Melbourne Documentary Film Festival Review – ‘Can Art Stop a Bullet’ by TheFlemishSeth William Kelly, artist and peace activist, has been called the ‘moral conscience’ of Australian Art. For him there's no line between life and art. Can Art Stop a Bullet is a documentary about the man himself and centered around an art piece he's making for the State Library of Victoria. The film explores the connections between art and activism and how imagery in their own way can change people's view on things happening in the world, their own lives and the lives of those around them. Kelly's art project will combine former pieces of his career and art that has inspired him throughout his life, in a collage of drawings that will tell a story of their own. He narrates the process of this important art piece, starting by taking us to his hometown in Buffalo, NY, where he explains how words and literature were his ways of escaping to another world, until he visited an art gallery with school and decided to start drawing. He also sits down with activists and artists from all over the globe, who's activism and the idiocy of war inspired powerful work that left an impact on the art world and those who get a chance to be affected by its compelling messages. Mark Street has worked in the tv and film industry for the last 25 years and met Kelly whilst producing a documentary on the development of art in regional Victorian towns. His film is respectful to all those involved in the making of it, taking careful and humanitarian standpoints to highlight the importance of art in changing people's views on the world. It's exactly those at times uncomfortable images that have a lasting effect and make us ask the right questions. "The worst enemy of an artist is sentiment" as actor/activist Martin Sheen (Grace and Frankie) says. He and many other Hollywood actors who spoke out about human rights have been arrested in the past, but find the naked truth in art necessary, even though it can come across unpleasant to some of us. Dedicating your art to social issues and human rights instead of being just a pretty picture on the wall, gives a notable voice to those who otherwise stay voiceless. And that's exactly what Kelly has been doing throughout his entire career. The most heartbreaking part of Can Art Stop a Bullet is an entire segment on Aboriginal art and Indigenous people and their rights in Australia. Art historian Professor Sasha Grishin points out how the longest war in Australia is that with the Indigenous people of this country. They had to suffer through 200 years of genocide by the hands of European colonisers, and although the Aboriginal Memorial is a great work of art, it bares the question why it's hidden in an art gallery in Canberra and not displayed at the capital's war memorial, where it belongs?! The film dives even further into a dark part of Australia's nuclear history where at least 12 nuclear bombs were tested in WA, without evacuating Indigenous communities who were also misinformed on the dangers of nuclear effects on humans and nature. Anti-nuclear activist Rose Lester's confession is shockingly honest and sends chills all over your body. The optimism in the interviewees and the possibilities in the art that gets presented during the film, is encouraging enough to leave a positive impression. Can Art Stop a Bullet never avoids topics such as the war in Syria, Abu Ghraib, school shootings and the Black Lives Matter movement, going exactly there were other art documentaries tend to draw a visible line they rarely dare to cross. Educational, essential viewing for every living creature that believes the world can be a better place than it is right now. Rating: 5 out of 5.
A documentary on the six-decades long career of a muckraking journalist, who was involved with the radical 196os magazine Ramparts, with the Los Angeles Times newspaper, and later with the Internet website Truthdig.
In the sixties, Peter Handke was one of the first to show how the business works: the writer as angry young man and pop star of the literary scene. As soon as he was on the bestseller lists, he turned his back on the hype. For many years, he has lived and worked in his house in a Parisian suburb, more quietly and more hospitably. Peter Handke's precise, free gaze becomes perceptible in his texts, his conversations, the cosmos of his notebooks.
Frantz Fanon alone embodies all the issues of French colonial history. Martinican resistance fighter, he enlisted, like millions of colonial soldiers, in the Free Army out of loyalty to France and the idea of freedom that it embodies for him. A writer, he participated in the bubbling life of Saint-Germain with Césaire, Senghor and Sartre, debating tirelessly on the destiny of colonized peoples. As a doctor, he revolutionized the practice of psychiatry, seeking in the relations of domination of colonial societies the foundations of the pathologies of his patients in Blida. Activist, he brings together through his action and his history of him, the anger of peoples crushed by centuries of colonial oppression. But beyond this exceptional journey which makes sensitive the permanence of French colonialism in the Lesser Antilles at the gates of the Algerian desert, he leaves an incomparable body of work which has made him today one of the most studied French authors across the Atlantic.
Following fateful scientific reports, protestors pose the argument for a better future against the vested interest of industry. Small to large, individual to collective, where do I fit into this?
Since the beginning of her career, Sinéad O’Connor has used her powerful voice to challenge the narratives she was surrounded by while growing up in predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland. Despite her agency, depth and perspective, O’Connor’s unflinching refusal to conform means that she has often been patronized and unfairly dismissed as an attention-seeking pop star.
On June 3, 1973, a man was murdered in a busy intersection of San Francisco’s Chinatown as part of an ongoing gang war. Chol Soo Lee, a 20-year-old Korean immigrant who had previous run-ins with the law, was arrested and convicted based on flimsy evidence and the eyewitness accounts of white tourists who couldn’t distinguish between Asian features. Sentenced to life in prison, Chol Soo Lee would spend years fighting to survive behind bars before journalist K.W. Lee took an interest in his case. The intrepid reporter’s investigation would galvanize a first-of-its-kind pan-Asian American grassroots movement to fight for Chol Soo Lee’s freedom, ultimately inspiring a new generation of social justice activists.
A comic, biting and revelatory documentary following a small group of prankster activists as they gain worldwide notoriety for impersonating the World Trade Organization (WTO) on television and at business conferences around the world.
A moving portrait of Chilean singer-songwriter and political activist Victor Jara (1932-73) that chronicles the life of the talented artist who was imprisoned, tortured and machine-gunned by the country's dictatorship.
The story of The Satanic Temple, a controversial movement that combines religion and activism with the apparent purpose of questioning the basic foundations of US society.
This is a documentary about an honest search for the truth about the Federal Reserve Bank and the legality of the Internal Revenue System. Through extensive interviews with recognised experts and authority, the director shows an astonishing revelation of how the Federal Government and the Bankers have fooled the American public by taking thier wages and putting it in the pockets of the super-rich.