Check out our upcoming Events!

Having trouble viewing this email? Click here

You're receiving this email because of your relationship with Free Thinking Film Society. Please confirm your continued interest in receiving email from us.

Lots of Upcoming Events! Who Funds Environmentalists??? Iraq N' Roll The Free Thinking Film Society and the Soloway Jewish Community Centre are proud to announce the screening of Iraq N' Roll. Free Admission! March 22, 2012, 7:30 PM Soloway Jewish Community Centre 21 Nadolny Sachs Pvt Ottawa, ON K2A 1R9 In this intimate and poignant film about family, culture and identity, filmmaker Gili Gaon follows popular contemporary Israeli rock musician Dudu Tassa as he embarks on a deeply personal journey to reconnect with the musical legacy of his grandfather, Daud al-Kuwaity. Daud and his brother Saleh - the al-Kuwaity Brothers -, Jewish musicians who lived in Iraq in the 1930's, were the most celebrated musicians and composers of their time, often performing in the court of the King, and are still considered to be the creators of modern Iraqi music. When they immigrated to Israel in the 1950's, however, their middle-eastern music was not embraced by the Western-oriented cultural establishment of the nascent state, and they became marginalized and almost forgotten. On his moving quest to rediscover his cultural heritage through his grandfather's music, Dudu decides to devote his next album to new and more contemporary reinterpretations of the al-Kuwaity's works, creating a dialogue between the generations, and helping to restore this suppressed musical and cultural legacy to its rightful place within the rich and diverse tapestry from which modern Israeli culture and identity have been woven. This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes: The Biases of the CBC You can now purchase a copy of our first self-produced documentary: This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes: The Biases of the CBC. Included on this DVD are our 49-minute documentary, my opening remarks from November 13th, 2011, the complete panel discussion with Brian Lilley from Sun News, Mike Fegelman of HonestReporting Canada, Eric Duhaime from Le Journal de Montreal, David Krayden from the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, and Stephen Taylor from the National Citizens Coalition, and the audience Q&A. The price of this documentary is just $20 plus $2 for HST and $2 for shipping. Please send your cheques to The Free Thinking Film Society, 39 Birch Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario K1k 3G5. You can also pay us via PayPal at this link. For those of you who want to contribute $50 or more to the Free Thinking Film Society, we'll send you the CBC disk, plus a bonus disk of over 30 minutes of additional CBC clips. We still need your help! The Free Thinking Film Society is a not-for-profit organization and we rely upon our ticket sales and DVD/Book sales to fund our operations. We take no government money. We can use your help for the 2012 Free Thinking Film Festival which will run between November 2-4th, 2012. For a donation of $50: We will send you this Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes DVD as well as a bonus DVD of CBC clips that did not make our documentary. For a donation of $100: We will send you both DVDs and a copy of Salim Mansur's book, "Delectable Lie: A liberal repudiation of multiculturalism." For a donation of $250: We will send you both DVD, Salim Mansur's book, and 2 free passes for the 3rd Annual Free Thinking Film Festival 2012. Please make your cheques payable to the Free Thinking Film Society (don't forget we are a not-for-profit corporation), 39 Birch Avenue, Ottawa Ontario K1k 3G5. Check out our Youtube channel! Here's a link to many of our past presentations. Please Volunteer! We can use your help!!! First, we value all suggestions for films for us to show. Secondly, we need people to help at our upcoming events. From planning to staffing to marketing, there's always something to do! info@freethinkingfilms.com Quick Links Free Thinking Film Society Join our Fan Page We now have a brand new fan page on FaceBook. Please become a fan and please pass it on to your friends on faceBook! And, check out our Youtube channel where we have film trailers and other videos of interest. Bruce Bawer reviews our documentary on the CBC! Acclaimed author Bruce Bawer has just written about "This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes: The Biases of the CBC" for FrontPage Magazine. The only thing worse than having the biases of the mainstream media inflicted upon you on a daily basis is having to subsidize it. For Americans, to be sure, the rip-off isn't so terrible: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, gets $430 million a year from the federal government, which comes to only a couple of bucks per household. In Britain, by contrast, the BBC license fee is now £145.50 ($226) annually per TV-owning family. And in Canada, the CBC receives more than $1.5 billion a year from the Canadian government, which amounts to upwards of $100 per household. And what, exactly, are Canadian taxpayers paying for? That's the question asked - and very illuminatingly answered - by a new documentary, This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes: The Biases of the CBC, producedby James Cohen and Fred Litwin. (The title is a reference to "This Hour Has 22 Minutes," a long-running CBC series specializing in political satire.) Focusing on two main topics - anti-Israel bias and anti-conservative bias - the documentary consists almost entirely of CBC clips (most but not all of them from news programs) in which we can see these biases in action. To