The World is Watching is a political film about the moral issues surrounding news gathering and newsmaking in the electronic age. Who decides what constitutes the news? How do they decide? And what about the men and women who report from the field. Are foreign correspondents allowed to tell all that they see? The film examines these complex issues by focusing on several international journalists in Nicaragua as they cover the negotiations surrounding the Arias Peace Plan in November 1987. With unprecedented access to the inner workings of ABC News, what follows is a unique portrait of a news crew in the field, as it interacts with the editorial process in the newsroom in New York City.
Tag: CANADA
A film, like a long poem in which a married couple engage in conversation about love, death, and life while the scenery changes around them. The destiny of each human being plays out between the parallel and antagonistic lines of man and woman, day and night, north and south, black and white. And not knowing what real death will be, we imagine life and death in various ways.
An unemployed man with individualist and pacifist values is inevitably brainwashed by society and the mass media to conform to the dominant ideology and embrace war. His soul is destroyed but his heart cannot be conquered.
Found drifting down the Saguenay River, half-drowned and clinging to a log, a woman is rescued by Boulder, who carries her to Undersky, his commune in the Quebec wilderness. Named after the river from which she was saved, Saguenay is haunted by memories of her past and remains unresponsive for days, drifting in and out of consciousness. She gradually becomes aware of the life going on around her and begins to explore it. But she senses she has brought ill fortune to this community and fears something in her past has doomed her and all who know her.
Fictional character played by 24 different actresses, Françoise Durocher is altogether small time waitress, hostess and barmaid. Together, according to the author, they represent the archetypical Québec waitress that everyday waits on us with a smile, despite whatever problems she faces in her personal life. First cinematographic experience of the Brassard-Tremblay tandem, this film full of ironic joy details all the nuances of the waitress living conditions.
This short fiction has much to say about kindness, although without any dialogue. In a combination of live action and animation, we are introduced to a man who discovers a small plant hidden under the snow and takes it inside his house. The plant responds to his loving care with rather startling enthusiasm.
Algernon is an old man who lives alone, having conversations with a porcelain cat and enjoys making things out of bones. He boils a neighbour’s dead dog for the bones. He is visited by an old friend who is dying but who commits suicide first – leaving a million dollars in a suitcase. A woman claiming to be interested in Algernon’s Egyptologist great-grandfather pretends to be in love with Algernon…
In this semi-autobiographical, semi-experimental film (described by its makers as “Huck Finn on coke – a memoir of the drug generation”) the characters bear the same names as the actors. Steve Lack is a suave, funky drug dealer, artist and guru to a street community “family” in Montreal. But the group is threatened from within and without. Brawley has turned from coke to heroin and Pierre follows suit. The group’s latest shipment of cocaine sits in a locker in Windsor station surrounded by cops, so the family can’t get at it. At the same time, a sociology student, Moyle, is doing his thesis on Lack and the family and has insinuated himself into the group.