trailer trash

Plugging the gap between awareness and development in "Christmas in Darfur"

The Darfur region in Sudan, has a long and complex past, several call to action’s from Amnesty and some Jolie / Clooney documentary aid campaigns later  - it seems little has changed, the atrocities continue, and the war worsens.

I caught the major low-budget documentary Christmas in Darfur the other day, which follows the trials of amateur filmmakers  Jim Milak (an IT guy), Jason Mojica (a waiter), and Ryan Faith (a policy worker) as they attempt to document aid workers’ experiences during the Christmas holidays  in the war-torn western African desert. The gap between the global attention on the area and the amount of help being actually received is central to the film’s theme.

With zero experience in filmmaking, and no connections or experience of the African sub-continent, the filmmakers adopt a guileless approach that takes us deep into the refugee camps of Chad and Sudan and eventually to a dialogue with rebel fighters.

Watch the documentary online here, where you can also donate to the filmmakers who are still trying to recoup the costs of making this self-funded project.

It’s nearly Christmas… which can only mean good news for Dan Brown, who’ll surely add a few more million to his bank account with his latest dose of conspiracy fiction -The Lost Symbol. Five years on from his best-selling The Da Vinci Code and couple of  hate campaigns from the Opus Dei later, things are certainly going well for Mr. Brown.

Brown’s book (now a “major motion picture”) exploded with phenomenal and controversial success on its publication. Eventually  translated into over 4o languages, the novel sold over 5.5million copies  hardback alone. His “alternative Christmas story” - a fictional account of a vast conspiracy by the Catholic church to cover up the secret knowledge  that Jesus escaped the cross, married Mary Magdalene, and had children with her - rather ironically ended up becoming a main fixture underneath Christmas trees worldwide.

'Cracking the Da Vinci Code'...the real Christmas Story?

joiningthedocs.tv title Cracking the Da Vinci Code by host and author Simon Cox takes you on an in-depth journey through the heart of the mysteries behind Brown’s best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. Moreover, it attempts to look beyond theories set out by Brown, some ideas that have only ever been discussed on the web. Cracking the Da Vinci Code is a comprehensive documentary that cuts right through the confusion, and reveals the remarkable truth behind the legend of the Holy Grail. The film includes new revelations by a series of experts, which ultimately, confide that Brown did not access all of their research and explain previously untold secrets. See More Here.

This week Uberto Pasolini will release his new title Machan. The Full Monty producer’s newest film is a fictionalised account of a true story, portraying street life in the slums of Sri Lanka’s Colombo.

So far the film has had an unprecedented response and dubbed one of the most important titles dealing with immigration in recent years. Machan follows a group of men, most of them are unemployed,  all of  desperate to escape their country’s economic and social reality. In a bid to escape, this these men form a phoney national handball team that miraculously manages to blag its way into a tournament played out in Germany. As expected, the team experiences little success in the competition and, after losing all of their matches, vanish into obscurity. What transpires is not only an amusing scam but one of the largest illegal immigration hoaxes of all time.

Urban sprawl in "Waiting for Europe"

Immigration has always been multi-faceted issue, though it has become an increasingly complex one. The need to understand large-scale immigration has been expressed with both fictional and non-fictional filmmaking. Recent years have seen accounts such as the fictional Import/Export by Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl that follows the travels of two people crossing borders, struggling to survive, both finding life abroad better than back home in their Ukrainian town. One my favourite non-fictional accounts dealing with the emigration process was director Michael Winterbottom’s docudrama In This World; that chronicled the life-threatening journey of Afghan immigrants to London.

joiningthedocs.tv title Waiting for Europe takes the mass issue of immigration and depicts it from a female point of view. The film follows Vania, a Bulgarian ex – beauty queen who emigrates from her home country to Portugal and then to Spain.This film touches on experiences of isolation and illegality caught up with life’s major decisions: career, love and children. Waiting for Europe displays a totally unique view point of immigration – a women trying to find her identity amidst a changing Europe watch it here.