Ok... Well SPIT is the film about my life in the street. I met Daniel Cross (director of SPIT) back in 1998. He told me he was looking for a street kid to document this world (he had done "The Street: A film with the homeless" before and I knew he was a filmmaker and what kind of work he was making). So we talked and left for the civil disobedience against the MAI : Multi-lateral agreement on Investments. So I got arrested at this civil disobedience and when I got out of jail, Daniel gave me a Hi-8 camera, that became the ROACHCAM, and told me he was going to teach me film-making.

Daniel is a University teacher in film making. So we started the film around the streets. I was in the process of getting out of drugs and out of the streets and needed a passion to quit all this and find a new life. Daniel gave me this passion through film-making. If I would have never met Daniel and Mila (cameraman of SPIT) I would have been dead.

So SPIT: Squeegee Punks In Traffic, is a documentary about me, as a street junkie who finds a passion in cinema, quits drugs and get off the streets and become a filmmaker.

How does "Punk the Vote" relate to your previous film making efforts?

I don't completely understand this question (don't forget I am francophone) but PUNK THE VOTE is an evolution in my career. I did SPIT as an associate-director, then I did ROACHTRIP my first film as a director. This film was about me traveling across Canada with my friend Smash (who was in SPIT) and it is a kind of road movie/documentary... And now here I am with PTV.

PTV for me is a film that had to be made for me. I am an activist, strongly politicized and fighting against this system since I am 14 years old. So it was just a natural shift I made, but it is also the best film I made in my career. I am really proud of the political experience I had and the result: "Punk The Vote". I think I am getting better and better and it will continue that way with my next film, which is about police harassing people of the streets and the effects of jailing and criminalizing those people.

How did you conceive of the "punk the vote" campaign was it as an excuse to make a movie or was it a political idea in and of itself?

It was actually an evolution. The film I wanted to do was called: "DIY: the Montreal hardcore-punk scene" but the grants were not coming in and people who funded films in Canada were kind of scared about this film. So when I met Starbuck, he told me he ran in 2 elections and was planning on running in the next federal election (because our government was hit with a sponsorship scandal in Canada and we knew the Liberals were going out and that we were going in election). So a new idea started in my mind and then I wrote this film... I wasn't even suppose to be in front of the camera but when it comes to politics, I just can't shut up. So I went to Astral Media ( a TV broadcaster) and pitch the film, and I just jumped into the unknown world of Canadian politics (because I didn't know shit about how the Canadian electoral system worked).

Were you aware of a similar effort in the United States with quite the few underground punk bands endorsing a campaign called "Punk The Vote" during the recent 2004 election that tried to get young people out to vote?

Yes I was aware, it was called "punk voter" but was not at all inspired by that. It was inspired by Liberal party corruption and the need for electoral change.

A lot of your movies start off as one thing, for instance Punk The Vote starts as a movie about Starbuck and ends up dealing with issues of representative democracy - are you conscious of these evolutions while making the movies or do you only come upon them while editing them?

No it is all natural... It arrives that way while we shoot. Don't forget that it is documentary and not fiction... What you see happened for real. Also the fact that I fought for proportional representation of the votes is also my ideology and I was in front of camera fighting that so of course it is the big fight of the movie, it was my whole program and the film is about campaigning. But things just happened that way.

You seem to associate punk with rebellion and political radicalism, do you think it is more so than other sub-cultures and if so why?

I don't get the question).. but punk is not unknown to provocation, social denunciation and revendicate (is that a word, in French it is). So yes I will always do that and my film will always say that I guess, we are here to demand change!

The film makes plenty use of anarchistic imagery and rhetoric, but ends up as an argument for representative democracy over the traditional anarchist desire for direct democracy - how can you explain this gap between image and idea?

Huh??? I don't get it either.... I am an anarcho-Communist punk, and I believe in the people, not the power or profit. I am no politician, I am a filmmaker and an activist and I will always be there to fight against the injustice. Workers, poor and oppressed should all become one and take over this system. I believe that the working class are the deciders, and we should be the ruling class. I am no anarchist, I believe a lot in communism. That's why I am an anarcho-communist. But I really don't understand your question.

