In 2003 the reality of war set in, amd the roar of the mainstream media seemed to deafen ours ears and stifle our voices. Hudson Mohawk Independent Media center respond by coming together to make these three documentaries. Independent Media in a time of war, Voices Against War, Women's fast for peace.

“On december 19th 2008, the Free Gaza movement sailed from Cyprus to Palestine. Our objective was to break the Israeli siege over the Gaza Strip. We were the last and only foreigners to enter and stay in the territory. We got involved in something that nobody expected”.

The public presentation

The Purple Meridians is a joint project by three organisations in Spain, Italy and Turkey that brings together eighteen women filmmakers, six from each country, to debate the difficulties faced by women working in the filmmaking industry and wider screen sector. The aim is to share strategies for overcoming common obstacles and set up a support and exchange network for future partnerships crisscrossing Europe from east to west.

The project is made up of three workshops, an online roundtable, onsite screenings in Barcelona, Turin and Diyarbakır and an online programme featuring a selection of films by the participating filmmakers. The films, subtitled in English, will be made available on the streen.org platform, free of charge on the first day (to be decided on the basis of the onsite screenings) and then on a pay-per-view basis for three months.

Once the onsite and online workshops have been held in Barcelona, Turin and Diyarbakır,  each group will watch the videos of the workshops held by the other two groups and draw up a set of conclusions to share at the online international roundtable.

The filmmakers resident in Catalonia ( Anna Giralt Gris, Raquel Marques, Pilar Monsell , Ro Caminal, Lara Vilanova i Lili Marsans) will meet at the Centre Cívic Pati Llimona , where they will connect with Turin (as part of the Torino Film Festival) and Diyarbakır (Turkey).

OVNI, Mostra de Films de Dones i l’Alternativa will present a programme of films made up of two films by each of the eighteen participating filmmakers.

The remaining shorts will be screened on the same day on a continuous loop on a monitor at the Pati Llimona Civic Centre.

All the films will be available from 3 December in their original language with English subtitles on purplemeridians.org .

1- Spain Workshop (onsite)

     Monday 15 November , 4 pm to 8 pm

    Sala Raval, CCCB, Not open to the public

2- Spain Workshop (online)

    Monday 22 November , Not open to the public

3- International Roundtable (online)

    Saturday 27 November, 11 am to 12.30 pm

    Open to the public, The roundtable will be held in English

4- The Purple Meridians Screenings

    Thursday 2 December , 6.30 pm to 8.30 pm

    Centre Cívic Pati Llimona, Free admission

    Films in their original language with Catalan subtitles

The Purple Meridians is a joint project by three organisations in Spain, Italy and Turkey with the support of 2021 Eurimages Gender Equality Sponsorship.

http://purplemeridians.org/

http://purplemeridians.org/

A video about Mumia Abdul Jamal, an Afro-American journalist condemned to death for an incident that has never been cleared up.

Infiltration into the convention of a major American political party. The independent video maker enters the convention very discreetly and within a few minutes reaches the presidential stratum. 3 Mostra de Vídeo Independent de Barcelona 1996.

Documenting the steadfast movement against intellectual property, Part 1 of Steal This Film takes account of the prominent players in the Swedish piracy (copyright infringement) culture: The Pirate Bay, Piratbyrån (Piracy Bureau), and The Pirate Party. It includes a critical analysis of the legal action taken by the Hollywood film industry to leverage economic sanctions by the United States government on Sweden through the WTO, in order to pressure Swedish police into conducting an illegal search and seizure for the purpose of disrupting a competitive distribution channel: The Pirate Bay tracker for P2P Internet file sharing with the BitTorrent protocol.

This video consists of 13 episodes recorded by independent groups and individuals at the Genova antiglobalisation demonstrations. Images which never appeared on mainstream media because they didn't fit in with the entertainment and counter-information agenda of the media industry.

Practical information

           A presentation of Kurdish films by the Rojava Kurdistan Film Commune (Northern Syria)

OVNI has collaborated with the Rojava Film Commune in a project aimed at researching, screening, and promoting their work in Spain, Italy, and France. A process of investigation through videos, texts, and meetings, in order to listen to their voices and understand their struggle together. We have created a website that you can visit link.

Komîna fîlm a Rojava (Rojava Film Commune) is a collective of filmmakers founded in 2015, based in the autonomous Rojava region in the Federation of Northern and Eastern Syria. The Commune is actively working in the region to rebuild and reorganise filmmaking and film education infrastructures.

The Rojava Film Commune was established to promote local film culture by organising film screenings, facilitating discussions on the role of film within society, producing new films, and setting up a Film Academy. Following the 1960 fire in Rojava’s only cinema in the city of Amude—which saw the death of 298 children trapped inside—the Commune aims to reclaim film as a central space for reimagining society, by democratising and revolutionising the imagination itself.

The Commune has educated a new generation of Rojava filmmakers, organized screenings in cities and villages, and produced new films. It seeks to represent the values and ideals of the Rojava Revolution, but also to mediate and depict the daily struggles in the Syrian civil war and Rojava’s collective attempt to build a new society.

The Rojava Film Academy provides education for aspiring filmmakers in Northern Syria. Founded in 2015, it offers one-year programmes, with courses on international film history, Kurdish film history, film theory, photography, cinematography, script writing, editing, and sound design, taught by local and international film professionals.

The Academy is self-organized and non-hierarchical, encouraging students to participate in every aspect of its organization. Exchange networks have also been set up with other academic, media, and news platforms, and with civil society organizations, in order to engage in broad discussions and create screening possibilities. Considering the influx of foreign filmmakers and journalists to Rojava, it is important for the Commune to reclaim the representation and imagination of the revolution.

After decades of oppression of Kurdish language and culture, the Rojava Film Academy aims to revitalize local film culture, reclaiming the power to narrate and imagine one’s dreams and realities. After the Syrian Civil War started, the predominantly Kurdish northern region declared the Autonomy Administration, creating structures based on grassroots democracy, women’s liberation, and cultural diversity.

The Academy bases its methodology on ‘revolutionary realism’, i.e. a realism that does not merely reveal the current reality in a new way, but also restructures the reality of the possible . As well as finding forms to express things as-they-are, it creates the opportunity to imagine the not-yet-present, the ‘eternal becoming’ that is the revolution itself.

https://rewend.desorg.org/

https://rewend.desorg.org/