film review

On Friday June 3rd 2016, the Simplicity Institute screened its newly produced film 'A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity'. The film is essentially a documentary of the Institute's attempts to create a simple living community along permaculture lines. Following a public invitation to participate a group of mostly fairly young people participated in this experimental community on a rural property in Gippsland. The project involved them growing and preparing their own food, and building the necessary infrastructure which included: houses for each other; a communal living area and kitchen in a large shed; vegetable patches; composting toilet systems, etc.

We are all here for a limited time, but when we have to work harder and harder to stay in one place, that is not really living. Who is stealing our time? Were it not for the cost of housing, Australians would need to work only half the hours they have to and manufacturers would halve their costs! We have only to consider how, in two generations, Australians have gone from needing one income to purchase a house to a situation where both spouses must work and pay for others to bring up any children they may find a brief instant to produce. The writer reviews two works on time-poverty: one a heavyweight and the other a lightweight and remarks that time is money. Time is life. See the film or watch the trailer; feel the truth: spot the enemy.

In 1994 three French speliologists (cave explorers) found the Chauvet Pont d'Arc cave, which turned out to be an extensive underground neolithic art gallery and a kind of visual Noahs Ark of lost species of the last great ice-age around 34,000 year ago. By comparison, the famous cave art of Lascaux is about half as old. Werner Herzog's film of this great ecological time machine is a once-ever.

Many, who believe themselves to be progressive, against war, for the environment and for international peace, display an unreasonable prejudice against almost all things American, in particular the American film industry. That prejudice, in fact, makes the struggle for peace and justice harder, even if it can justifiably be said that by far the greatest of threats to world peace come from within the United States of America.

Title was: "We all have a stake in Hollywood telling the truth about US wars", 14 Jan 11

Avatar is a remarkable movie, about a fabulous world and an old story with some great new twists and perspectives. This is an exciting and skilled 3D graphics state of the art creation which puts the viewer on a new planet in the skin of an alien tribe. We discuss this experience and the political message of the movie.