Actifilms Saigon - Arroyos..

Palestine, Mai 07

saigontoine — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:07:00 +0700

Palestine, Gaza, Nusseirat camp, Mai 25th 2007

Mahmud Hams - AFP (c), Bayeux-Calvados Prize for the best War photographer 07.

Che 1967-2007

saigontoine — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:34:00 +0700

1967-2007, 49th birthday of Guevara's murder

__Revolutionary icon: World marks 40th anniversary of Che Guevara’s death By Alvaro Zuazo, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Friday, October 5, 2007__

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia - Fidel Castro insists Ernesto (Che) Guevara could never have been taken prisoner 40 years ago if his gun hadn’t malfunctioned. But the retired Bolivian general who led the mission to capture him says the Argentine revolutionary was hardly a heroic figure in his final moments.

The man that Gen. Gary Prado remembers - sad, sick, hungry, dressed in rags and alone in the jungle - simply dropped his gun and surrendered, saying, "Don’t shoot, I’m Che."

"He wasn’t the figure of the heroic guerrilla," Prado recalled in an interview with The Associated Press Thursday night.

Decades after he gave up a comfortable middle class life in Argentina to foment armed rebellion, Guevara still inspires and infuriates people around the world.

He is an icon for fans who have made his death scene a tourist trap. His face is instantly recognizable, a one-dimensional image on posters and T-shirts that either celebrate or mock his revolutionary ideals.

Prado is bitter that Guevara still gets so much global attention four decades later. He’s angry that Bolivia’s leftist President Evo Morales plans to honour Guevara but not the 55 soldiers who died putting down his attempted revolution in Bolivia.

Che "wasn’t someone to inspire terror or anything, but simply to be pitied," he said.

Castro has put a noble spin on the death of his fellow revolutionary and close friend, calling Guevara "not a man who could have been taken prisoner" with a working gun.

"Wounded and without a weapon they were able to hold him and take him to a small town nearby, La Higuera," Castro told Spanish writer Ignacio Ramonet for the book "100 Hours with Fidel."

"The following day, October 9, 1967, at noon, they executed him in cold blood," Castro said.

Prado said the order to kill Guevara, then 39, came not from the CIA operatives who joined his soldiers, but from Bolivia’s president, who wanted to avoid a trial that would give Guevara a global platform to spread his views. Prado said he wasn’t present when Guevara was shot.

"Why did they think that by killing him, he would cease to exist as a fighter?" Castro asked in 1997, when Guevara’s remains were finally laid to rest in Cuba amid thundering cannons. "Today he is in every place, wherever there is a just cause to defend."

Those who knew him personally remember a complex character: sardonic and demanding of himself as well as others.

"He always did what he said he was going to do," said Alberto Granados, who travelled with Che across South America on a broken-down motorcycle in 1952, a trip portrayed in the hit 2004 movie "The Motorcycle Diaries."

"That’s why he is still timely," added Granados, who is now in his 80s and lives in Havana.

Guevara’s Cuban enemies, now living in exile, remember a man who did not flinch after Castro and his rebels came to power. It was Guevara who oversaw the military tribunals and subsequent firing squad executions of hundreds of people: military, police and other officials of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Cuba will honour him Monday with a ceremony at the tomb where his remains are kept, beneath a gigantic bronze statue built in his image in Santa Clara, where Guevara oversaw a decisive victory for the Cuban rebels. Cuba also planned a gathering of 1,500 people playing chess, Guevara’s favourite game.

In Bolivia, Che fans were gathering in the jungle where he was captured and in La Higuera, where he was killed. A new Che statue is being built in his native Argentina, Venezuela is holding an art and music festival in his honour, and students were painting huge Che portraits in Mexico City’s subway.

Guevara’s image is ubiquitous in Cuba, where a giant stylized rendering of his face oversees Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution. Cuban schoolchildren start their daily classes by pledging: "Pioneers for communism. We will be like Che!"

Those who knew him personally would consider that difficult. They recall him being a taskmaster insistent on austerity.

"He was demanding of everyone and practised being a personal example," wrote Tirso Saenz, an adviser when Guevara served as Cuba’s Industry Minister. Once, Guevara and other ministry officials were served fat, juicy steaks during a severe food shortage. Steaks are a treasured meal for Argentines, but Guevara became incensed and ordered it all removed.

