AFI's blog

By Shannon Dunn
Special to the Daily News

While news headlines constantly broadcast political and environmental wins and woes, some of the world’s most exciting filmmakers have made it their mission to go beyond the boundaries so often kept to by the six o’clock news.

AFI FEST is providing a platform for some such American and international filmmakers, who have created forward-thinking films and documentaries to educate and inspire.

Chris Taylor’s FOOD FIGHT, Danny Ledone’s PLAYING COLUMBINE, Jim Finn’s THE JUCHE IDEA and Jan Louter’s THE LAST DAYS OF SHISHMAREF are just four such films that are capturing audience’s hearts and minds at the 22nd-annual international film festival, headquartered at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel.

The everyday act of eating and buying food is at the center of Chris Taylor’s FOOD FIGHT – a documentary that raises the question: is what you’re putting in your shopping basket as healthy as you think?

“We have to think about our food choices, how they affect ourselves, how they affect the community, and how those choices affect the planet,” the writer and director says. “I would like people to realize their food choices matter — each of us has the power, we have economic power, which is always what drives social change.”

Taylor says on the most basic level, food forms the fundamental basis of our humanity and relationships with family and friends.

“Right now, four out of 10 of the leading fatal diseases are food-related chronic diseases. So it is a health care issue. Food is also an environmental issue, since the way we currently grow food is a contributor to global warming, more so than automobiles,” he said. “A large-scale industrial farming is petrochemical-intensive, so food is at the center of three of the most important issues facing Americans today.”

Another hot topic debated in the United States is captured by filmmaker and video game producer, Danny Ledonne in his documentary PLAYING COLUMBINE, which serves as an introduction to his controversial game, Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

Confronting as the game may seem, many failed to recognize that Super Columbine is more than a violent impulse fantasy. Many who have taken the time to play it have found the game to be therapeutic and even life changing.

The documentary explores the game’s coverage in the press, the phenomenon of school violence and the evolution of video games as an expressive medium. It asks us to reconsider games as more than just play and asks us which subjects are fit to become interactive experiences.

“The film is designed to provoke discussion on the issue of videogame violence/representation, school shootings, and the future of interactive media in social critique,” Ledonne says. “The larger questions that are raised as a result include the value of the First Amendment, the aesthetic controversy in experimental, independent art and how discourse on controversial subjects can be initiated.”

Ledonne says his biggest life lesson since creating the game, and then developing the documentary, is to “be unafraid.”

“There will always be people who disagree with your work if you have something important to say with it,” he says. “The challenge is to develop alliances and support the courage of your convictions. Sometime between my first batch of hate mail from angry parents to my letter of acceptance at AFI FEST, I learned to be unafraid of my creative decisions — and more importantly to trust them.”

Politics and art also come together in Jim Finn’s THE JUCHE IDEA, a film that looks at communism. The filmmaker’s latest offering takes aim at the official North Korean ideology Juche, reveling in the absurd results of the regime’s attempts to turn directors into doctrinaires.

“I saw some footage of the Mass Games, which is basically the Chinese Olympics opening ceremony but with communist themes and electricity,” Finn says. “I read a bit about how Kim Jong II consolidated his power in North Korea by running the film industry and pushing hard for a cult of personality of his father.”

Finn says North Korea’s unique dictatorship, including control of national media is “amateur hour” compared to America’s corporate media control.

“How many Pentagon-paid media experts were there that got us into the Iraq war,” he says. “The film that I created points back to our own ideology and how our own media is controlled.”

Jan Louter’s THE LAST DAYS OF SHISHMAREF shows an Inuit community whose town and culture is being washed into the sea, thanks to global warming. Louter’s preference is not to hit filmgoers over the head with politics, however.

“This is a film on the edge of documentaries and features. You see that everything is set up as a scene, but the people are playing themselves. There had been stories on Shishmaref before—in the New York Times, on the BBC—but where those reporters stayed in the village for one or two days, I was there for weeks. Eventually the villagers began wondering, ‘What is this crazy white man doing here?’

“I didn’t want to romanticize their life, either. You see, when the snow melts, that they’ve trashed their own environment. Once the pristine whiteness goes away, it gets ugly.”

Other films giving audiences a more in-depth view of the world in which they live, includes 24 CITY, NIRVANA and PALESTINE EN SOLIDAD.

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