Celluloid politics

Cinema Politica celebrates five years of free,
weekly and controversial screenings

TAKING A STAND AT THE MOVIES:
Svetla Turnin and Ezra Winton

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

There are worse ways to spend your summer vacation than plopped on the couch watching hundreds of movies. But too much of a good thing can make even the most dedicated film enthusiast weary.

Take Ezra Winton, for instance. He says he watched “somewhere around 180 films over the summer.” As founder, director and curator of Cinema Politica, a free weekly documentary screening series at Concordia, it’s his job to pick a selection of the most provocative, interesting and timely films out there. He has been running the series with his wife Svetla Turnin for five years this fall, and 30 offshoots—called “locals”—have popped up across the country. Another five locals are screening films in France, Romania, Germany, Bulgaria and Brazil.

Winton calls the Cinema Politica experience “a media intervention in the world of cinema,” he says over a beer at a bar in the Plateau. The films tend to be left-wing-ish, but, “It’s not a dogmatic approach,’ he says. “We show films that take stand, or show characters that take a stand.” Filmmakers, characters or activists in related fields usually speak after the film is shown.

Tensions on and off screen

Cinema Politica films tend to attract a lot of first-year students, says Winton, and sometimes entire classes. And while he doesn’t necessarily attribute a screening of a film to a young greenhorn’s political awakening, he does think there might be “causal links” between seeing a thought-provoking movie and one’s decision to explore an issue further.

Winton and Turnin both have long had politics on the brain. Winton arrived at Concordia from Vancouver’s Langara College in 2002 after hearing about the Netanyahu riots (“I wanted to be at a school where there was a politically charged climate”) and Turnin transferred to Montreal from Madrid the same year to pursue her communications studies. After attended fledgling Cinema Politica screenings at Langara, he wanted to continue the experience in Montreal. He got the politically charged atmosphere he sought, and all the attendant difficulties that come with it.

Besides dealing with the usual university bureaucracy of filling out request forms, finding a venue, funding and the like, he also had to deal with simmering post-riot tensions on campus. “We were constantly harassed by the administration whenever we were showing films about the Middle East,” he says. “There were security teams at screenings and there were threats to shut us down.”

“Security had to approve the dates and wanted us to send them lists of films we were showing so they could do research to determine whether it would be a high-risk event,” says Turnin. “Sometimes they would require guards at screening, which just served to make people nervous. And they charged us $100 per guard.”

Last October, prior to a screening of Occupation 101, the university presented organizers with a $400 security bill. Winton threatened to go to the media with the claims (the Mirror ran an article at the time), and the bill was withdrawn. The university blamed “miscommunication” for the fuss.

Corporations, murder and chickens

Regardless of security issues, turnout has been consistently good, they say. The 700-seat H110 Cinema, in Concordia’s Hall Building, is regularly filled to capacity, sometimes overflowing. Of course, some screenings go better than others. The Middle East is always a hot topic, but he says queer-themed films get sparser turnouts.

Winton and Turnin cite the best experience being the 2003 screening of a three-hour rough cut of The Corporation, by Canadian filmmakers Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott, which generated a two-hour discussion afterwards and influenced the film’s final version. The worst was the 2004 screening of What I Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy: The War Against the Third World, by American Frank Dorrell. A bizarre incident involving the exhumation of a mass grave in Latin America, a DVD Winton’s roommate had spilled sauce on, a “cheap-ass Wal-Mart DVD player” and its dancing-chicken default mode served “as not just a testament to a grievous injustice but as a numbing reminder of the ultimate and total lameness of DVD as a format for cinema,” Winton writes in a follow-up e-mail. “It’s funny now, but as the faces of the shell-shocked, confused and dismayed audience streamed past me after I had announced the screening prematurely over, no one was laughing.”

CINEMA POLITICA BEGINS ITS SEASON
THIS MONDAY, SEPT. 15. SEE WWW.
CINEMAPOLITICA.ORG FOR SHOW
INFO. ALL SCREENINGS FREE.