Tag: Trailer

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2 New Films: Occupy Love And Surviving Progress

Occupy Love: A Film That Captures The Global (R)evolution Of Compassion In Action

 

Occupy Love will be a moving, transformative feature documentary that asks the question: how are the economic and ecological crises we are facing today a great love story?

A profound shift is taking place all over the world. Humanity is waking up to the fact that the current system that dominates the planet is failing to provide us with health, happiness or meaning. The dominant paradigm is based on separation, as exemplified by the financial system, and the corporate emphasis of profits before people.”

This crisis has become the catalyst for a profound transformation: millions of people are deciding that enough is enough – the time has come to create a new world, a world that works for all life. We have experienced an extraordinary year of change, from the Arab Spring, to the European Summer, and now, erupting into North America: the Occupy Movement.

This is a revolution rooted in compassion, direct democracy, and shared power, as opposed to the ‘power over’ model of the corporate world view. The new story is one of Inter-dependence. Love is the movement.”

  • For more information, updates and videos such as the one below, visit occupylove.org

Surviving Progress

Humanity’s ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, A Short History Of Progress inspired Surviving Progress, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps” – alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world’s resources accelerates and financial elites bankrupt nations, can our globally-entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behavior, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter isn’t an evolutionary dead-end.”

source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1462014/plotsummary

Watch the 2 min. trailer for Surviving Progress:

Quotes from Some of the Speakers

Ronald Wright, Author of A Short History of Progress, the book which inspired this film
“If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.”

Jane Goodall, primatologist
“Arguably, we are the most intellectual creature that’s ever walked on planet Earth. So how come, then, that this so intellectual being is destroying its only home ?”

Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist
“We are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. But I’m an optimist.”

Simon Johnson, former chief economist International Monetary Fund
The bankers can’t stop themselves. It’s in their DNA, in the DNA of their organizations, to take massive risks, to pay themselves ridiculous salaries and to collapse…”

Marina Silva, senator & former Minister of the Environment, Brazil
It is impossible to defend models that cannot be universally applied because we would have to start from a premise that some people have rights and some don’t. Thus there is no technological problem, but an ethical one.”

David Suzuki, geneticist / activist
Money doesn’t stand for anything and money now grows faster than the real world. Conventional economics is a form of brain damage.”

Surviving Progress official site: survivingprogress.com

Surviving Progress Facebook page: facebook.com/survivingprogress

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Inside Job [Film]

Inside Job presents how a chain of actions and decisions underpinned by increasing self-interest in the U.S. financial sector over the past 50 years has brought the U.S. to its current worsening socio-economic state.

Maximized Self-Interest – The Financial Crisis Time-Bomb Ticker

The key point that Inside Job presents is how the “securitization food chain” developed – borrowers, lenders, investment banks, investors, ratings agencies – governed by the commonly held value of maximized self-interest at every rung of the chain. It shows how precisely this chain was the ticking financial crisis time-bomb that exploded in September 2008, the effects of which are felt worldwide until today.

Here’s how maximized self-interest worked at every level of this chain:

  • Borrowers wanted loans for buying homes or other high-cost assets (and since it was in the financial interest of people in the higher parts of the chain for as many people as possible to get loans, then loans were highly promoted during the first years of the 2000s)
  • Lenders wanted the extra money they could make from any loans they provided, no matter how risky, since they sold all the loans to investments banks
  • Investment banks wanted the extra money they could derive by collating all the loans they bought into complex derivatives called CDOs (Collateralized Debt Obligations), and selling those CDOs to investors
  • Investors wanted the extra money they would get from the borrowers paying back the loans (the CDOs)
  • Ratings agencies, which were hired by investment banks to evaluate the CDOs, wanted the extra money they would get from giving high ratings to the CDOs (since people in the ratings agencies would get paid more for giving CDOs high ratings, regardless of the actual value of the CDO)

This setup presents how the financial crisis of 2008 hit, showing one bankruptcy after another of major firms as the securitization food chain imploded:

  • Lenders could no longer sell their loans to the investment banks
  • As loans went bad, dozens of lenders failed
  • The CDO market collapsed
  • Investment banks held onto billions of dollars in loans, CDOs and real estate that they could not sell

Who Is Accountable For The Financial Crisis? A Few People Or Commonly-Held Values That Frame Society?

As the film follows the effects of the 2008 economic meltdown, it searches for a voice to be held accountable among the major players of the financial sector, finding none. No person or group of people could be found responsible, but speaker after speaker, what becomes clarified is that everyone in this chain was simply subjected to the commonly held value of “maximize your profit at any expense.”

As long as everyone in the chain was getting what they wanted, everything seemed fine. However, when the system imploded, resulting in bankers having to lose those profits, and millions of people losing their homes and jobs, it shows how the commonly held value at every layer – “maximize your profit” – is in dire need of a revision.

Watch Inside Job Trailer

Buy Inside Job full version on DVD

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Blind Spot [Film]

Blind Spot

Blind Spot

Blind Spot analyzes the problem of peak oil, that:

  • Oil and fossil fuel energy is finite, and coming to its end in the near future
  • Human population is constantly increasing
  • Society is not preparing for the end of oil and fossil fuels, but instead self-interest values, which encourage the direct and indirect use of fossil fuels, continue being perpetuated in the media.

The Problem Of Peak Oil – That It Connects In A Complex Web Of Other Problems

Blind Spot presents the complications in dealing with the problem of peak oil, by showing how it connects to many other current and future problems: inflation, stagflation, pollution, climate change, global warming, overconsumption and overpopulation.

Through interviews with scientists and experts in ecology, economy and sociology, Blind Spot proposes some approaches to these problems, including population control, policies for using less energy and implementing different kinds of energy.

Peak Oil’s Central Problem – Challenging The Strong Influence Of Self-Interest Values Upon Society

However, central to the problems that the film’s experts’ mentioned is the issue of social influence. There is an in-built threat in challenging generations of self-interest values at the center of society’s beliefs and assumptions, or “The American Way,” as people in Americanized societies are used to relying on cheap oil and energy, living in big houses, being highly individualized, and traveling long distances.

The cultural constraint on change becomes very dangerous, because when it is challenged, it is challenging generations of belief and assumptions. … There are people who have to study raw data, who are trained as scientists to have their belief system based upon evidence, and when that contradicts generations of belief, then they become cultural outcasts. That became incredibly frustrating to me. I have kids, I want peace on earth, I want all good things, and yet, I found that people that also want those things unable to realize that we’re all a huge part of this problem.”

–Jason Bradford, PhD, ecological scientist and expert in sustainability and local food systems

Watch Blind Spot Trailer

For more info about the movie & to purchase a DVD copy, visit: blindspotdoc.com