By the end of the movie you seemed quite close to the New Democratic Party, has this relationship not developed further and would the experience of electorally minded social democratic parties like New Labour in the UK and elsewhere not signal the dead end of reformism?

I still don't understand... But I had join the NDP 2 weeks ago, a year after I ran. I will never go with the party line, I will always use my freedom of speech. Even if the leader, Jack Layton tell me to shut up, I won't. We live in a democracy, and a country where freedom of speech is encouraged, so I will keep that freedom. Parties are less democratic than democracy itself. That is why I ran as an independent and that I will resign from the NDP if I am being told to shut up. I will never stop to say what I have to say and to attack my enemies, politicians!

Labels: Film, Hot Docs, Politics, Punk, toronto

Hot Docs: Indie Cinema Orgy

The annual Hot Docs Festival took place from April 19th to 29th earlier on this year in Toronto, and some version or other of the following material may be familiar to you from coverage published in the latest Totally Dublin...

Before Morgon Spurlock's grease laden death diet and Michael Moore's spot-on vendetta against neo-conservative America were banking the big bucks as blockbusting summer successes, documentaries dealing with the hot topics of contemporary controversy were relegated to the art-house cinema and the rather infrequent silver-screen orgy of the film festival. For fourteen years now the Toronto Hot Docs festival has been setting the pace for the current explosion of socially minded documentaries, ripping through the mold to become one of North America’s largest documentary festivals.

This year it hosted over 129 films on a hectic ten day run, showcasing not just the North American but global documentary film making efforts that will filter down to the indie cinemas over the next year, or at the very least through your home broadband connection. In short, as Sean Farnel the festivals Director of Programming told me, it has “emerged from what was essentially an industry conference to one of the world’s largest documentary events.”

Compared to the quite aficionado only ambiance of most film festivals, Hot Docs is a bustling mess of crowds and queues. With over 70,000 admissions to this years assorted flicks, a "no guaranteed entry" system is compounded by the usual hesitation of buying expensive festival wide tickets. With rush lines stretched well beyond the norm at all weekend screenings, chasing seats became an adrenalinising experience all of its own.

The ground for the festival madness is laid through Toronto's envied year long indie-cinema culture, DIY theatres like the Brunswick screen three left of centre documentaries a day, leading to what Farnel terms "a very engaged, curious and open audience" in the city. Reflecting this mass documentary culture, Ron Koperdraad a coordinator for the festival over saw 250 volunteers who "mostly did it out of a love for documentaries, but also for the social reasons."

The audience award went to War/Dance, directed by Andrea Nix Fine it’s a look inside the lives of three orphans in an Ugandan displacement camp who find expression through the country’s national music and dance festival. Best International Documentary winged its way to Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken’s tale of globalisation's Losers and Winners, a close up of the dismantling of a German smelting plant and its reassembly in China’s growing industrial hubs.

The festival also featured the debut of Morgan Spurlock’s latest look at our modern consumer shopapacyalpse in What Would Jesus Buy? Hooking up with long term icon of the no-brand, counter culture Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, he documents the cack handed Christians attempt to save Christmas from commercialism.

Gary Hustwit's Helvitica, due a Candy Culture Sugar Club screening on June 28th, examines the rise of a typeface as the embodiment of post-war values and their eventual inertia, crippled at the hands of post-modern concerns, creating a social history where no one thought possible.

Film fascination with favella poverty continued in the Made in Brazil programming stream. Kiko Goifman's Acts Of Men delivered a cooly executed jaunt into the criminal economy, with the massacre of 29 people by local death squads in the Baixada Fluminense township setting the background for impulsive interviews with the power players in one neighborhood's deadly games.

This South American concern was furthered in Arturo Perez Torres' Super Amigos, a comic portrayal of the real life super heros emerging from the Mexican popular classes obsession with luche libre, a theatrical wrestling satirized in Jack Black's Nachos Libre. In the social war against crippling poverty, movement heroes like Super Barrio and Super Gay have become unique icons of dissent and community organisation, warding off both landlords and homophobes.

If one director and film at the festival highlighted the transformative role of the documentary lens it was the formerly homeless street-punk Roach Denis and Punk The Vote. Roach's own life was the subject matter of the Daniel Cross classic Squeege Punks in Traffic. Intertwining biography with a critique of a Conservative governments brutal harassment of a new generation of homeless kids earning a buck cleaning windscreens at intersections, Cross provided Roach with a route out "I was in the process of getting out of drugs and out of the streets and needed a passion to quit all this and find a new life. Daniel gave me this passion through film-making."

Ten years later Roach is a well known filmmaker retaining the conviction he picked up on the streets. "Inspired by Liberal party corruption and the need for electoral change" he examines the theatrics of a Montreal political process that cares little for the poverty he experienced in his youth and runs in the municipal elections leading to " a film that had to be made. I am an activist, strongly politicized and fighting against this system since I was 14 years old. So it was just a natural shift I made, but it is also the best film I made in my career."

Hot Docs is critically minded to the core and a series of festival panel discussions wrenched into the existential heart of the documentary method to explore interviewing technique, political power and directorial responsibility. This tension was exemplified perfectly by the ultimate buzz movie of the festival, Rick Caine's portrayal of Michael Moore in Manufacturing Dissent.

Some selected shorts by young directors featured in the Doc It Showcase are now available for viewing online.

Labels: festival, Film, Hot Docs, toronto

# posted by antrophe @ 5:51 AM

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Monday, June 11, 2007

Chinese Rock and Movies At NXNE

Alongside panel discussions on how bands can grind the best use out of their myspace, the NXNE organisers put on a sequence of movies related to the industry over at the Toronto Film Board Building. Kevin Fritz's Wasted Orient was a quick paced look into disaffected youth in modern China, going on the road with Joyside the director documents the Chinese punk scene in all its drunken apathy as it turns its back on society with anthems like "Johnny Rotten" and "I Want Beer" that celebrate a nihilism born out of a hunger for western culture. Rock and roll as they described it is an "addiction to chaos," most of this hour long flick was spent in pursuit of getting trashed with all the skills of four Chinese Pete Dohertys.

Don Lett's George Clinton: Tales of Dr. Funkenstein used people influenced by the king of funkedelic like Macy Grey, Andre 3000 and some dude from Digital Underground to look at how that mothership of funk landed and a movement grew from barber shop quartets to mass funk freakouts of 70 or more contributers. Reaching well back, the best movie of the sequence had to be Living the Blues - an intimate portrait of a group of elderly blues musicians that remembers the racism and poverty of their depression era youth, the very period when they first got the blues as a "teller of truths."

Labels: festival, Film, Music, NXNE, toronto

# posted by antrophe @ 6:53 PM

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NXNE Saturday and Sunday

Saturday: Toronto was pretty much kicking all weekend with this NXNE lark, most bars and clubs had 4am drink extensions and I can really be fairly accused of not making enough use of this pass business - opting instead for taking my chances on one venue for a whole night instead of bar hopping around. Harlem bore witness to some of the worst attempts at a call and response in a hip hop act during Think Twice's set on Saturday night, overly brash MC's found there was nothing they could do to move a disinterested crowd, appalling sound quality and choppy production probably explained it as well. It's numbing to see some one shout to a venue full of people "ye all want some more?" only for everyone to remain silent and look at each other awkwardly.

Ghettosocks has been touted as one of the hottest properties in Canada at the moment, bursting out of Halifax he's humorous as fuck and encourages the crowd to "Steal from Walmart" and read a booka-booka all the while rocking the off-duty accountant look he frames himself in with massive horn rimmed glasses. Is he worth the hype? Well I don't think anything could have worked for me in that Harlem shit hole.

Sunday: One night later and in the Drake, the two story epicentre leading to the gentrification of the Queen West neighborhood, it seemed like a purely Diplo sanctioned night with Bonjay, Thunderheist, YoMajesty and those hard rock head wreckers trying to pass themselves off as dance Lesbians on E all playing. I stupidly missed Bonjay, from listening to the few online tracks they have quite a dance-hall like feel to them, with a twist of heavy club electronics and bursts of chatting over the odd cowbell. They've quite a decent cover of "Staring at the Sun" over on their myspace and I was pretty gutted to miss them.

Thunderheist escaped me too, but the echo of their room shaking bass tracks wafted up the stairs to torture me in the queue before getting in. The crunching baltimore use of "Sweet Dreams" on "Suenos Dulces" over on their myspace is a perfect example of how they seem to work a club as well as something of an ode to reggaeton, part MIA and part-Modeselektor they certainly are ones to watch. There's not much that needs to be said about Tampa trio Yo Majesty except one of them was missing and they still went off with a fierce torrent of energy.

Dancers from both the Fat Femme Mafia and some nut from Kids on TV jangled their wiggly bits in some nude on-stage action as Yo Majesty taunted them on, harder and faster. What you have here is a queer and female Two Live Crew that rap about masturbation and partying to some pretty filthy grimey beats. After that it really was embarrassing to watch the hard rock antics of Lesbians on E, that band really wreck my head - iconic in the queercore scene, their outspoken identities lead people to excuse them for a real lack of musical quality. Cringing.

The Yo Majesty photo is nicked from the Beatle Jinny Flickr set. My camera is busted.

Labels: festival, Gig Review, Music, NXNE, toronto

# posted by antrophe @ 5:10 AM

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Wednesday, June 06, 2007

NXNE Festival: What Do You Recommend?

Sometimes this blogging lark can lead to some very nice blags. As you might guess North By North East is something of a jealous sibling to the much larger industry junket that is the annual South By South West Festival, except with far more of a focus on the Toronto home grown. Armed with an all access pass for the weekend I've got to make some choices from this pretty insane looking list.

Is there anything here some of you would recommend before I get lost in unknown streets chasing cool names like Bourgeois Gypsies and Million Dollar Marxists only to find myself fiddled with acoustics and indie-fops? As most of this seems to be a Canadian showcase, I'll probably just take my cues from local free papers like Now. I'll try keep you posted with some day by day accounts of what goes down.

The photo above was nicked from the Yo Majesty Myspace, for some of the recent hype post SXSW alone I'll have to check them out.

Labels: festival, Music, NXNE, toronto

# posted by antrophe @ 8:29 AM

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Friday, June 01, 2007

Lady Sovereign Is Well Bored

Over the past few years Lady Sovereign has released a string of fantastic singles with some of the tastiest beats and production out there, so when the opportunity to see her play a relatively small club in Toronto comes up I'm not one to turn it down. Last Wednesday it was at the Social, something of a hipster haunt that revels in its location right beside run down Parkdale with its Midnight Cowboy feel and the mentally wounded perched in the ghetto cafes.

The Social laps this environ up and drips with the irony of how it's one establishment among others spearheading gentrification of the area. One of walls alongside the dance floor reads in gothic font "an allegory for the death of Parkdale as we knew it" while the other boldly states "welfare." The path outside is full of real fashion histrionics taking photos of each other, mostly in a sort of nu-rave attempt that falls over itself and ends up a mid eighties Don Johnson dipped in day glo paint with some sideline fashion advice from Zack Moris. No matter how spot on the opening DJ's are none of these are going to admit enjoyment until Lady Sovereign orders them into it later in the night.

When she does come on, she stalks the stage in over sized sun-glasses and a t-shirt with "Ding dong special delivery" in large slogan font at the front, first she forces her way through "Cha-ching," before complaining about hating "Random" - a song she claims she wrote at 13 and is the only thing people this side of the Atlantic ever want to hear. Bored she continuously rolled her eyes at the DJ, and moaned at the crowd. She gave us "Love Me or Hate Me" before cheering the place into sudden violence with "Public Warning" and a scream of "mosh, mosh, mosh" into the crowds face. The opening intro set by her DJ was the tightest blend of dubstep, hip-hop and grime I've yet to hear and while busied posing right up in the lens of the scattered cameras, you got bored and eventually just wanted him to take over.

This was only meant to be a mini-set, having stumbled on the El Dorado of pop, SOV plays to the kids at venues like the massive Air Canada Centre on Gwen Stefani's tour before scalping the hipsters for a four song set for twenty dollars on the door later in the night. Whatever about Def Jam and her attempts stateside, Lady Sovereign was both tired and cranky -reduced to more a UK curio and novelty act. It's hard to figure where she stands as an artist now. Not so long ago she entered into this rather depressing confession at a similar small club show about being broke in the music industry stateside and how she hates what she is doing. Her tour dairies are over here.

Side note: Haven't these fuckwits seen Nathan Barley? Are these people in Super Super and the rest of this documentary for real? It actually sounds like a piss take of Hadouken - am I missing something here?

Labels: Gig Review, Lady Sovereign, Music, toronto

# posted by antrophe @ 9:01 PM

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Monday, May 07, 2007

Marijuana March: All This Canna-biz In Toronto

"All day up on green, inhale smoke every time I breathe, talking junk when I hit the seed I love that smoke and a bag of weed, might attack that White Widow, dirty bud the hydro - too many people buy the homegrown, It'd wanna be bum to make my mind blow. Thick lumps start to change me, head in the clouds paranoid and lazy, everything about me starts to faze me, never thought weed would drive me crazy, up late and I start to lose my temper..." - Mark One/Sizzla (Feat Virus Syndicate) "I Got Too."

Pot activists in Toronto continued their campaign for legislation of that much vaunted plant yesterday as the city's annual Freedom Festival gathered in front of the legislature at Queen's Park. Mainstream media reports of the event settled on an attendance figure of a massive 20,000. A huge majority of these didn't even bother to join the Marijuana March that eventually wormed its way down Bloor St and back again. Staying behind instead for the direct business of mass spliffage on the grass.

The main stage tossed out pop-metal along Linkin Park lines, a suitable soundtrack for the teenage, lank haired and stoned. The crowd was mostly middle-class, rarely stretching further than their early 20s and there weren't many obvious worshipers of dead Ethiopian dictators around either but plenty of bongoloids getting their primal drumming on, college students flicking hacky sacks in circles, the spaced staring off under trees or clutches sharing over-sized decorative bongs.

The numbers are hardly surprising with the Freedom Festival and Marijuana March organisers under-taking a massive promotional effort year after year for this "cultural pro-testival." The logo of the organisers, which cleverly uses the CN Tower as a leaf in a cannabis plant, was flapping on posters stapled to poles across the city for weeks before hand.

The event has a massive appeal, drunk people shout at you about it from cars roaring past the night before and you could find it without having any idea of the city, given the crowd flow to and from it. Fake cannabis leafs draped around them, cash just handed over for temporary braidings of their hair or t-shirts with terrible visual puns boasting of drug usage and cannabis culture cliches. You're shooting fish in a barrel really.

The parade was grand marshaled by the so-called "Prince of Pot" Marc Emery, head of the Marijuana Party and publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine. Arrested over 20 times in the course of his campaigning he is wanted for extradition by the US for sending seeds across the border, in online sales some claim have netted him over five million dollars. He claims he simply introduced a business plan into the Canadian cannabis world,"a retail revolution so we could earn lots of money to fund a peaceful revolution to change the way the world thinks about marijuana."

Apart from a rebellious stature gained from appeal to a culture centred around cannabis, he's really not much of a figure to care about. A few google searches reveal a traditional captialist libertarian, who according to Wikipedia favours the abolition of public education in favour of private tutorship. In true shock jock style his comments about older people are far more reprehensible, basically funding for their health care should be cut off and they should be left to die.