"What is this?" Saenz quoted Guevara as saying in his biography. "No one is touching this meat. Take it away."

Leftists still cherish the image of the dogmatic Marxist wearing a beret, a determined gaze and an unkempt beard. But anti-communists hate what he stood for.

One such man is Cuban exile and former CIA operative Gustavo Villoldo, now living in Florida, who hopes to profit from a lock of hair snipped from the slain rebel’s head in Bolivia. Now 71, Villoldo said he kept the hair and other items in a scrapbook since participating in that mission. Heritage Auction Galleries of Dallas is auctioning them off on Oct. 25-26.

The auction has generated much discussion among Cuban exiles. Some fear a Che fan will buy them and put them on reverent display.

Prado said that after Guevara surrendered in the jungle to his squad of 70 Bolivian soldiers, he asked what they planned to do with him, and that they initially told him he would be put on trial.

"I’m worth more to you alive than dead," Prado remembers him responding.

Guevara was shot the next day. He would have been 79 this year.

Associated Press Writer Anita Snow in Havana contributed to this report.

La jetee, cine-roman by Chris Marker

saigontoine — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 11:56:00 +0700

Nothing sorts memories from ordinary moments. They claim remembrance when they show their scars.

Chris Marker. La Jetée.

Directed by Chris Marker

Produced by Anatole Dauman

Written by Chris Marker

Starring Jean Negroni, Etienne Becker, Davos Hanich, Jacques Ledoux, Helene Chatelain

