pursued friendship with humans. The film is full of interviews with officials, local people and scientists, and almost everyone who encountered the whale talks about how much they came to love him. Luna had a distinct personality.

Saving Luna is a truly fascinating movie, both entertaining and educational, and it has won 18 awards at various film festivals around the world.

As it's not devoid of tragedy, the movie is not suitable for very young children.

BALLAST opens Vancity Theatre Vancouver

Exclusively at Vancity Theatre, Vancouver
Jan.30-Feb.2



Life and death on the Mississippi Delta
Film gets strong performances from a cast of non-professionals

By Jay Stone, Canwest News Service
January 30, 2009



BALLAST

****

Starring: Michael J. Smith Sr.,
Tarra Riggs, JimMyron Ross
Directed and written by: Lance Hammer
14A: violence, adult themes

- - -

The low-budget movie Ballast is spare, unadorned, quiet and real. These might not be words that make you want to rush to the theatre, life itself being all those things and having the further advantage of being free. But Ballast is also a work of uncluttered art, a small film that accumulates all of the drama of moviemaking without hitting you over the head with it. It's a wonderful film, but it's not Batman.

It's more the Dardenne Brothers; first-time filmmaker Lance Hammer, who wrote, directed and edited Ballast, owes a debt to the Belgian brothers whose own movies have a similar sense of documentary discovery of lives on the gritty fringes. The fringe here is the Mississippi Delta, portrayed -- in a series of beautifully composed shots, including such evocative images as the unadorned bungalow in the rain, surrounded by a chain-link fence, with two artificial deer standing guard under the floodlights -- as flat, unfussy grasslands under a cold sky, with occasional mud patches. Ballast comes without a soundtrack or any notions of prettiness.

It begins in the darkened house of a large black man (Michael J. Smith, Sr.) who seems to be catatonic. His twin brother has just committed suicide -- we learn all this in passing, where much of Ballast is told -- and he tries to kill himself as well. These scenes, filmed (by cinematographer Lol Crawley) with a bouncy hand-held feeling of life actually occurring, start and stop abruptly. Hammer has no extraneous decoration in his filmmaking, and there is none in the performances either.

The man, Lawrence, lives in that plain bungalow, which is next door to another just like it, the home of his late twin. The other characters in Ballast are Marlee (Tarra Riggs), the brother's estranged widow, and James (JimMyron Ross), her 12-year-old son. They live in a nearby trailer surrounded, like much of the habitation in the film, with stray vehicles and small garbage dumps composed of old pieces of metal and burnt wood. Life in the world where Ballast is set is a mysterious wreck.

It takes a while to learn all this: Ballast is a quiet film, and even when it talks, it's not that easy to understand. It feels like mumblecore cinema, but we get the point. Lawrence is a large and generous man who has lost his spirit. Marlee is a single mom who cleans toilets -- we see her at work, scrubbing a urinal -- and James wanders the patchy fields, getting into trouble with a group of local drug dealers. He doesn't say much; when he needs money, he gets a gun and robs his uncle. He spends much of the rest of the movie eating junk food and watching cartoons on TV.

Much of the grim feeling of Ballast comes from the non-professional actors who nonetheless burrow into their characters and emerge, as the plot progresses, as people with believable pasts and with a hunger for a better life. Riggs is especially strong as the desperate mother, but Smith has a powerfully dignified screen presence and young Ross nails that 12-year-old unresponsiveness that you have to go to the movies to appreciate.

Hammer doesn't narrate as much as insinuate, and we learn of the history -- of a promising business getting by in a rundown part of America, of the ruination of drugs, of the various ways of killing time (video games, smoking, sleeping) that you can pick up when you don't have money -- as the film goes along.

Ballast picks up momentum, and while it is never what you would call an action flick, it does have the elements of grand drama. It's just that they happen quickly, like they do in real life, without preparation and without a soundtrack. Sometimes, they aren't even noticed: Ballast ends, like it starts, with an open-ended sense of possibility. This is life unfolding in space, both of them seeming more captured than choreographed.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun




__________________________________








A change of view
Ballast director feeling better about U.S.

By Jay Stone, Canwest News Service
January 30, 2009

The day after Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, a Los Angeles filmmaker named Lance Hammer woke up feeling disoriented.

"I'm kind of giddy," he said by phone from L.A. "I was such a cynic, and I have to recalibrate. I've suffered eight years of hell. We all have. I had such a hatred of our government. And because of that eight years, everything we've done is infused with this, including all artistic work. I think all American artwork contains this in some capacity."

Hammer has made one such feature film, a low-budget drama called Ballast. A winner of the directing and cinematography awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival, it tells the story of three people -- a lonely man, a single mother and her troubled son -- struggling to get by in the Mississippi Delta. Ballast is notable for its realistic setting and naturalistic acting: The main roles are all played by non-professionals, and Hammer allowed them to use their own words. It's also notable for a dark viewpoint that Hammer says is closely connected with the politics of the nation.

Hammer, 41, who wrote, directed, edited and produced Ballast, says he wrote it at a time when he was depressed because of personal reasons, but also because of his sense of futility about the U.S.

"It has been so depressing to be an American, to be stuck with that passport and to have no control over what this administration is doing to the world," he said. "I had such a sense of hopelessness. So many artists did. It'll be interesting 20 years from now for scholars to look back at the art that was created during this period and analyze that, but I have a feeling it's going to be a grim time. It'll be viewed as a grim time in art. Not that it's bad art. It's grim."

Hammer started on that road more than 20 years ago. He says he was 19 when he saw the ethereal Wim Wenders movie Wings of Desire -- about invisible angels who live among us -- and decided he wanted to become a filmmaker. He got there, but on an odd track: He went to architecture school and was hired by Warner Brothers as a designer. He created Gotham City for the superhero adventure Batman Forever, did digital design for Batman & Robin and was visual effects art director for the 1998 comedy Practical Magic.

The minimalism of Ballast is, to some extent, a reaction against all that. "I started becoming so frustrated with the lack of narrative substance and the lack of moral substance in these studio films, and so frustrated by an endeavour that is purely and nakedly and obscenely based on profit for profit's sake only, at the expense of everything else," he said. "I realized I needed to start writing myself to see if I could write my way out of that, and that writing was infused with that kind of frustration and defiance and desire to do something that's 180 degrees from that."

Ballast began when he visited the Mississippi Delta area in 1999 and felt a strange connection to the geography there; the movie is mostly his attempt to express that connection.

He began writing a script, but he knew from the start it would only be "a foundation that intuition could flourish upon." He wanted a naturalistic truth that he felt only non-actors could provide. After a long talent hunt, he hired performers and, with British cinematographer Lol Crawley, took them to the locations that had inspired his story.

He asked them to use their own words, and allowed them to change the scenario if it felt false to them. At one stage, as the filming was running out of time and money -- the budget is "under $1 million" -- Hammer allowed the actors to read the script once and then hand it back to him. They then got a quicker sense of what the scene was supposed to be.

The only problem he had was with the one professional in the cast, Johnny McPhail, who plays a helpful next-door neighbour. "That was the most difficult part for me because we had to remove all of the theatricality," said Hammer. "We spent a lot of time trying to get him to a place where he wasn't acting and he wasn't thinking about artifice. He was thinking about filtering artificial scenarios through his own emotional system."
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun