The Portland Alliance, Vancouver Unitarians offer progressive films

The Michael Servetus Unitarian Universalist Fellowship is offering progressive movies the second and fourth Friday this summer. Presented as “meaningful movies, special presentations and thos progressive documentaries you meant to get out to see but missed...” The films 7-9 p.m. The church supplies the popcorn but you are on your own for drinks.
The festival started with a July 22 screening of The Overspent American, a video based on Juliet Schor’s examination of the “new consumerism” and how that upscale shopping surge is shaped and reinforced by a commercially-driven media system. Schor argues we have gone beyond “keeping up with the Joneses” to taking on a debilitating debt burden and materialistic lifestyles found only in the fantasy of the world of television.
The rest of the film schedule includes:

Friday, Aug. 12:
Supersize Me
(96 min.).
The critically acclaimed documentary from filmmaker Morgan Spurlock that delivered after Fast Food Nation a second blow from which fast food chains like McDonalds are still reeling. Spurlock graphically explores the correlation between fast food, lack of exercise, inadequate nutritional and physical education and the obesity epidemic currently plaguing our nation.

Friday, Aug. 26:
The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror (93 min.).
According tomost experts, the Middle East holds 70 percent of the world oil reserves while North America, Europe and Japan are primary consumers. And, while emerging technologies might provide alternatives, these innovations cannot remedy the need for oil used in plastics which accounts for abouthalf of all present uses of oil.

With easy to understand maps and graphics, The Oil Factor looks at dwindling oil reserves and current consumption. It presents recognized oil experts, a Pentagoninsider and pro-Bush administration officals to identify motives for invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and the positioning of U.S. trooops around the world wherever oil is pumped or shipped, deployments not generally known by most Americans at this time. The Oil Factor presents behind-the-scenes manipulations of the Bush-Cheney government pertinent to current military activities in the region.

After a year and one half investigation and a three month trip covering Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, The Oil Factor looks at both the human cost and the greater geo-strategic picture of the Bush administration’s war on terror. Along with solid facts and figures, clear, illustrative maps and graphics and original footage shot on location, The Oil Factor features such personalities as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Noam Chomsky, The Project for the New American Century Director GarySchmitt, best-seller Taliban author Ahmed Rashid and the Pentagon’s KarenKwiatkowski.

Friday, Sept. 9:
Toxic Sludge is Good for Your
(45 min.).
While advertising is the visible component of the corporate system, perhaps even more important and pervasive is its invisible partner, the public relations industry. This video illuminates this hidden sphere of our culture and examines the way in which the management of the “public mind” has become central to how our democracy is controlled by political and economic elites.
Toxic Sludge is Good for You illustrates howmuch of what we think of as independent, unbiased news and information has its origins in the boardrooms of the public relations companies.

PR critics include PR Watch founder John Stauber, cultural scholars Mark Crispin Miller and Stuart Ewen. Toxic Sludge is Good for You tracks the development of the PR industry from early efforts to win popular American support for World War I totherole of crisis management in controlling the damage to corporate image. The video analyzes the tools public relations professionals use to shift our perceptions including a look at the coordianted PR campaign to slip genetically engineered produce past public scrutiny.

Toxic Sludge is Good for You urges viewers to question the experts and follow the money back to the public relations industry to challenge its hold on democracy.

The Michael Servetus Unitarian Universalist Fellowship is located at 4505 East 18th St., Vancouver, WA.

Front Page > Issues > 2005> August

Vancouver Unitarians offer progressive films