When Open Road Film’s Denis Hennelly and Casey Suchan set out to make Bold Native they wanted to work in the spirit of revolutionary films like Easy Rider. They succeeded. Bold Native is a feature film on the subject of animal liberation but at its heart, much like Easy Rider, it’s a road film about the fight for freedom in a corrupt America.
Joaquin Pastor “Charlie” & Casey Suchan – Producer of Bold Native
Bold Native follows Charlie Cranehill, played by Joaquin Pastor, an animal liberator working outside the law and Jessica Hagan who plays Jane, a woman working for change for animals within the confines of the legal system. The film’s hero, Charlie, is an ordinary activist who accepts a challenge by his girlfriend to ‘walk the talk.’ When things go awry and he is wanted by the U.S. government as a domestic terrorist, he must go into hiding. He emerges later in the plot to coordinate a large-scale action to free animals nationwide while both his estranged CEO father and the FBI hunt him.
Interspersed into the film are clips of institutionalized animal cruelty, which provide the much-needed context to underscore Charlie’s willingness to take such great risks. The filmmakers manage to do this in a way that supports the plot and pace of the film while avoiding seeming preachy.
Hennelly and Suchan show similar bravery by including a chilling scene of Charlie’s old friends taking a tactical heinous path of their enemies, which tests the viewer’s trust in Charlie.
The dialogue throughout the film is true to the movement and at times refreshingly comical. The gripping exchange between Charlie and his father toward the end of the film will easily make Pastor a star.
Pastor captures Charlie and presents him in a way that everyone can understand. Pastor is also a musician who contributes to the film’s soundtrack along with household names like Sufjan Stevens.
The filmmakers capture the all too real conflict between factions of today’s animal rights movement. But even for a viewer who knows nothing of the struggle or it’s inner arguments, Bold Native is a great primer on the ideology of a diverse movement that at its’ core is really about life, love and freedom.
Like all good revolutionary films, Bold Native is both inspirational and challenging. The film forces the audience to confront uncomfortable notions of brutality, betrayal and greed while inspiring us to fight for justice and freedom at all costs.
Nobody went to see Easy Rider just once. Bold Native will be the same. As soon as the credits rolled, I wanted to see it again.
Last Month I posted about the privatization of water through corporate control of municipal water systems. As I mentioned in the previous post, the second way corporations are stealing our water is through bottling. FLOW (For the Love of Water), a documentary which came out in 2008 brilliantly (and frighteningly) lays out the international water crisis, including the role of bottled water. I would highly recommend everyone rent, borrow, or buy this film. After watching it, I did a down and dirty post for Girlie Girl Army but here I’d like to dig a little deeper.
As you probably already know bottled water is terrible in numerous ways. It’s no safer (and in some cases, less safe) than tap water, much worse for the environment in many way than tap water and a gigantic waste of money. In the U.S. and abroad Nestle, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are the chief corporations creating a false demand for bottled water by making people think it’s healthier and safer than water from the tap. It’s a masterful marketing campaign the opposite is often actually true. Then again, usually when a corporation tells us anything it’s probably safe to assume the reverse. Tap water is subject to state and federal safe drinking water standards by the Environmental Protection Agency, whereas bottled water is far less regulated because it’s done so by Food and Drug Administration.
More than just the plastic waste created with every bottle of water tossed in the trash after drinking, the making of plastic bottles and transporting the water-filled bottles all across the country takes a lot of energy and creates a lot of pollution. Although this is of course an argument against all plastic containers, remember, the same water already comes out of the faucet. The infrastructure for drinking water out of the tap already exists and it’s a lot more eco-friendly! No plastic waste, no trucks driving water all over the place. Its genius but unfortunately municipal water bureaus don’t have millions of ad dollars to market tap water the way Coca-Cola can market Dasani.
On top of the waste created from plastic production, shipment and destruction, corporations often devastate the environment to extract water at an alarming rate. Nestle is a notorious offender. In 2003, Nestle after failing in Wisconsin, set sights on Michigan and set-up a bottling plant, extracting groundwater at the rate of 400 gallons per minute. Citizens won in court claiming that the pumping had a negative effect on the environment but Nestle appealed and continues to pump water while the legal battle with Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation continues.
Finally, bottled water is a huge waste of money for the consumer (hopefully at least after reading this, not you) and communities. Buying bottled-water perpetuates the falsehood that it is safer than tap water and diverts concern (and eventually dollars) away from municipal water systems. In my other post about bottled water I mistakenly said that when you buy bottled water you are paying for what you could get at home for free. That’s not true of course, municipally-owned water you get from the faucet is not free to you or the government, it actually costs millions of dollars for government to provide safe and clean drinking water. But that is still a fraction of the cost of bottled-water and corporate-controlled tap water.
To learn more on the ills of bottled water you can read the Take Back the Tap report. In it, you’ll find the many local groups are fighting big corporations’ bids to set up bottling plants in their communities. Additionally, groups like Food and Water Watch and Corporate Accountability International are helping convince individuals, governments, restaurants, campuses and stores to move away from bottled water and start offering tap water. Both have many resources on their sites if you want to help. Sometimes all you have to do is ask, or not even. I’m so happy to report that after my friends who run Food Fight Grocery! in Portland, OR read my other piece on bottled water they stopped selling it altogether and instead now offer free water that customers can fill up reusable bottles with (thanks guys!)
Food and Water Watch suggests that it’s not enough to simply give up bottled water and they advise that government at every level needs to protect our sources of water as well devote needed dollars to drinking and sewer water systems. I agree but would add that giving up bottled water is a great first step that everyone can take. Right now. More than immediately decreasing demand for the product, when you buy and carry around plastic water bottles, you send a message that it’s an acceptable product. So, go rent FLOW, learn more about the global water crisis in general, and take the pledge to give up bottled water.
It is essential to all forms of life, covers a third of the earth, makes up over half of the human body and yet I can’t find a way to begin my discussion of water. Maybe it’s for the very reasons I just mentioned. The fact that water is all around us, is us and we can’t live without it makes the global water crisis a very scary one indeed. I didn’t really grasp the complexity and severity of the matter until I saw a documentary on the issue called Flow: For the Love of Water. You can watch the trailer here (although you really should watch the whole film).
While many aspects of the crisis merit discussion, I’d like to focus on the growing rate of water privatization through corporate control of municipal water systems and bottling. To introduce the topic, here is a nice and short interview with Maude Barlow who co-authored Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water, which has now been turned into an award-winning documentary: Blue Gold: World Water Wars.
Water for Profit not for People
Want to know how a city loses its’ most precious natural resource? Here’s how it happens: A multi-national corporation (which by law is required to put its own interests — generating profits for its shareholders — above all others) creeps into an area, gains control, and privatizes the water at a pittance. Then they sell it back to you for a bundle. You can’t survive without water so you don’t have a choice but to buy at whatever price they are selling (or obtain even more contaminated water from other sources).
But the rising privatization of water shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The common rally cry is that water is an essential human right and thus should not be held in private hands — but are land and food not also essential human rights? It would be very difficult to live if you didn’t have something to live on or something to eat while you’re living there! So, while we cannot live without land and food, we pay for both. To capitalism and corporations, water is no different.
More specifically, what happens is a corporation moves into an area where water infrastructure is either lacking or entirely absent — this can happen both domestically and abroad — and entices the local government to sell or lease their water to the corporation in exchange for cash and promises of improvements to the system. In the 1990’s there was a resurgence of privatization of water systems in the U.S., but private ownership of water was nothing new. Private companies controlled much of the U.S. water supply in the 1800’s, but the same problems that arise when water is privatized today were issues then. Businesses were unwilling to invest the needed capital into water systems for booming cities, people were unable to access water, and as a result government stepped in and took control over water infrastructure. The problem now is the reverse: local governments lacks the capital to make the necessary upgrades and expansions to water works for a growing population. Corporations attempting to control water in the U.S. today include French-owned Suez (aka United Water) and Veolia. The largest company in the U.S. is American Water.
Food and Water Watch has an in-depth report on water privatization in the U.S. called Money Down the Drain, so I’ll just give you the highlights of what citizens can expect if their government sell the local water system, they include: rate hikes, water contaminants and service cutbacks. History has shown that privatization of water fails again and again in every important way, yet in the U.S. alone, lured by an ostensible fix massive budget short-falls, hundreds of cities have turned over control of their drinking and sewer water systems to corporations. Right now, my hometown of Milwaukee is reviewing bids from “ten firms seeking an advisory mandate on the monetization of the city’s drinking water system.” I’m not exactly sure what that means, so I called Food and Water Watch for their take on the situation. According to Jon Keesecker, a senior organizer for the Take Back the Tap campaign at Food and Water Watch, it’s one of the first concrete steps in selling the city’s water. The Comptroller will review the 16-17 applications that were turned in, interview the applicants and eventually hire an advisor to help the city move forward with privatization. In theory the financial advisor is impartial body which values the system and gives the city expertise to study proposals. In reality, the financial advisor greases the wheels to make privatization happen more quickly and they do so because their payment is often dependent on it. Milwaukee should know better, the city’s sewer system is already privately controlled, currently by Veolia. Because of so many problems, including dumping raw sewage into Lake Michigan seemingly every time it rained, the city ended its contract with Suez in 2007.
So, what can be done? A lot. People are fighting back against corporate control of municipal water systems all over the U.S. Last year in Felton, CA activists with the grassroots organization Felton Friends of Locally Owned Water successfully won back public control over the city’s water supply from California-American Water after a six-year battle. Folks in Emmaus, PA stopped a bid for privatization quickly after it began by taking out full-page ads in the local newspaper demanding a public hearing on the issue, getting 300 people to attend the hearing and over 50 to speak out against it. The group’s work changed the minds of three previously pro-privatization council members and the proposal subsequently died. In Milwaukee right now, water, public policy and union groups are already mobilizing to prevent the City Council from selling Milwaukee’s most valuable resource to the highest bidder.
After an 18month+ campaign by activists in the Northeast the proposal to build an Liquid Natural Gas terminal and artificial island 13 miles south of Long Beach has been shut down!
In April of 2009 The Sparrow Project partnered with Clean Ocean Action, The Surfrider Foundation, local environmentalists, politicians, and artists in an effort to [...]
After hosting the New York premiere of Bold Native, the first fiction film about the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Russell Simmons sits down to talk about veganism, spirituality and radical activism. On the nine billion animals bred, raised and killed for food annually in the U.S., Simmons says, “Aside from all the suffering we’re [...]
Calling all community-based graphic designers! Author Andrew Shea is looking for projects to feature in his upcoming book. Have you used a graphic design to help a community in need? Do you have insights into this process? If so, visit andrewshea.com/book.html and submit your work.
From the website: “This book will emphasize strategies to help designers [...]
Review By Danielle Thompson
When Open Road Film’s Denis Hennelly and Casey Suchan set out to make Bold Native they wanted to work in the spirit of revolutionary films like Easy Rider. They succeeded. Bold Native is a feature film on the subject of animal liberation but at its heart, much like Easy Rider, [...]
For those reading this via RSS or on facebook click here to view the full post w/ video.
The Uganda Skateboard Union in Kitintale Uganda has whittled itself out a little place in the hearts of us here at Sparrow. If you are able to, please consider buying one of these t-shirts we made [...]
Tweet This Post 
Digg This Post 
Facebook 
Reddit This Post
