TWO GEMS
We came across two gems amongst the films we saw in the Zabaltegi Section at the Donostia Film Festival. The films that are classified as documentaries are the films that seem to be the ones most willing to take risks lately. "24 hour party people": from the end of the 70's to the start of the 90's Manchester was the focus of everybody's attention. "Joy Division", "New Order","Happy Mondays"; music and ecstasy. Black humour and irony. Black shirts and psychedelia. A lovable re-visit to a time and city, warts and all. "Bowling for Columbine": 1999. Columbine High School. A student goes to school armed to the teeth. The film has started. The student has to kill as many others as possible. Bonus. A teacher gets shot in the head. But all games have their game over. Bowling for Columbine is a film about the strange relationship that exists between Americans and guns. Provocative and slashing humour. A shot straight to the heart of "the world's biggest democracy".
NO DOUBTS ABOUT THE SHELL
The Gold Shell at this year's 50th Festival has gone to those who sunbathe on Mondays. This year, unlike others, there have been no polemic awards. The film is a just winner. Berlin awarded the film that evoked Ireland-s "Bloody Sunday", Cannes did the same with "Le Pianiste", a film that reuses to let us forget the nazi holocaust, and Donostia has given the prize to a film about people on the dole. My god! but aren't the ministers from each country and multinational media that support these film festivals becoming super-duper lefties!!
THE RETURN OF BETH GIBBONS AND PORTISHEAD
Portishead have just finished work on the album that will an end to five years of silence. The record will be called "Alien" and they say that it lasts up to an hour and that there be multimedia bits and pieces thrown in as well. Before that happens, however, the singer of the band, Beth Gibbons, intends to release a solo album called "Out of Season" on October the 28th.
300.000
According to a group of scientists in the USA, that's the number of computers needed to be able to decode genomes and research the vital proteins for illnesses. The Genome@home programme is not the first to use a bit of your/our computers' memory (Seti@home , for example, is still trying to find extraterrestrial life). The story behind the 300,000 computers is that once you've installed a driver, your computer receives data every time you connect. After the data has been processed, it is returned from whence it came. All the same, they only use a fraction of the capacity of the huge computers they use to coordinate all of this; the rest of the capacity is used for nuclear research!
THE BALDE PRESENTATION FEST
You are all invited to a party on the 24th of October to celebrate the launch of The Balde Issue No. 6. Selektah Kolektiboa and Desmond Williams are on the bill. The whole shenanigans will kick off at 22:00. Several copies of Thievery Corporation’s latest album, provides by Red Musical, will be raffled at the do.
MY NAME IS TUROK
Just when you thought that we'd seen everything there was to see in the world of publicity and marketing, along comes Simeon Cantrell from the British Technical Institute of Marketing with his campaign for the video-game producer Acclaim UK. His strategy is really innovative: you get paid for changing your real name to a commercial name. Acclaim UK offer you 770 euro if you go along to the registry and the change the name you have had since birth and re-name yourself Turok. As well as the money, you also get an X-box games console and all the games based around the character Turok. Within a few hours of starting the campaign, more that 3000 people gave their names.
