Festival de cine + Latina : Proyecto Pap

El Festival de Cine + Latina se concibe como un espacio vital para fomentar, rescatar y permutar las múltiples prácticas culturales y realidades; brindan un escenario de convergencia, articulación y difusión del cine creado, realizado y producido por mujeres. La finalidad del festival es realizar una compilación de materiales audiovisuales que puedan ser difundidos y expuestos a una gran cantidad de personas para que queden grabados en el tiempo, el espacio y memoria de los espectadores. Es así, como de esta manera se construirá una herramienta de comunicación educativa que nos hará pensar con otras sensibilidades.

Exploring 'Samoaness' in the Samoan language film The Orator (O Le Tulafale)

The Pacific nation of the Independent Samoa (formerly Western Samoa)  is not known for having a developed film industry.   In 2011, a Samoan languge film called The Orator (O le Tulafale) placed the spotlight on Samoa, its people, and the Samoan culture when it became the country’s first ever film to be accepted into major international film festivals such as the 68th Venice Film Festival.  Samoans the world over have embraced the film for its richness, compassion, and authenticity. Yet at times, the film portrays the Samoan culture as harsh and cruel.   Samoans are usually quick to criticise negative portrayals of their culture but the thousands of comments on the film’s official Facebook page show otherwise.  From April 2011 to March 2012, there were only 11 comments criticising the film on Facebook, and these criticisms were denounced as ‘un-Samoan’. This raised the question as to why Samoans did not react to the unflattering portrayals of their culture, but instead react against legitimate criticisms of the film.  By using Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and the Samoan narrative structure of fāgogo, a heterotopia space and a utopia space are created in which past memories confirming Samoan cultural identity and bonds to the culture are evoked and are (re)experienced by Samoans while viewing the film.  Thus the film’s ability to encourage this is what Samoans praise rather than the actual film.  

La sottotitolazione interlinguistica in tempo reale: il caso Ericsson Olanda e l'esperimento presso il festival Sedicicorto 2014

Al giorno d'oggi l'accessibilità all’informazione e ai prodotti audiovisivi è un argomento particolarmente delicato. Spesso, le categorie più svantaggiate, come le persone affette da disabilità sensoriali e gli stranieri, non hanno pieno accesso alla programmazione televisiva o a eventi ricreativi, culturali o formativi (conferenze, workshop, spettacoli), a causa della mancanza di adeguati servizi di supporto linguistico. Tale carenza rappresenta una mancata opportunità d’integrazione e anche una potenziale perdita, in termini di pubblico e di introiti, per le emittenti e gli enti che organizzano programmi ed eventi di interesse generale. Questa tesi intende analizzare le tecniche attraverso le quali oggi viene realizzata la sottotitolazione interlinguistica in tempo reale. Il nostro obiettivo è quello di dimostrare che approfondendo la ricerca scientifica sul respeaking e su altre tecniche meno costose rispetto alla stenotipia, la sottotitolazione interlinguistica in tempo reale non sarebbe più un miraggio. Il primo capitolo fornisce una panoramica sulla sottotitolazione intralinguistica e interlinguistica e sulla sottotitolazione preregistrata, in diretta e in semi-diretta. Nel secondo capitolo presenteremo il caso dell’azienda Ericsson in Olanda, l'unica a fornire sottotitolazione interlinguistica in tempo reale nei Paesi Bassi, tramite una tecnica che combina un interprete simultaneo, uno stenotipista e un "subtitle keyer" (figura che inserisce i sottotitoli al momento opportuno). La squadra lavora su un segnale dal vivo che viene però trasmesso al pubblico olandese con alcuni secondi di ritardo, permettendo di migliorare la qualità dei sottotitoli. Grazie ad una borsa di studio concessa dal Dipartimento d’Interpretazione e Traduzione di Forlì (Università di Bologna), abbiamo potuto intervistare il responsabile dell’unità di traduzione presso Ericsson, dott. Thijs de Korte, e abbiamo avuto modo di assistere in loco alla realizzazione dei sottotitoli interlinguistici in tempo reale. Il terzo capitolo si concentrerà sulla tecnica del respeaking, dagli ambiti d’uso ai requisiti per svolgere questa professione. Ci concentreremo in particolare sulle somiglianze tra respeaker e interprete simultaneo, che ci condurranno all'esperimento descritto nel capitolo 4. Infatti, date le somiglianze riscontrate tra interpretazione simultanea e respeaking e il potenziale in termini di accessibilità offerto dalla sottotitolazione interlinguistica dal vivo, abbiamo fornito un servizio sperimentale di sottotitolazione in diretta dall’italiano verso l’inglese durante la cerimonia di premiazione del Sedicicorto International Film Festival di Forlì. Dopo aver descritto in dettaglio l’esperienza, analizzeremo i giudizi espressi da ospiti stranieri, pubblico italiano e membri dell'associazione "Sedicicorto", al fine di verificare la qualità del servizio e osservarne i benefici. La conclusione della nostra tesi è che sfruttando appieno il potenziale offerto della tecnologia moderna e approfondendo la ricerca sulle tecniche per la sottotitolazione interlinguistica dal vivo, si potrebbero ridurre i costi dei servizi di supporto linguistico a non udenti e stranieri, incoraggiando dunque aziende ed enti a garantire una maggiore accessibilità all’informazione e agli eventi culturali e formativi.

Film Screening: ‘The Barber of Birmingham’

Time: 6 PM – 7:30 PM | Location: Page Library, Room #100 | RSVP via Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1562714160720394/ Synopsis: In this 2012 Oscar-nominated short film, Alabama barber and civil rights veteran James Armstrong experiences the fulfillment of an unimaginable dream: the election of the first African-American president. An Official Selection of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Produced in association with American Documentary | POV. A co-presentation with the National Black Programming Consortia.

High fashion

High Fashion is a practice-led research enquiry that examines the processes involved in producing a no-budget film of high aesthetic standards that can confidently compete in the global film festival market, and to reflect on the production techniques tested during the making of the film. The practical outcome of the research is a twenty-five minute short drama. It incorporates a large cast and crew, original designer clothing, extravagant sets, and a popular soundtrack. The thesis considers how over one hundred professionals volunteered their time, expertise, and equipment to help produce the film. The thesis also examines the many obstacles encountered while producing the film and how these were overcome. It is written for the student filmmaker as a guide to "learn by doing."

In Interaction

The field was the design of cross-cultural media art exhibition outcomes for the Japanese marketplace. The context was improved understandings of spatial, temporal and contextual exhibition design procedures as they ultimately impact upon the augmentation of cross-cultural understanding. The research investigated cross-cultural new media exhibition practices suited to the specific sensitivies of Japanese exhibition practices. The methodology was principally practice-led. The research drew upon seven years of prior exhibition design practices in order to generate new Japanese exhibition design methodologies. It also empowered Zaim Artpsace’s Japanese curators to later present a range of substantial new media shows. The project also succeeded in developing new cross-cultural alliances that led to significant IDA projects in Beijing, Australia and Europe in the years 2008-10. Through invitations from external curators the new versions of the exhibition work subsequently travelled to 4 other major venues including the prestigious Songzhang Art Museum, Beijing in 07/08, the Block, QUT, Brisbane and the Tokyo International Film festival. Inspiration Art Press printed a major catalogue for the event extensively featuring this exhibition. This project also led to the Sudamalis (2007) paper, ‘Building Capacity: Literacy And Creative Workforce Development Through International Digital Arts Projects’ (IDAprojects) Exhibition Programs And Partnerships’.

The Figures

This short film, created by David Megarrity and Luke Monsour, experimented within a short timeframe with the challenge of superimposition of hand-drawn backgrounds, non-verbal action, and a short, sharp shoot. The aim was also to find a single piece of standalone music that would act as an unedited soundtrack It won Best Queensland Film at the Woodford Film Festival in 2005, and was screened at Base-Court, Lausanne Switzerland in 2006, and the Westgarth Film Festival 2005. It was acquired by comedy website minimovie in 2007.

Rare chicken rescue

Sound design for documentary is an under-researched field. The specific context of representation of emotional or mental states is particularly open to clichéd treatment. Such treatment in the media often ‘perpetuates inaccurate or negative assumptions about mental health issues in the wider community’ (Francis et al 2005: 11) by employing, for example, either jarring sound/music combinations to signify ‘madness’ or overtly saccharine music to educe sympathy. This project adopted a practice-based approach to discovering a considered aesthetic treatment designed to elicit a more empathetic audience response. A more discriminating engagement with the intentions of the film was cultivated by abandoning both the ‘representational naturalism’ and the ‘distilled, evocative realism’ of documentary sound design (Davies 2007: 18) in favour of a more lyrical or musical approach. To achieve this we manipulated perspective, tonal character and perceptions of space in the final mixing stage. The project was funded by the Film Australia National Interest Program, ABC TV and the Pacific Film and Television Commission. As a crucial contributor to the aesthetic of the project I was nominated in the funding application, and ultimately received an AFI Award for Best Sound in a Documentary in 2008. The film was honoured by The Film Critics Circle of Australia, The Slamdance Film Festival in Utah and The Sydney Film Festival. It has been favourably reviewed in national and international print media (The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, among others) as well as online film/culture zines and blogs.

