3rd Annual CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival (events » politics & activism) Thursday, October 16, 2008 - 7:00 PM
The CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival returns to the Bay Area this week for its third consecutive year of films and discussions that explore the power and influence that corporations have on our daily lives, communities, environment, and culture and psychology.

The 2008 CounterCorp Festival runs Oct. 15–17 at the Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th Street in San Francisco, with three nights of documentary and “narrative” (fictional) feature-length and short films, post-screening discussions with directors and issue experts, and audience Q & As. The themes for this year’s Festival are food, oil, and the ubiquity of corporations in our societies and personal psyches.

The Festival opens on Wednesday, Oct. 15, at 7:00pm with the California premiere of GROWING AWARENESS, an unvarnished look at a more sustainable alternative to the current corporate-controlled, government-subsidized global food system: small, organic, local farms. Director Jade Ajani and local organic farmer Antonio Roman-Acala of Alemany Farms will speak after the film. (USA, 2008, 100 mins.)

This year’s opening night film is THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MONSANTO (9:15pm) a detective story that follows the trail of deception, devastation, and death left by a corporate serial killer whose weapons include PCBs, herbicides/insecticides/defoliants, bovine growth hormone, dioxin, genetically-modified crops, and seed patents and other so-called “intellectual property”. (France, 2008, 109 minutes)

The Festival continues on Thursday, Oct. 16, at 7:15 with a program called “The True Cost of Oil” that coincides with two pending trials in San Francisco against Richmond, CA-based Chevron. It includes previews of two works-in-progress — THE NAKED OPTION and SWEET CRUDE — and one short film, JUSTICIA NOW!, all about Chevron’s exploitation of people and the environment in Nigeria and Ecuador.

The films will be followed by an extended panel discussion including Nigerian activist Ayo Ajisebutu; Cindy Cohn, one of the plaintiffs attorneys in the Chevron lawsuits; Antonia Juhasz, author of The Tyranny of Oil; Martin O Brien and Robbie Proctor, co-directors of Justicia Now!; and Mitch Anderson of the environmental non-profit Amazon Watch.

The theme of oil carries over into GASHOLE at 9:15, which tells the history of U.S. oil consumption, oil prices, and the economic, political, and cultural effects of being the world's largest consumer of oil. What is impeding efforts to change that fact — such as the development of alternative fuels? Narrated by actor Peter Gallagher. Q & A with co-director Scott Roberts scheduled. (USA, 2008, 101 minutes)

The Festival concludes on Friday, Oct. 17, with the California premieres of two films about the pervasiveness of corporations in people’s daily lives. THE BIG SELLOUT (7:30) documents the effects of the global privatization of basic human needs such as water, electricity, transportation, and healthcare: higher prices for fewer services — or, for the poor, no services at all. (Germany, 2006, 94 minutes)

And finally, in keeping with a CounterCorp tradition of having a narrative (fictional) work as the centerpiece of the Anti-Corporate Film Festival, we are thrilled to close this year’s screenings with the California premiere of VISIONEERS (9:30), a satirical look at the effects of corporate culture at the big-gest and most profitable company in the history of the world. Stars rising comic talent Zach Galifianakis (Into the Wild, Comedy Central). Q & A with writer Brandon Drake following film. (USA, 2008, 94 mins.)

Tickets ($10, $5 with student ID) are available at the door or through the CounterCorp website (www.countercorp.org). For film trailers, the list of speakers, and other details about CounterCorp or the Anti-Corporate Film Festival, visit our website or e-mail filmfest@countercorp.org.

Benefit Film Screening: "The Yes Men Fix The World" (events » politics & activism) Friday, October 30, 2009 - 7:00 PM Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno -- a.k.a., the Yes Men -- are two guys who just can't take "no" for an answer.

They have an unusual hobby: posing as top executives of corporations they hate. Armed with nothing but thrift-store suits, the Yes Men lie their way into business conferences and parody their corporate targets in ever more extreme ways -- basically doing everything that they can to wake up their audiences to the danger of letting greed run (and ruin) the world.

In 2004, Andy got on the biggest TV news program in the world by purporting to be a Dow Chemical Corporation spokesperson, and announced that Dow would finally clean up the site of the largest and deadliest industrial accident in history, the Bhopal catastrophe some 20 years earlier.

The result? As people worldwide celebrated the company's seeming change of heart, Dow's stock dropped by $2 billion. People wanted Dow to do the right thing, but "the market" declared that the company's priorities -- and shareholders -- wouldn't put people ahead of profits.

That reality hit Andy and Mike like a ton of bricks: We have created an economic and political system that makes doing the right thing impossible, and our so-called "leaders" are actually mindlessly following its pathological dictates. If we continue to leave the market in the driver's seat, it will happily drive the whole planet off a cliff chasing ever-higher profits.

At one business conference after another, the Yes Men try to wake up their corporate audiences to that frightening prospect, while in the process taking on some of the world's biggest and baddest corporations.

So, for example, Andy and Mike posed as Exxon spokespeople who were demonstrating a new "biofuel" made from the victimes of climate-change themselves. It's hard to decide whether to laugh or cry as you watch the their totally credulous audience learn that the lit candles they are holding are made from the corpses of dead people.

On their journey, the Yes Men act as gonzo journalists, delving deep into the question of why we have given the market more power than any other institution to determine our direction as a society.

Andy and Mike visit the twisted (and unintentionally hilarious) underworld of the "free market" think tanks, where they figure out a way to defeat the logic that's destroying our planet.

As they address 300 million viewers on the BBC, and in front of 1,000 New Orleans contractors alongside Mayor Ray Nagin, peeling back the layers of lies to reveal the raw heart of truth -- a truth that brings with it hope.

Hope explodes at the end of this film with a power that may take audiences straight out of the theater and into the barricades. A word of warning to theater owners: Make sure your seats are securely screwed down ...