judge by this compilation, the CBC is perhaps even more slanted than the infamously partial BBC - and, perhaps, even more brazen about it. Take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the documentary we see excerpts from a CBC report on the second Gaza "Freedom Flotilla" that consists entirely of interviews with flotilla participants - all of whom represent it as a virtuous and innocuous aid mission and condemn Israel's actions against the previous flotilla as absolutely unjustified. At no point does the CBC provide even a brief reminder that there is, in fact, another side to the story. (As the documentary asks: "Is this reporting? Or stenography?") [Please read the whole article..] Please join us for an evening with Vivian Krause! Environmental detective Vivian Krause will be presenting on the funding of environmental groups in Canada. March 19, 2012, 7 PM Library & Archives Canada 395 Wellington Ottawa, Ontario Admission: $15 (students $10) From Vivian's blog: Rethinking Campaigns "According to my preliminary calculations, since 2000 USA foundations have poured at least $300 million into the environmental movement in Canada. Its time to ask why. The David Suzuki Foundation alone has been paid at least $10 million by American foundations over the past decade. Why are American foundations spending so much money in Canada instead of in their own country or in other countries around the world that are far more needy than Canada?" You can go to her blog here: http://fairquestions.typepad.com/ You can also catch Vivian regularly on Ezra's show on Sun News. Here is Vivian's bio (in her own words) I have a B.Sc. and an M.Sc. in Nutrition from McGill University and l'Université de Montréal, respectively. My major was Nutrition. During the 1990s, I worked for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on programs for maternal and infant nutrition in Guatemala (1990-1995) and Indonesia (1996-2001). I also did some food aid planning for the the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR). Before that, I worked with Algonquin people to prevent diabetes in their communities in the north part of Quebec. During 2002 and 2003, I was Corporate Development Manager for North America for NUTRECO, one of the world's largest producers of farmed salmon and fish feed. In 2006, I prepared a submission to the Special Committee on Sustainable Aquaculture of the B.C. Government. While preparing that submission, I unexpectedly came across a grant for an "antifarming camapign" with "science messages" and "earned media." When I raised questions about this grant from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, four grants were quietly re-written. This and other information led me to begin writing a blog called Fish Farm Fuss. While going through U.S. tax returns as part of the research for that blog, I happened to notice many grants for a "Tar Sands Campaign" (see here also). That's when I started to write about the campaign against Alberta oil. If you would like to read about how I ended up going from UNICEF to salmon farming, and started writing this blog, please click here. As I tried to take a look at the salmon farming controversy from a marketing perspective - a point of view that I missed when I worked in the industry - I wrote two papers about the so-called 'science' about PCBs in farmed salmon, and sea lice - and the money behind it. I was born in Vancouver but lived most of my childhood in Kitimat and Kamloops. At the time, my parents were teachers. I now reside in North Vancouver. Where to buy tickets for our evening with Vivian Krause:: Tickets will be available at the door. You can also buy tickets at four locations in Ottawa - tickets available on Thursday, January 5, 2012.. 1. Compact Music, 785 1/2 Bank Street in the Glebe. 2. Compact Music 190 Bank Street (at Nepean). 3. Collected Works (1242 Wellington). 4. Ottawa Festivals (47 William Street) DVDs of "Unmasked: Judeophobia and the Threat to Civilization" are now available Back on November 13th, 2011, we presented the Canadian premiere of "Unmasked: Judeophobia and the Threat to Civilization", a documentary about the current political assault against Israel - fundamentally a war against the Jewish people and their right to self-determination. Jews are facing a threat much greater than a military threat in the battlefield or a traditional terror threat in urban centers. They are facing the possible uprooting of the very idea that there should be a nation state of the Jewish people. We now have DVDs for sale for $20 plus $2 HST plus $2 for shipping. Unmasked Judeophobia Trailer Featured in the film: ALAN DERSHOWITZ | ALEX SAFIAN | ALVIN ROSENFELD | ANDREA LEVIN | ANNE BAYEFSKY | ANTHONY JULIUS | BARRY RUBIN BEN-DROR YEMINI | BENNY MORRIS | BRET STEPHENS | CAROLINE GLICK | CATHERINE CHATTERLEY | CHARLES SMALL | DAN DIKER EMANUELE OTTOLENGHI | FIAMMA NIRENSTEIN | GERALD STEINBERG | HILLEL NEUER | IRWIN COTLER | ITAMAR MARCUS JAMES WOOLSEY | JEFFREY HERF | JOE LIEBERMAN | JOHN BOLTON | CHIEF RABBI JONATHAN SACKS | KENNETH MARCUS MANFRED GERSTENFELD | MARK GARDNER | MATTHIAS KUNTZEL | MEIR WAINTRATER | MELANIE PHILLLIPS | MOSHE YA'ALON NATAN SHARANKSY | NIDRA POLLER | PILAR RAHOLA | PHYLLIS CHESLER | RADU IOANID | RICHARD LANDES | ROBERT WISTRICH ROBIN SHEPHERD | RON DERMER | RUTH WISSE | SHIMON SAMUELS | SHMUEL TRIGANO | TAMMI BENJAMIN | YISRAEL NE'EMAN China! Yes, we are about to take on China. In May, we will be showing the fim, "When China Met Africa" which focuses on Chinese investment in Zambia. Following the film, we will be having a panel discussion on what China is doing in Canada - in particular on the Alberta Oil Sands. Stay tuned for further information.