Delivery

'Delivery' (2005) was an installation work at MetroArts, Brisbane that incorporated drawings, paintings, video projections and temporary architectural structures. The work made central use out of a mock public event, staged in a Gold Coast park by the artist. Documentary footage of the ambiguous event comprised one of the video projections and formed the basic iconographic palette upon which the rest of the works were based. Using 3D animation as well as conventional drawing and paintign approaches, the works conveyed a palpable sense of fragmentation and social dislocation - a quality that was heightened by the reflective panels that bisected the exhibition space. The work was [part of the MetroArts Artistic Program in 2005 and its video elements were included in the 2008 exhibition Video Ground, curated by Rachel O'Reilly for Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (MAAP)/Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (Touring show). The work was the subject of a feature article by Mark Pennings in Eyeline magazine, and also appeared on the front cover of that issue.

Dutch tilt, Aussie auteur : the films of Rolf de Heer. 2nd ed.

Dutch-born Australian director, Rolf de Heer, is Australia's most successful and unpredictable film-maker, with thirteen feature films of widely varying style and genre to his name. Arising from the author's 2006 - 2009 PhD research at the Queensland University of Technology (which focussed on the psychoanalytic use of sound in his films), and a fixed term Research Fellowship at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, Australia, "Dutch Tilt, Aussie Auteur: The Films of Rolf de Heer" was first published in 2009 by VDM in Saarbrucken, Germany. This second edition addresses de Heer's additional film-making since 2009, and as with the first edition, is an auteur analysis of the thirteen feature films he has directed (and mostly written and produced). The book explores the theoretical instability of the concept of auteurism and concludes that there is a signature world view to be detected in his oeuvre, and that de Heer (quite possibly unconsciously) promotes unlikely protagonists who are non-hyper masculine, child-like and nurturing, as opposed to the typical Hollywood hero who is macho, exploitative and hyper masculine. Rolf de Heer was born in Heemskerk, Holland, in 1951 and migrated to Australia with his family in 1959. He spent seven years working for the ABC before gaining entry to Australia's Film, Television and Radio School, where he studied Producing and Directing. From his debut feature film after graduating, the children's story about the restoration of a Tiger Moth biplane, "Tail of a Tiger" (1984) to his breakout cult sensation "Bad Boy Bubby" (1993) which "tore Venice [Film Festival] apart" to the first Aboriginal Australian language film "Ten Canoes" (2006) which scooped the pool at the Australian Film Institute awards, de Heer has consistently proven himself unpredictable. This analysis of his widely disparate films, however, suggests that Australia's most innovative film-maker has a signature pre-occupation with giving a voice to marginalised, non-hyper masculine protagonists. Demonstrating a propensity to write and direct in a European-like style, his 'Dutch tilt' is very much not Hollywood, but is nevertheless representative of a typically Aussie world-view.

The Brisbane Line

A short 27 mins docudrama film. The Brisbane Line is a neo noir drama-documentary depicting the forgotten history surrounding the subtropical capital of Queensland, Australia. Set in the shadows of this sunshine city's unsolved crime, the film explores gaps between fact and fiction, memory and myth and excavates Brisbane's original sin [from DVD container]. The Brisbane Line is a film noir about the 1940s police force & corruption in Brisbane. The film is a creative research output, screened at Tribal Cinemas, Brisbane on the 8th November 2011.

Review : "Birthday Boy" -- Sejong Park

Synopsis and review of Sejong Park's film Birthday Boy. Includes credits. Birthday Boy has won over 40 awards at film festivals around the world including Best Animated Short at the prestigious SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival in 2004 which qualified the film for the 2005 Academy Awards even before Park and fellow students had graduated from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS). It was subsequently nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, losing to another extraordinary short, Chris Landreth’s tribute to pioneering Canadian animator Ryan Larkin, Ryan. Other awards include the Prix Jean-Luc Xiberras at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 2005 (which had a special focus on Korea) and Best Short Animation at the 2005 BAFTA awards. It has screened at over 100 film festivals around the world, and is the most awarded film in the almost forty year history of the AFTRS...

