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EDITOR'S NOTES SPRING-SUMMER 2007
_____________Feature Obituary___________
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INGMAR
BERGMAN |
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)))))))))))))____________Prison Parole Feature_______________
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MOVE
9 Imprisoned for LIFE because of the killing of a police officer in 1985, 9 members of MOVE are due for parole (after 30 years in 2008). Will the get it? |
____________Death Row Feature______________
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Mumia
Abu Jamal
and
Justice Denied fiba took a rough cut of the documentary Justice Denied, directed by Thomas Filmyer, to the Fes- tival of New Latin American Cinema in 1998 (Cuba). It fea- |
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tures an extensive and illuminating interview with Mumia
Abu Jamal, live from Death Row (Philadelphia).
Mumia, now in his late 30's was convicted
of murdering a police officer. At 15, Mumia
was a jour- nalist and main writer for the Black
Panthers. The film also has an interview with author Richard
Weight's daughter. TV interviews on
death row were not permitted by USA crews
at the time but this visit was organied from abroad and managed to slip
through the net, Subsequently, TV and film
crews were banned completely. Our film of Alice Walker, in 1998 at Lewisham Theatre (London) also available in this issue, began as an attempt to obtain her testament of support for Mumia in the final edit of Justice Denied. fiba wel- come any not-for-profit screening and distiribution of this important documentary project. Justice Denied was produced by George Solomos (fiba publisher) and directed by Thomas Filmyer (fiba USA West Coast correspondent) and interview of Mumia on Death Row was by Allen Houghland (fiba German correspondent). |
__________________Poetry Feature______________
| Guantanamo
Bay detainment
camp horror US involvement in extra-judicial imprisonment, abuse and tor- ture in violation of international law symbolically takes place on |
 |
 |
the doorstep of revolutionaryfCuba.The outrage that is Guantanamo Bay detainment camp has been normalized by the prevailing anti-Muslim propaganda and its progeny, ignorance. This condition conceals a war of imperial intent propped up by a political and moral strategy of mediaeval barbarity. A glimpse of humanity in the form of |
| poems
that were written by the Guantanamo inmates
is now available to the 'civilized' English
speaking world; lest we forget those forgotten prisoners still incarcerated
without due trial or process by the United States
advocate of 'freedom
and democracy'. |
____________Music Feature_____________
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John
Taverner: Where
the rivers meet.
From the work of Jazz musician, Don Cherry to the films of Serg- ei Paradjanov, the ability of artists to transcend mere plag- iarism and create a work in the spirit and with a deep appreci- ation of another culture is a crowning achievement. At a time when hysteria and prop- agenda obscures interfaith and cultural understanding, |
 |
| Taverner's recent composition, a musical of the 99 names of God, received the highest acclaim when performed in Turkey. His achievement is to begin to challenge ignorance and create a stage for shared experience. British Christian fundamentalists of the Roman Catholic kind have demonstrated the extent of their own prejudice in condemning the performance on June 19 by the BBC symphony orchestra at Westminster Cathedral. |
_____________Revival
Feature_______________
| The 70's Italian 'mondo‚ documentary, Addio zio Tom or its English title, Goodbye Uncle Tom was brought to the attention of fiba by a group of film enthusiasts including film directors and producers, photographers, Pan-Africans - all with a keen interest in promoting the history and cultural legacy of Africa and its peoples. For them, Goodbye Uncle Tom comes close to conveying some of the horror and the legacy of American style slavery. |
 |
| Shot in Haiti, the birthplace of the liberation movement that would end the slave trade and sound the toll for the death of slavery, its nar- rative begins in the 19th Century America with the horror of a South- ern states plantation. By the end of the film we are transported to the 70's present day and the denouement of American slavery in 1970's USA (and a scenario reminiscent of Richard Wright'‚s Native Son). |
 |
| Shrouded in scandal on its release, Goodbye Uncle Tom has only ever been marketed as a 'shock doc' style movie and loathed or ignored by the film establishment. On its release, directors Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi were scandalized in the media and with legal action in Italy threatening the future of the film. Its little wonder that it has never moved from the status of fringe cult movie. We urge fiba readers and enthusiasts of film culture to find out themselves.nd out themselves. |
_____________________Double Feature______________
| Exploring the reality behind the spin, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson in their new book, FANTASY ISLAND; WAKING UP TO THE IN- CREDIBLE ECONOMIC, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL ILLUSIONS OF THE BLAIR LEGACY, explode the myths about Britain's success in the creative and intellectual industries. Instead they show its only |
 |
achievement lies in mastery of the dark arts ofpersuasion, aka spin, practiced for political and commercial gain. But what happens when the skills required for selling perfume and pot noodles now enshroud government policy? (click left) |
| Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson claim 'the essence of success- ful bullshit is that the really top- notch exponents of spin not only manage to convince others but also manage to delude them- selves'. In the current Tricycle theatre production, Called to Account, written and directed by |  |
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Richard Norton-Taylor and Nicholas
Kent, one wonders to what extent Tony Blair
will be victim of his brand of bullshit. Posing the question as to whether he should be indicted for the crime of aggression against Iraq, for about two hours the audience of the Tricycle are treated to the restrained courtroom deliberation (based on Norton-Taylor and Kent's own inquiry), in which key figures illuminate the background, thinking and processes behind the decision to go to war. Rather than offering an answer to this question, the testimony itself demands an official inquiry, if only for the future moral and political health of this country. Withheld from the subtle play of court room evasions, misunderstanding or perhaps deliberate deceit is that oil and territorial power are now an essential part of the equation. The stakes are high and the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents have already been lost with further destruction and world stability now at stake. A chilling and ominous career development for a country that places its faith and its future in the subtle arts of persuasion. (click top right) |
_____________________Feature Exclusive_____________________
Euzhan Palcy, the path to Hollywood
and her roots in the Negritude movement
 |
| Acclaimed Hollywood director, Euzhan Palcy (right) appeared in discussion at the National Maritime Museum as part of the slavery abolition bi-centenary programme. She told her audience that her guru is Aimé Césaire, the Martinique intellectual. She also revealed that her film career was given a kick start by another islander, novelist, Josef Zobel who decided to give the aspiring director the complete rights to adapt his novel, Sugar Cane Alley (or Rue Cases Nègres), a dramatic exploration of colonialism after slavery, on the Caribbean island (and French dependency) of Martinique. Euzhan Palcy described how she subsequently moved to Paris, clutching the first draft of a script and how the French film establishment took up her cause paving the way for her to become the first African women director to work in Hollywood. |
________________ Whose 'New world' ?____________
 |
| Several of London's museums and galleries depict stories and images of the New World, the lands of the Americas as well as the colony that was to grow into the United States of America. Terence Malick's recent film of the same name re-creates the first permanent settlement, telling the story of Pocahontas and intimating the terrible fate in store for the native peoples after they had so generously protected the colonists from starvation. However, neither exhibitions nor film reveal that the future of the Jamestown colony was to be guaranteed by slavery, firstly provided by the British underclass and prisoners of war; subsequently by the peoples of the African continent. |
____________________The Gift of Creation ________________
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fiba offers a review of The Gift by Lewis Hyde, an essential work that is very close to the preoccupation and pursuit of fiba, the difficulty of authentic creativity in society that predominantly governed by the rules of commerce, competition and consumerism. To compliment this essential reading are two poems as a 'gift' from poet, Nazim Hikmet. Hikmet met fiba publisher GP Solomos and offered him a couple of poems while the latter was visiting Moscow in the early 1960's. Though we can't put our hands on these, by chance we |
| came across this work, written at this precise time and currently published by Anvil Press Poetry and translated by Ruth Christie, Richard McKane and Talat Sait Halman, 2002. |
__________________Nazim Hickmet _________________
| Nazim Hikmet was born November 20 1901and died on June 3 1963. He was a Turkish Poet, dramatist and communist who is widely regarded as the best-known Turkish poet and his works have been translated into countless languages. Nazism Hikmet is sometimes called "Turkey's national poet". He was born in Selânik in the Ottoman Empire (now Thessaloniki, Greece). Later he became a member of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) and died in exile in Moscow. Much of his life was spent in imprisonment in Turkey. It is alleged that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, statesman and founder of the secular Republic of Turkey was |  |
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inspired
by the works of Nazim Hikmet. Mustafa
Kemal believed in the supreme importance of culture; "Culture
is the foundation of the Turkish Republic". she
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| (Watch this space for another gift from fiba coming shortly: the opening chapters of the novel, Thermopylae, a tale of war, a fictional account of the famous battle in which the Spartans confronted the might of Persia as scapegoats for the Athenians. This parable was written by fiba publisher GP Solomos over 50 years ago in an attempt to come to terms with personal experience and trauma of WW2 that spanned his involvement in the bombing of Germany to his life behind enemy lines and finally, his escape from occupied France into Spain, just after D-Day.) |
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fibaa CONTENTS 2007
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fiba
CONTENTS
SPRING-SUMMER 2007
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FILMBANK 2007
Year
of 
the PIG