CounterCorp was invited to program the opening day of the "Green Film Festival" — four days of screenings leading up to the 2008 San Francisco Green Festival. We presented four films that screened during the first three years of the Anti-Corporate Film Festivals (2006 – 2008):
2:00 p.m. The Forest for the Trees (Opening night, ACFF 2006)
4:00 p.m. Growing Awareness (Opening night, ACFF 2008)
6:30 p.m. The World According to Monsanto (Opening night, ACFF 2008)
8:30 p.m. This Land is Your Land (Closing night, ACFF 2007)
CounterCorp is proud to co-present the San Francisco theatrical premiere of What Would Jesus Buy?, which follows the Rev. Billy Talen and his Church of Stop Shopping on a cross-country mission to save Christmas from the "Shopocalypse" — the end of humanity caused by commercialization, consumerism, consumption, and eternal debt.
The film traces Rev. Billy's journey from his humble days preaching on the New York City subway with a portable pulpit, through his rise to a leader of a national movement, with a full gospel choir and congregations of thousands. Along the way we watch as he performs an exorcism of Wal-Mart headquarters, conducts "retail interventions" at the Mall of America, and finally arrives in the Promised Land on Christmas Day.
Rev. Billy will be in attendance at the 7:00 pm and 9:00 pm shows for a Q & A with the audience.
CounterCorp will have a table at the 8th Annual Expo for the Arts, featuring nearly 100 Bay Area arts and culture organizations, free workshops and performances, an outdoor beer and wine garden, and hundreds of local artists and musicians.
Attendees can browse tables staffed by local nonprofit groups, collectives, galleries, and small businesses; find resources and services; and attend 75 workshops, salons, and skillshares on arts techniques, history, and related issues.
Performances include sea chanteys, Chinese violin, and six local musical groups. Workshops include country dancing, intellectual property, 'zine making, marketing, funding theater, female filmmakers, science fiction writing, burlesque, and more. Children's activity area and organic food available on-site.
Please join us for an evening of local, grassroots films from independent media centers, film festivals, and young artists curated by Stephen Parr of the San Francisco Media Archive as part of the 8th Annual Expo for the Arts.
We will be screening three short films — Alienation, Aqua Who?, and Children — from the 2006 Anti-Corporate Film Festival as part of a program including works from Bay Area Video Coalition's "Youth Video Works", San Francisco Women's Film Festival, and independent artists Sabrina Alonso, Bill Basquin, Veronica Majano, and others.
From small-town America to the White House, Maxed Out reveals how the modern financial industry really works: how so-called "sub-prime" borrowers — a euphemism for the broke and bankrupt — became the industry's "preferred customers", why banks and credit card companies actually want you to make late payments, and why Americans are now going broke at a faster rate than during the Great Depression.
The film also looks at the personal information business, in which 90 percent of all credit reports have errors in them, but the credit companies don't bother to correct them, because negative reports mean higher interest rates — and industry profits.
And, in an echo of the microcosm of the current sub-prime loan mortgage crisis, Maxed Out exposes how companies pay colleges millions of dollars for students' private data, then entice teenagers into life-long debt servitude and financial subsistence.
The film will be followed by a Q & A session with credit experts and activists. Tickets benefit the 2007 Anti-Corporate Film Festival.
CounterCorp and New College's Media Studies program are co-sponsoring the San Francisco premiere of In Debt We Trust, a new documentary from writer and director Danny Schechter (Weapons of Mass Deception) at the Roxie Theater.
The film examines why many ordinary people find themselves drowning in debt, and what former Reagan administration advisor and conservative commentator Kevin Phillips calls the "financialization" of the American economy — how big banks and credit card companies replaced factories as the engine of U.S. economic growth, and the rise of a powerful credit-and-debt industrial complex that's driving people into "modern serfdom".
Schechter will introduce and speak after the screenings, and there will be a wine-and-cheese reception at the Picaro tapas restaurant across the street from the theater. CounterCorp will announce the initial line-up of films for the 2006 Anti-Corporate Film Festival.
In his previous film (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price), director Robert Greenwald showed the insidious and far-reaching effects of 'Godzilla capitalism' on ordinary people across the U.S. and around the world.
Greenwald's new documentary, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, shows what happens to those same Americans — and their Iraqi counterparts — when the military gets privatized, conflict becomes big business, and corporations go to war.
The film reveals the inside story of the soldiers, truck drivers, widows, and children whose lives have been changed forever as a result of the staggering amount of corporate profiteering in post-invasion Iraq.
Greenwald uncovers the connections between a small group of private U.S. companies that have made literally billions of dollars doing jobs that the military used to do on its own — and that Iraqis could do better, faster, and cheaper themselves — and the corporate-funded policymakers who have allowed these firms to turn no-bid contracts into a license to steal from American soldiers and taxpayers.
Although the privatization of the Pentagon did not begin with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the sheer scale and brazenness of the profiteering in Iraq — and the total lack of government oversight or accountability for a handful of well-connected American corporations — is unprecedented.
The results of this profit-driven policy include the deaths of U.S. soldiers, contractors, and Iraqi civilians; the alienation of most of the Iraqi population, and transformation of Iraq into the #1 recruitment and training center for militant Muslims; and the exacerbation of sectarian strife into a civil war that threatens the stability of the whole region, and beyond.
The film will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange and CodePINK, Charlie Cray of the Center for Corporate Policy, and Aaron Glantz of Pacifica Radio. The event will be preceded by a demonstration at the corporate headquarters of war profiteer Bechtel Corporation, 50 Beale Street, San Francisco from 4:00-6:00pm.
Other Cinema impresario and cult film curator Craig Baldwin emerges from his subterranean lair and celluloid archives to present a medley of retro industrial propaganda and vintage "corporate-identity porn" loops from the '50s, '60s, and '70s.
Don't miss the stentorian voice-overs, howlingly earnest dialogue, characters firmly bound by their gender roles, and more rayon than you shake a martini stirrer at — all in an atmosphere best described as "guerrilla theater".
The overt corporate proselytizing and homogeneity are startlingly surreal and unintentionally funny today, but these films were the precursors of our "info-mercials", and served much the same socio-economic purpose.
So come on down to ATA to see the fossilized remains of the future that never came — and the inspiration for the wicked parodies of these decidedly disinformative "educational" films on The Simpsons (featuring failed B-movie actor and variety show host Troy McClure).
During the breaks between film sets, DJ Mindwrecker, host of Mindwrecker TV on SF cable TV's Channel 29, will premiere his most recent audio-video mash-up featuring images from newly "liberated" (i.e., dumpster-retrieved) Bay Area corporate films.
Adult beverages and tasty treats will be available from a CounterCorp-hosted bar. Proceeds benefit the 2006 CounterCorp Anti-Corporate Film Festival.
CounterCorp Kicks Korporate Ass
"We are heartened by a kindred project here in the ‘hood, the annual weekend presentation of films and panels that take corporations to task: the CounterCorp Film Festival! Come on down for a drink and a snack in this screening-room reception that serves to launch this ambitious undertaking."
The Two-Lane Search for Mom & Pop
These days, you have to go pretty far out of your way to spend your money in a local "mom and pop" store instead of one of the thousands of corporate chains that seem to be sprouting up in every city in America (and increasingly overseas, too).
The film is an account of the former reporters’ 32-state road trip in search of "unchained" America. They have only two self-imposed rules:
- No interstate highways
- No corporate chains — including gas stations, restaurants, hotels, and grocery stores
In other words, they can only shop with mom and pop.
What they discover during their trip is growing discontent with corporate America, and a growing movement away from globalization and toward "localization," as individuals and small businesses across the country band together to preserve not only their livelihoods, but their local communities as well.
In Colorado, a Starbucks is repeatedly vandalized. In Texas, a rebellious city forces Borders Books into retreat. Residents of America’s "Fourth of July" capital in Nebraska turn against their new Wal-Mart. And an entire Wyoming town goes into business for itself after it is abandoned by its chain department store.
Along the way, their conversations with corporate executives, economists, entrepreneurs, political leaders, union members, and ordinary Americans from all walks of life lead Hosein and Hughes to conclude that a healthy democracy needs local small businesses if it wants to control ever-growing corporate power.
The film will be followed by a panel discussion and audience Q & A featuring David Room of Energy Preparedness, Don Shaffer of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and Lani Riccobuono of AK Press. Proceeds benefit the 2006 CounterCorp Film Festival.
The San Francisco premiere of a new documentary about the grassroots struggle of teachers and parents to resist efforts to privatize Mexico's public school system, which have accelerated since the 1993 NAFTA treaty made education a so-called "tradable service".
Under pressure from the World Bank, the IMF, and U.S. government and corporations, Mexican President (and former CEO of Coca-Cola Mexico) Vicente Fox has stepped up efforts to supplant the country's public schools and teachers, who have traditionally defended the rights of Mexico's poor, disenfranchised, and indigenous citizens.
Grain of Sand also documents the historic role that teachers have played in Mexican politics, including the struggle against their own corrupt and co-opted national union, which has used intimidation and violence to undermine the teachers' efforts to preserve their classrooms, jobs, and autonomy — as well as Mexican democracy.
(Granito de Arena, 2005) In both English and Spanish, with bilingual subtitles. Written and directed by Jill Freidberg (Corrugated Films), who also produced the award-winning documentary This is What Democracy Looks Like about the 1999 anti-globalization protests against the WTO in Seattle.
Following the film, a panel of speakers will discuss the connection between the privatization of Mexican schools and similar trends in the U.S., and answer questions from the audience. Proceeds support the 2006 CounterCorp Film Festival.
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Corporate Film Festival — and remember to buy local!