Review : "Not Quite Hollywood" -- Mark Hartley

Synopsis and review of the Australian documentary Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008). Not Quite Hollywood might just as accurately have been titled Not Quite Australian Cinema. The film begins from the premise that the vast range of films it covers have been unduly overlooked by critics, historians and scholars of the Australian cinema despite often enormous box office success. Much of the blame for the marginalisation of these films is placed at the feet of former Sydney Film Festival director and long-time film critic for The Australian newspaper David Stratton, well-known to Australian audiences as one half of the ‘David and Margaret’ couple who have dominated film reviewing on Australian television for many years. Stratton’s books on the Australian film revival The Last New Wave (1980) and The Avocado Plantation (1990) are said to have set the tone for later writers by reviling or simply ignoring many of the films produced in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s in favour of a canon of films and directors deemed more culturally and artistically worthy. Perhaps predictably, Not Quite Hollywood swings the other way. The back-slapping, anecdotal, revisionist history told through the many interviews with key figures from the time is only occasionally interrupted by Bob Ellis and Phillip Adams, who are only slightly uncomfortably cast as defenders of the mainstream views. The interviews and clips from the films are interspersed with the fan-boy enthusiasms of Quentin Tarantino whose geek-chic profile and encyclopaedic knowledge of exploitation and genre cinema are milked to the full. In sharp contrast, Ellis’s scorn for these filmmakers and their films is total, but it is his withering and slanderous assessments of the characters, talents and practices of producers like Antony I Ginnane and John Lamond that leavens this sometimes stodgy stew of selfcongratulation...

Orchids : My Intersex Adventure

Orchids: My Intersex Adventure is a multi-award winning autobiographical documentary film. The film follows documentary filmmaker, Phoebe Hart, as she comes clean on her journey of self-discovery to embrace her future and reconcile the past shame and family secrecy surrounding her intersex condition. Despite her mother’s outright refusal to be in the film, Phoebe decides she must push on with her quest to resolve her life story and connect with other intersex people on camera. With the help of her sister Bonnie and support from her partner James, she hits the open road and reflects on her youth. Phoebe’s happy and carefree childhood came to an abrupt end at puberty when she was told she would never menstruate nor have children. But the reasons why were never discussed and the topic was taboo. At the age of 17, Phoebe’s mother felt she was old enough to understand the true nature of her body and the family secret was finally revealed. Phoebe then faced an orchidectomy, invasive surgery to remove her undescended testes, the emotional scars of which are still raw today. Phoebe’s road trip around Australia exposes her to the stories of other intersex people and holds a mirror to her own experience. She learns valuable lessons in resilience and healing but also sees the pervasive impact her condition has on all her relationships. At home, Phoebe and James want to start a family but dealing with infertility and the stress of the adoption process puts pressure on their marriage. Phoebe also starts to understand the difficult decisions her parents faced and is excited but apprehensive when they eventually agree to be interviewed. Will talking openly with her mother give Phoebe the answers she has been looking for? The film was produced and directed by Phoebe Hart and commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The film premiered at the Brisbane International Film Festival in 2010 where it was voted the number one film of the festival by audiences. Orchids was broadcast on ABC1 in Australia in 2012, appeared in more than 50 film festivals internationally and has since been broadcast nationally in Switzerland, Sweden, Israel, Spain, France, Russia, Poland, Germany and the USA.

Literacy and numeracy project: Final report 2009

Literacy and numeracy are critical for young people during and after their schooling. The subjects and courses that students undertake during their school years incorporate a range of academic literacy and numeracy practices which students must be able manage if they are to be successful. Pathways beyond schooling also require specific, and changing, understandings of, and proficiencies with, literacy and numeracy as new communication technologies increasingly impact on further study, work, and everyday life. Teaching and learning numeracy is a new emphasis in the SACE and as yet we have little understanding about the ways in which secondary schools handle this area. Students in Years 10 and 11 are at a crucial point in their educational and life pathways as they begin to refine their future aspirations. For those who have difficulty with academic literacies and numeracies – and often a long history of such problems – this period can be fraught unless teachers are able to provide specific support when it is needed, or students are able to access it from care-givers or community members. The School to Work Literacy and Numeracy Project involved teachers from nine schools across the three sectors and university researchers working together to design curriculum interventions for students with a history of low measurable achievement in literacy and/or numeracy. The project started from the premise that working with ‘rich tasks’, an approach to learning and assessment developed in the Productive Pedagogies work undertaken in Queensland (Hayes et al., 2006), would improve students’ motivation, engagement and learning and that this work could best be done by teachers working in school-based, cross-curriculum teams with a school leadership team member and a university researcher as mentor. A key idea in designing rich tasks is that students will have opportunities to demonstrate their learning in assessments which are aligned with the learning expectations (for example a film festival to publicly launch student-produced films, advertising to sell student-made cubby-houses, a household budget based on students’ likely incomes in future work). In other words the assessments should be designed to allow for authentic communication and displays of what the students have learned through serious engagement with the curriculum. The project was conducted from Term 1-4 2009, with follow-up checks with some project teachers in the early weeks of 2010.