Acorn Milk Anyone?

Acorn Milk from Brian Barnes on Vimeo.

So gonna give you a couple videos we produced for the website in case you're interested in trying some local wild food recipes. This one shows you how easy it is to make acorn milk. And it's really good.

Growing Roots

This is the documentary we produced on Turtle Lake Refuge for our final project. Had alot of fun with this project and learned alot. Hope this film can inspire a person or two to check it out and try some local raw food lunch!

A Taste of What is to Come?

I think there's a good chance Bush and Cheney are going to get hit with more than a shoe after they leave office. Of course they'll probably have private security out the wazzoo for the rest of their lives too.

Hopefully we can really take this country in a new direction and start to reverse some of the intense animosity we have provoked around the world.

The Power of YouTube

So if you search for Argentina Dirty War you can find hundreds of pertinent videos. Protests are still going on as this home video shows. The children of the disappeared who were kidnapped by their parent's murderers are in their 20s today. Birth certificates were forged, and many do not know that their family is a fraud. But the grandmothers have not given up. 85 of the "missing generation" have been found, and at least 500 cases are known about and being actively searched for today.

People still going missing - Argentinians skeptical

So this guy went missing after his testimony helped bring down old war criminals. It seems many feel the governments talk of no more impunity is just rhetoric and believe the old systems and structures and corruption is still in place.

No more impunity?

Even after the junta was overthrown, the general and other military leaders were protected by the new "democratic" government, which obviously infuriated the people of Argentina. Just recently, they have said they will no longer provide impunity to these criminals, as it is not in the interest of developing a democracy. The first 3 or 4 minutes of this interview talk about the change.

Garaje Olimpo

Another Argentinian film about the dirty war of 1976-1983. I did a presentation on the power of film as a means of protest and remembrance. That's where I got all these clips.

This movie was directed by a guy who was actually tortured by the regime. You can see at least several large portions of it online.

The sort of anti-establishing shot of the muddy water in the beginning is important. The film focuses on two stories - one of a girl taken to a concentration camp who tries to use her sexuality and relationship with one of the torturers to save her life. The other story is based on the true story of the resistance and a girl who placed a bomb under the bed of a cop who was her friend's dad. The girl in the camp suffers the same fate as everyone else and is dumped out of a plane at several thousand feet into the muddy water at the same time as the bomb goes off in the film.

Filmmakers Speak Out

This is a trailer for the Argentinian film, Moebius. It was created by a professor and a bunch of his students and has earned international accalaim. A moebius strip has no end, you can make one by taking a strip of paper, twisting it and taping the ends together. If you trace a line around it, it would eventually run back into itself.

So the film is an allegorical sci-fi movie. Gustavo (the director) was also an engineer thus the sci-fi story, but the underlying message is about the "disappeared" in Argentina that I mentioned in my last blogs. The idea is that there is a subway full of people that is trapped on a moebius strip, still out there but unacknowledged by society and the government.

Gustavo worked on a very small budget and used his engineering skills to rig a camera on the subway to get the crazy tunnel shots.

Horrifying History Part 2

Here's part two of the Al Jazeera doc. Concentration camps, genocide, and torture on par with the Nazis. And this was only a few years ago! Alot of evidence suggests that the militray overthrow was backed by the U.S. government. Henry Kissinger told Videla (the dictator general) "look we would like you to succeed...if you can finish before Congress gets back the better." The story of the 22 year old girl is heartbreaking.

Horrifying History

This is the first of a two part doc put out by Al Jazeera about the 10,000 to 30,000 people that were "disappeared" in Argentina between 1976-1983 after a military dictatorship overthrew the government. If you're not familiar with what happened I'd recommend taking the 20 minutes, but it's intense. At least 500 known pregnant students, artists, and political activists were kidnapped for their babies. They were tortured until they gave birth, then loaded like cattle onto a plane and dumped alive over the Atlantic Ocean.

This is How I Feel This Week