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MERATA: HOW MUM DECOLONIZED THE SCREEN

Merata: How Mum Decolonized the Screen is a terrific biopic about Maori moviemaker Merata Mita, the first Pacific Islander woman to direct a feature film (1988’s Mauri, which means “Life Force” and Mita also wrote). This 95 minute documentary includes extensive interviews with Mita plus her relatives, colleagues and those she mentored such as Taika Waititi (What We Do in the Shadows). There are also clips from the nonfiction films she made and the fiction movies she acted in and helmed. In the process we learn much about this Polynesian woman and the worldview she expressed onscreen, which aimed at debunking South Seas Cinema’s celluloid stereotypes by “decolonizing” and “indigen-izing” motion pictures. As Merata told me when I interviewed her for the July 22, 1992 Honolulu Weekly:

Domestic violence victim Diona Clark gave testimony Wednesday at a sentencing hearing for her ex-boyfriend. Drying tears with a tissue, she said she would like her ex-boyfriend to serve prison time for having shot her twice. The first bullet entered under her left arm, the second bullet entered the left breast, went inches from her heart, after grazing her hand which required microsurgery, collapsed her lung, and chipped her rib.

But the Judge, Stephen McIntosh, extended the final sentencing for three weeks until Wednesday 29 May, so he can determine whether the defendant, Larry Belcher, can be housed in prison, since he shot himself in the head after shooting her, and remains in a wheelchair 14 years later with other associated medical conditions.

Clark told the court, “My desire is for him to serve prison time...I don’t think he is remorseful for what he has done to me. I would like him to be judged according to what he has done to me.”

Like you, I’ve had countless experiences of pointing out a new fact to someone, and seeing them acknowledge it and incorporate it into their thinking and their talking from that point forward. I’ve even had this experience with public petitions pushed on powerful people. But, I’ve also had a different experience. There are some facts that some people just will not accept, and for some of them I have a very hard time understanding why. Can you help me understand?

Ethics classes in U.S. philosophy departments are pathologically obsessed with imaginary scenarios, often involving trollies, that purport to demonstrate some people’s greater acceptance of causing death or suffering if they don’t have to physically, directly, immediately cause it. Some people would supposedly pull a switch so that a trolley killed one person rather than staying on another track and killing five people, but wouldn’t push one person onto a track to save five people.

I say “supposedly” because, luckily, nobody’s gotten the funding to actually try out an experiment (as far as we know, I can’t speak for DARPA).

The purpose of all this imaginary murdering is unclear for two major reasons. First, some professors will simply conclude that people are weak and ought to know better (which they could have told you to begin with), while other professors will tell you that whatever people imagine they would do simply is what they should do because their inner whatchamawhoochie is intuitively in touch with the great cosmic whatchamacoochie. So, what have we learned?

If “audacity in cinema” is the theme of this year’s South East European Film Festival, then the Serbian documentary Occupied Cinema is among the 14th annual SEEfest’s most audacious films. Following the circa 1990 collapse of a form of socialism in former Yugoslavia, along with civil wars a wave of privatization swept Serbia, et al. State-owned, nationalized property were sold off to private owners (often, according to the film, at pennies on the dollar), including a chain of movie theaters in Belgrade.

Two months ago, I heard a story. You heard it too, if you went anywhere near a television or a newspaper in the United States. The government of Venezuela needed to be overthrown because it wouldn’t allow in humanitarian aid.

Mix a little socialism in with the oil and war may be unavoidable.

Thus, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, talking about Venezuela: “The president has been crystal clear and incredibly consistent. Military action is possible. If that’s what’s required, that’s what the United States will do.”

World BEYOND War, May 6, 2019

I’ve been studying the Pentagon’s use of psychological tactics in the way it recruits youth into the armed forces for 20 years, so I have a sense of the lack of boundaries practiced by the US government through its military. Now I can report on the psychological tactics employed by the State Department through the Secret Service Police. I spent a week in the besieged Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, and I was exposed to a relentless psychological operations campaign (psy-ops) orchestrated by my government to drive peace activists like myself from the embassy.

Our attorney, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, addressed the severity of the threat to us in her May 3rd letter to the Secret Service Police, in which she wrote:

BANGKOK, Thailand -- The U.S. government's media and a Dalai
Lama-supported campaign to liberate Tibetan political prisoners have
published two portraits of what the Panchen Lama's face could now look
like on his 30th birthday and are demanding to know his fate after
China took him into custody when he was six years old.

"Despite China's sporadic claims that he was attending school and
leading a normal life, no one has seen or heard from the 11th Panchen
Lama Gedhun Choekyi Nyima since May 17, 1995, the day Beijing took him
away as a six-year-old boy and rendered him disappeared ever since,"
said the Tibetan Bulletin published by Tibet's India-based
government-in-exile which also represents the Dalai Lama.

Mr. Nyima was born in Chinese-controlled Tibet on April 25, 1989.

If alive, the now 30-year-old man would be the second-most prominent
religious figure in Tibetan Buddhism, a position endorsed by the top
religious leader, the Dalai Lama.

"The panchen lamas and the dalai lamas play a significant role in the

“Big Mining interests and assorted mining (and oil) industry investors around the world all knew about the strong pro-extractive, anti-regulatory business climate of the Trump administration, which prompted Iván Arriagada Herrerathe CEO of Antofagasta Minerals S.A. to comment that there is now ‘a more favourable climate for the development of the project’ (ie, the Twin Metal’s copper mining project in northern Minnesota - which seriously risks the environmental health of both the BWCAW and the Quetico Provincial Park in Canada).