There's a clear tension in Toronto's well developed movement to "free the weed," with some campaigners trying to establish activity outside the "official" Freedom Festival, so April 20th now figures strongly as an alternative date within the cannabis culture calendar here. Set aside by more radical liberationists as a day of smokers pride with the numerical representation of the date matching the 4:20 police code for a cannabis possession offence. Last 4:20 A crew calling themselves the Toronto Hash Mob (as in flash mob) assembled out of no where in the downtown area in an "out yourself" smoke out. Police officers looked on and promised no arrests , with some major debate sparked in the letters pages of the alternative press on decriminalization or legalization.

One participant writing in NOW! magazine, itself a sponsor of yesterday's Freedom Festival described, the consternation the move caused in the canna-biz world of hemp stores, head shops and cafes. "There's a big fear that our unsanctioned actions will feed bathhouse-style raids. Some café owners even beg us not to come back to their establishments post-rally."

The 1981 Bathhouse raids, where the police raided four gay bathhouses leading to the mass arrests of 300 men, spurred the queer community into a series of protests that eventually stabilised as the annual Pride parade. Many seeking a change in the status of cannabis see a similar "pride" strategy as a suitable template for shifting state policy. Toronto now has its own openly stoned culture. Head shops like Roach-a-rama in Kensington Market boast a "pot-io" and a cafe calling itself the Hot Box where the owners allow stoners to smoke on the premises.

The main Freedom festival is affair is now simply that, a festival complete with a small year round staff and sub contracted workers such as security people, paramedics and technicians required by the law coming in during the event. Over the years there has been a string of corporate sponsors including PizzaPizza, a massive fast food franchise present across Ontario.

The festival's website even invites advertisers to "market your brand to core consumers; 80/20 male/female, ages 17 to 35, lower to upper income, socially, progressively, environmentally, and politically aware" and "acquire market intelligence." And of course many advertiser do come on and advertise, like Budbabes.ca - a soft porn site specialising in annual calendars featuring semi-nude, fluoro-goths caressing cannabis paraphernalia or suggestively biting into apples being used as improvised pipes.

Its like a very privatised Gay Pride with a raft of companies saddling up to get in on profits to be made after a status change for the plant or from over-priced cannabis culture kitsch today. There certainly is a very valid argument for a change in the status of cannabis in many countries but for a plant whose past and present intertwines with issues of race and class few of these are to the fore of a cannabis liberation movement dominated by would be entrepreneurs and cannabis devotees fawning all over their own radical stonage.

Labels: Social Movements, Society, toronto, Tourism

# posted by antrophe @ 5:12 PM

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Thursday, May 03, 2007

Murmours of the Past In The Dublin Docklands.

[murmour] is one of those interesting considerations of urban space that sprung up from the civic imagination of Torontonians. Starting as a project to document the experiences of people living in Kensington - a market area full of stalls and wafting with dope smoke from the few open cafes in the city that challenge legislation directly to allow patrons to smoke over a coffee. Through gathering murmours and voices from residents they document the ambiance of a place itself.

Kensington now can be thought of as some mini-Amsterdam fused with the anti-vicious circle mentality of Brighton and cross referenced with just about every hippy clothing store and vintage outlet you've ever come across. Beneath its counter-cultural glare, a marked working class experience and large immigrant population co-exist in an area with traditionally low rents.

As part of the Bealtaine festival [murmour] are swooping down on the Docklands development to record people's stories for an interactive, illustrated audio visualization of the development. In a PDF media package the project aim is making stories heard because once heard "these stories change the way people think about that place and about the city." The site they produced after visiting Leith, Edinburgh gives some idea of the likely end result.

People are invited to take their mobile phones for a walk and ring the numbers on signs mounted where the stories were gathered to hear them recited at their point of origin. Some how all of this is related to a festival for the elderly, "Ah in my day there was none of this ringing traffic sign bollix..."

A dedicated [murmour] site for their documentation of a modern Dublin oral folk history is now online.

Labels: Art, murmour, Society, toronto

# posted by antrophe @ 7:14 PM

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