Music by Trevor Duncan

Cinematography Chris Marker

Editing by Jean Ravel

Release date(s) 1962

Running time 28 min

Country France

Language French, German

"This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood. The violent scene that upset him, and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later, happened on the main jetty at Orly, the Paris airport, sometime before the outbreak of World War III. Orly, Sunday. Parents used to take their children there to watch the departing planes. On this particular Sunday, the child whose story we are telling was bound to remember the frozen sun, the setting at the end of the jetty, and a woman's face. Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. Later on they do claim remembrance when they show their scars. That face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. Had he really seen it? Or had he invented that tender moment to prop up the madness to come? The sudden roar, the woman's gesture, the crumpling body, and the cries of the crowd on the jetty blurred by fear. Later, he knew he had seen a man die. And sometime after came the destruction of Paris. Many died. Some believed themselves to be victors. Others were taken prisoner. The survivors settled beneath Chaillot, in an underground network of galleries. Above ground, Paris, as most of the world, was uninhabitable, riddled with radioactivity. The victors stood guard over an empire of rats. The prisoners were subjected to experiments, apparently of great concern to those who conducted them. The outcome was a disappointment for some - death for others - and for others yet, madness. One day they came to select a new guinea pig from among the prisoners. He was the man whose story we are telling. He was frightened. He had heard about the Head Experimenter. He was prepared to meet Dr. Frankenstein, or the Mad Scientist. Instead, he met a reasonable man who explained calmly that the human race was doomed. Space was off-limits. The only hope for survival lay in Time. A loophole in Time, and then maybe it would be possible to reach food, medicine, sources of energy. This was the aim of the experiments: to send emissaries into Time, to summon the Past and Future to the aid of the Present. But the human mind balked at the idea. To wake up in another age meant to be born again as an adult. The shock would be too great. Having only sent lifeless or insentient bodies through different zones of Time, the inventors where now concentrating on men given to very strong mental images. If they were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps they would be able to live in it. The camp police spied even on dreams. This man was selected from among a thousand for his obsession with an image from the past. Nothing else, at first, put stripping out the present, and its racks. They begin again. The man doesn't die, nor does he go mad. He suffers. They continue. On the tenth day, images begin to ooze, like confessions. A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves. On the sixteenth day he is on the jetty at Orly. Empty. Sometimes he recaptures a day of happiness, though different. A face of happiness, though different. Ruins. A girl who could be the one he seeks. He passes her on the jetty. She smiles at him from an automobile. Other images appear, merge, in that museum, which is perhaps that of his memory. On the thirtieth day, the meeting takes place. Now he is sure he recognizes her. In fact, it is the only thing he is sure of, in the middle of this dateless world that at first stuns him with its affluence. Around him, only fabulous materials: glass, plastic, terry cloth. When he recovers from his trance, the woman has gone. The experimenters tighten their control. They send him back out on the trail. Time rolls back again, the moment returns. This time he is close to her, he speaks to her. She welcomes him without surprise. They are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. Their only landmarks are the flavor of the moment they are living and the markings on the walls. Later on, they are in a garden. He remembers there were gardens. She asks him about his necklace, the combat necklace he wore at the start of the war that is yet to come. He invents an explanation. They walk. They look at the trunk of a redwood tree covered with historical dates. She pronounces an English name he doesn't understand. As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say, "This is where I come from ..." - and falls back, exhausted. Then another wave of Time washes over him. The result of another injection perhaps. Now she is asleep in the sun. He knows that in this world to which he has just returned for a while, only to be sent back to her, she is dead. She wakes up. He speaks again. Of a truth too fantastic to be believed he retains the essential: an unreachable country, a long way to go. She listens. She doesn't laugh. Is it the same day? He doesn't know. They shall go on like this, on countless walks in which an unspoken trust, an unadulterated trust will grow between them, without memories or plans. Up to the moment where he feels - ahead of them - a barrier. And this was the end of the first experiment. It was the starting point for a whole series of tests, in which he would meet her at different times. Sometimes he finds her in front of their markings. She welcomes him in a simple way. She calls him her Ghost. One day she seems frightened. One day she leans toward him. As for him, he never knows whether he moves toward her, whether he is driven, whether he has made it up, or whether he is only dreaming. Around the fiftieth day, they meet in a museum filled with timeless animals. Now the aim is perfectly adjusted. Thrown at the right moment, he may stay there and move without effort. She too seems tamed. She accepts as a natural phenomenon the ways of this visitor who comes and goes, who exists, talks, laughs with her, stops talking, listens to her, then disappears. Once back in the experiment room, he knew something was different. The camp leader was there. From the conversation around him, he gathered that after the brilliant results of the tests in the Past, they now meant to ship him into the Future. His excitement made him forget for a moment that the meeting at the museum had been the last. The Future was better protected than the Past. After more, painful tries, he eventually caught some waves of the world to come. He went through a brand new planet, Paris rebuilt, ten thousand incomprehensible avenues. Others were waiting for him. It was a brief encounter. Obviously, they rejected these scoriae of another time. He recited his lesson: because humanity had survived, it could not refuse to its own past the means of its survival. This sophism was taken for Fate in disguise. They gave him a power unit strong enough to put all human industry back into motion, and again the gates of the Future were closed. Sometime after his return, he was transferred to another part of the camp. He knew that his jailers would not spare him. He had been a tool in their hands, his childhood image had been used as bait to condition him, he had lived up to their expectations, he had played his part. Now he only waited to be liquidated with, somewhere inside him, the memory of a twice-lived fragment of time. And deep in this limbo, he received a message from the people of the world to come. They too traveled through Time, and more easily. Now they were there, ready to accept him as one of their own. But he had a different request: rather than this pacified future, he wanted to be returned to the world of his childhood, and to this woman who was perhaps waiting for him. Once again the main jetty at Orly, in the middle of this warm pre-war Sunday afternoon where he could not stay, he though in a confused way that the child he had been was due to be there too, watching the planes. But first of all he looked for the woman's face, at the end of the jetty. He ran toward her. And when he recognized the man who had trailed him since the underground camp, he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death."

The Obscure

saigontoine — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:43:00 +0700

An MK 47 production, in association with Cinerent, Atelier Lu. (International sales: MK 47, Beijing.) Produced by Liu Yiwei. Directed by Lu Yue. Screenplay, Lu, Liu Yiwei.

With: Wang Zhiwen, Wang Tong, A Cheng, Lin Bai, Xu Xing, Chen Cun, Xu Lan, Zhao Mei, Fang Fang, Ding Tian, Wang Shuo, Ma Yuan, Mian Mian.

"The Obscure" is certainly that. Blending of documentary and fiction, centered on a writers' colloquium in southwest China, this will be tough sledding for non-Sinophiles, but it does leave lingering emotional traces. Reminiscent in its fictional bits of d.p.-turned-helmer Lu Yue's first feature, "Mr. Zhao" (1998), this is fest fare that could travel to specialty channels and Sinophile gatherings. Setting is a 1999 gathering of some of China's best-known scribes to gab about Poetry -- which they do for 30 minutes before the fictional story even starts. It's fascinating stuff if you know the writers and are interested in the subject; most auds will start to tune in when the colloquium organizer, Chen Xiao (Wang Tong), recognizes an old flame, Zhao Zixuan (Wang Zhiwen), who's in the same hotel on business. Between more academic gabbing, the film crosscuts to their tentative get-together, reminiscences and regrets: a slowly involving story, beautifully played by the two thesps, that does deliver emotionally. A cheeky ending half-succeeds in trying to unite the pic's two sides. HD package is OK, though colors look gray and washed out on the bigscreen. Chinese title simply means "A Story."

More than one option __(Co) Lu Yue (Person) Lu Yue (Person) Lu Yue More than one option (Co) Fang Fang (Person) Feng Fang (Person) Fang Fang Camera (color, HD), Wang Tianlin; editor, Zhai Rui; art directors, Wang Dongfang, Cui Fuqiang; costume designer, An Bin. Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (Horizons, competing), Sept. 7, 2007. Original title: Xiaoshuo. Mandarin dialogue. Running time: 90 MIN.__

Motown spirit (2)

saigontoine — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 11:18:00 +0700

James Brown / Public Enemy #1, Part 1

I Ain't Got No Quarrel With The VietCong..

saigontoine — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:40:00 +0700

"I Ain't Got No Quarrel With The VietCong...
No VietCong Ever Called Me Nigger"
Muhammad Ali, 1966

No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people the world over. This is the day and age when such evil injustice must come to an end.
Muhammad Ali

Motown spirit (3)
James Brown / Public Enemy #1

Resistance to the Vietnam and protest took many forms : demonstrations all over the world since the famous Jane Fonda's call from Radio Hanoi, for peace..
Muhammad Ali, 'the greatest', on August 23, 1966, embarked on his biggest "fight" when he applied with the Selective Service for conscientious objector status.
He used his voice against the Vietnam War, willing to speak out against racism in the US and this famous talk about the living conditions of the Third World.

Thanks to AAVW for the resources.

In another part of the 'black movement', the Black Panther Party also fought against this illegal war, by preeches and denunciations like these following posters edited in the early 70's.

Motown spirit (1)

saigontoine — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 10:18:00 +0700

The Four Tops / A simple game

Cine'Manna, June-July 07,

saigontoine — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:29:00 +0700

A weekly rendez-vous for all movie-goers, every sunday night in Manna Lounge, Hcm-City, Vietnam..

The Cine-Eye, concept invented, drawned and filmed by the famous soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov has been taken as a symbol for the Cine’Club in Hcmc. The Cine-eye is used as a logo for the Cine'Club because all these movies, fictions, documentaries or experimentals films question the world where we live ; past, present and future ; the work, the dream, human's relations, love, desire, friendship and missed connections...

HISTORY

''Born in June 06, Cine’Berlin began in Berlin Club with 3 screenings on Sunday nights, with the help of Christian, the manager, and Pier Laurenza. After the departure of Christian, we had to stop the screening there and find another place. One year later, the screenings, called Cine’Manna, started again in « quality» conditions at Manna Lounge with the help of Florent Moncan, the manager. Every Sunday night, 7 movies were screened in original version, with english subltitles, preceded by a short film, attracting an increasing public of expats and locals (from 20 to 60 people on the last screening). Infortunately, regarding to the new orders of the direction who wants to change the lounge into a vietnamese disco, the Cine’Club was one more time in exile…''

PROJECT

''Knowing the cinema offer in Hcmc and in Vietnam, the Cine’Club is born in 2006, following the demand by a few group of expats and locals, all movie-goers who were not satisfied of the commercial distributors offer (Megastar, Galaxy, Phuoc Sang…). Knowing that in Hcmc, locals and foreigners don't have access to so many movies, this cine-club aims to attract a large public on sunday rest time and especially the young generation (locals, vietkieu or foreigners) such as young filmmakers and cinema students... Knowing that the vietnamese and vk cinema is growing month after month, that there are more and more young filmmakers, this weekly event in a lovely and confortable place wishes to be a new rendez-vous to discover cinema classics and independant movies from all over the world, most of them having been awarded in prestigious festivals, and meet passionate people.''

Cine'Manna posters, June-July 07

Hopefully, Cine-Eye will come back in October 07 in Cantina Central Saigon !

Saigon monsoon

saigontoine — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 07:59:00 +0700

Saigon Bridge, summer 06,