Lars Von Trier Challenged by Gesamt

This year, as part of the Copenhagen Art Festival, film director Jenle Hallund will use crowd-sourced video from around the globe to make a film. Not just any film, but one that challenges the rules that Lars von Trier created for making a certain style of art house film.

A community masterpiece
The concept gesamtkunstwerk can be explained as ‘the universal work of art’ or ‘synthesis of the art’. It refers to a piece of art that has been made up of many different types of art. Film is one of the only types of media which can accommodate several types of art forms at once. By using the idea of ​​Gesamt in a user-generated film project we are taking the concept one step further: A universal work of art is not only created by many different art forms but also by a diversity and multitude of people.

An experiment
What the result of Gesamt will be, no one knows – yet. There is no script, just a cinematic experiment that gradually comes to life by people, thoughts, images and sound that merge into each other and form new meanings and constellations. The final work, which will premiere on October 12.2012, is a reflection on our time and the people who live in it: a community masterpiece.

More info here.

Australia Gets World’s Toughest Law on Cigarette Branding

It is common knowledge that smoking kills people and, in democracies, providing health care for citizens is important and unquestioned. In Australia, they clearly care about each other as they now make it harder than ever for cigarette companies to shill their destructive product.

Starting in December, packs will instead come in a uniformly drab shade of olive and feature dire health warnings and graphic photographs of smoking’s health effects. The government, which has urged other countries to adopt similar rules, hopes the new packs will make smoking as unglamorous as possible.

Many countries mandate that packages display photos or text describing smoking’s health effects, and some limit the size of the branding or ban certain slogans, but Australia’s dual approach would be the strictest globally.

Read more here.

Young, Urban, and Farming in Rural Ontario

In Ontario women from the city are defying stereotypes and running farms. Once the purview of the stereotypical old white farmer who hates cow-tippers, now women raised in cities are buying and operating farms in rural Ontario. These young and educated farmers are using organic process and community driven opportunities to run successful farms.

“I saw that something was wrong with the world, but I didn’t want to push paper around trying to change it,” she said. “When you work on a farm that respects the environment, you see your impact on the earth in a very real way.”

Now a proud owner of a 38-hectare vegetable farm in Neustadt, Ont., she finally feels she’s saving the earth from the ground up, caterpillars and all.
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Both Young and Moskovits sell organic vegetables using a community-supported agriculture model. Local families buy in at the start of the season and receive farm-fresh fruits and vegetables every week.

“It’s a great feeling to sell directly to people that are eating your food,” said Moskovits. “Marketing locally also means you aren’t shipping great distances and wasting energy.”

It’s also a model that is relatively drought proof. Since members have already paid, they, too, bear the burden when harvests are low.

Read more at The Star.

Paris Revitalizes the Seine for People

Paris is continuing it’s transition to be more people-focused. The city has a great plan to gut its highways in the city along the Seine and replace them with bike lanes, pedestrian walks, and cultural spaces. It’s bound to make a city known for its romantic appeal even more lovely.

From next month, a stretch of more than 1km (0.6 miles) on the right bank near the Hôtel de Ville will see the first narrowing of the road to make way for pedestrian corridors, riverside walkways, bars and cafes. Then in the spring the final promised masterpiece of pedestrianisation will be unveiled: a 2.5km car-free zone on the left bank, between the Musée d’Orsay and the Pont de l’Alma, with a riverside park, pedestrian promenades, floating botanic gardens, flower-market barges, sports courts, restaurants and even perhaps an archipelago of artificial islands.
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Delanoë promised his new scheme would “give Parisians back their river”, “profoundly change” the city and provide “an opportunity for happiness” for residents. But the mayor, who will not stand for re-election in 2014, also has an eye on his legacy, seeking to be remembered as the man who finally ended Parisian reverence to the car. He has expanded cycle routes and introduced the city’s famous short-term bike-hire and car-hire schemes.

Read more at The Guardian.

Crowdsourcing the Meaning of Life

Some filmmakers are channelling the world to find out what the meaning of life is. Their project has started an Indiegogo campaign to fund their project and they can use your help.

The world we live in is extremely confusing and precarious. With economic meltdowns, global terrorism, ecological disasters, civil unrest, if we don’t find the answers now, there may soon be no life left to explore. Simultaneously, it is an extremely exciting time and we now have the technological tools to communicate and collaborate to find solutions that have eluded us for millenia. We are a group of award-winning filmmakers who believe in the power of the moving image to move the world, and we have initiated a crowdfunding campaign to launch a website – lifemeanswhat.com – where we will create a tapestry of short films that will address meaning and purpose from a diverse array of perspectives, and provide in its patchwork a beautiful and profound reflection on life for all those who are looking to be entertained, inspired, and informed.

Here’s a video they sent me about how much they like life: