Tag: opendemocracy
Video: Black lives matter: shutdown
“1,562 deaths in police custody in my lifetime. 0 convictions”. As Black Lives Matter protesters set up blockades in London, Birmingham and Nottingham, here’s their video explaining why it’s time for a shutdown.
When the world of documentary films became a factory production line, I fought back
In 2011, I suggested to family friends who were looking for projects for their old farmhouses and barns in Kent, that we run a film festival. We would turn their old barns into screening rooms, and guests could camp out in the field. They loved the idea, and we soon created the Quadrangle Film Festival – now called Otherfield.
At the time, it felt like the most natural thing to do. The Quadrangle was a place that I had been visiting since childhood, and the huge granary barn and surrounding fields formed the most natural setting for camping and cinema. Like many of my friends, I was carving out a path in the strange world of creative documentary-making. More than anything, I longed for a place where we could gather, talk, watch and share experiences with like-minded others.
Our raison d’etre was that we were filmmakers creating a space for filmmakers. It was a radical idea when set against the industry’s competitive world of TV commissioning and selling that was threatening to overtake all creative practice in non-fiction filmmaking.
I discovered the truth about Singapore’s ‘war on drugs’. Now I campaign against the death penalty
(openDemocracy) – Yong Vui Kong was my first encounter with the death penalty in Singapore. I was 21 years old, and so was he. But we couldn’t be further apart when I sat in the public gallery of the courtroom and he in the dock, behind a glass pane. At that age I was considered by many older people as young, idealistic, naive, prone to mistakes and immaturity. Yet the Singaporean criminal justice system was expecting Yong Vui Kong to die for a mistake he’d made when he was just 19 years old.
Born to a poor family in the east Malaysian state of Sabah, Vui Kong was arrested in 2007 with 47.27 grams of heroin. Under Singaporean law, 15 grams and above is enough to attract the mandatory death penalty. Seeing his youth, the trial judge had asked the prosecution to consider reducing the charge, so he wouldn’t have to face the gallows.
Sexual harassment in Kosovo: no longer invisible
A video of a woman walking in Prishtina being sexually harassed 50 times in 8 hours and publication of the first quantitative data on the harassment of women counter the argument that it’s not a widespread problem.