Author: Mackenzie Lad

Categories
Student Life

Reporting on the European refugee crisis

Refugees bail from an overloaded raft and swim towards the shores of Lesbos, Greece. It is only one leg of the treacherous journey across Europe to reach their final destination, Germany in Another News Story.

Cinema Politica screening of Another News Story followed by panel on media representation of crisis

“Another news story” is a phrase one might use when referencing media coverage of Trump’s latest antics, or the most recent development of a long-standing social issue in another corner of the world. It signifies both a habitual regard for and detachment from the social phenomena that make headlines—a reflex that is all too common among those on the receiving end of the news.

In the last few years, coverage of the European refugee crisis by major news outlets around the world has saturated the media landscape with scenes of the calamity. Yet, the story has never been told from the perspective British director Orban Wallace takes in his debut documentary, Another News Story. Wallace steps away from the sea of tripods and media personnel to instead focus his camera on the journalists themselves as they navigate the working conditions and ethical dilemmas of reporting on a humanitarian crisis. This unconventional take on a widely-reported topic isn’t just another news story; it goes beyond surface-level media criticism to probe the relationship between news subjects, producers and consumers.

In this story, there are no heroes or villains; it quickly becomes apparent that the ethical and moral divisions of right and wrong are not so clear cut. Each journalist Wallace encounters projects the honourable intention of bringing truth to viewers so they can grasp the severity of the crisis and care enough to do something about it. However, under the unflinching gaze of Wallace’s camera, it’s unclear whether the journalists themselves care, whether they are at all invested in the reality they report on.

Journalists are essential to society, yet the profession’s nobility is questioned as Wallace follows reporters who seemingly go through the motions, setting up tripods on the shambles of people’s lives without enduring the emotional weight of the situation. At one point in the journey, Wallace finds out a refugee has been injured in an aggressive confrontation with police. When Wallace questions the bystanders, one journalist observes that the man is now swarmed with cameras but hasn’t actually been offered aid. It was one of many instances in which the journalistic imperative to “get the shot” overrides the human instinct to help someone in need.

The documentary does not seek to champion the virtues of journalism, nor does it take a hostile view on the news media. Another News Story simply poses the question: If the news media holds the government accountable, who holds the media accountable? The answer places Wallace in a new, unfamiliar position—the watchdog’s watchdog.

A journalist captures the last shots of a refugee-packed train before it pulls out of the station enroute to Germany in Another News Story.

Though he stays closely attuned to the lives of the journalists, Wallace doesn’t ignore the emotional intensity of the refugees’ journey. He travels alongside Mahasen, a Syrian refugee, and a group of others who have embarked on the perilous journey to Germany, to experience the bureaucratic minefield and physical stress firsthand. Wallace juxtaposes the sanitized broadcast news coverage of his colleagues with his own intimate, handheld footage from the field, effectively widening the audience’s field of vision beyond the CNN news desk to see all that lies in the periphery.

The group of refugees is seemingly always being pursued, either by journalists or authorities, to be tokenized or victimized. Wallace, with his camera and valid passport, is not excluded from the hoards of news media personnel and the security his press pass permits him. In this story, the roles can only be defined by power—who stands on either side of the camera, and subsequently, the television screen.

Towards the end of the film, a reporter Wallace encountered offers an observation: “The story is over from a news point of view.” Yet life goes on for Mahasen and thousands of other refugees who will begin a new life in Europe. Only, now, the cameras have stopped rolling.

Cinema Politica’s screening of Another News Story on March 19 was followed by a panel discussion moderated by filmmaker Muhammad El-Khairy, in which activists Fatima Azzahra Banane, Dalila Awada and Houda Asal addressed the residual questions posed by the film: With no end to the crisis in sight, where do we go from here? What kind of news coverage is needed?

Awada suggested journalists need to be increasingly aware of the language they use when identifying vulnerable people, and how these prescribed labels are then represented in the news media. Language poses the unique threat of unconsciously alienating individuals and groups, as it’s used carelessly in public discourse, she said. The most subtle linguistic divides—in this case, the interchangeable use of the terms “refugee,” “foreign person” and “illegal immigrant”—can erode any common ground between the vulnerable group and the audience.

Azzahra Banane stressed the need for context, to make both journalists and viewers aware of the social, political and cultural roots of the issues they are witnessing. When context is limited to what is considered breaking news, viewers fail to comprehend the extent of the problems and are not compelled to solve them, she said.

In the same way Wallace held a mirror to the frontline of journalists, the film calls for self-reflection among media consumers as well. News producers and consumers maintain a symbiotic relationship; the interests and preferences of the audience directly inform the nature and content of the news. If we are to honestly criticize the journalist’s vulture-like scavenging of the remains of human lives, then we must also acknowledge the North American appetite for superficial, sensationalized news coverage.

Categories
Student Life

An exploration of unresolved family conflict

Cecilia Aldarondo is the director of Memories of a Penitent Heart. Photo by Mackenzie Lad.

Memories of a Penitent Heart delves into the height of the AIDS crisis at Cinema Politica screening

Cecilia Aldarondo’s documentary, Memories of a Penitent Heart, began with a question: “If we only remember the good things about the people we love, what do we lose?” Her search for the answer led to the excavation of a guarded family history at the site of her uncle Miguel’s death. The documentary screened at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on Feb. 15 as part of Cinema Politica’s winter series, in conjunction with the Concordia University Community Lecture Series on HIV/AIDS.

Miguel, who died of AIDS complications when Aldarondo was only six, became an elusive figure in her family. A cross-generational game of broken telephone seemed to obscure the circumstances of his death and the nature of his life. “I started sensing that something was really amiss in the way that he was talked about,” Aldarondo said. A persistent curiosity sent her back a generation to the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City, where her uncle lived at the time, and to the doorstep of his lost lover. “It is a personal film; it’s about family,” Aldarondo said. “It’s a film about memory.”

The story is guided by the tangible, material objects that house these memories: handwritten letters, dusty negatives, reels of Super 8 home movies, photographs—a seemingly endless trove of assorted archives. Aldarondo unpacks them on screen, weaving in the residual people and places from Miguel’s life through intimate interviews and the construction of a family tree with new, unexpected branches.

Polaroid photos of Miguel and his family, as seen in Memories of a Penitent Heart.

The film grapples with the complexity of Miguel’s identity, fractured by the social circumstances of his life. His experience as an immigrant in New York City, at a time when racism, homophobia and the stigma around AIDS were pervasive forces, placed Miguel in the precarious position of a cultural outsider.

The nuances of his identity were reserved for specific audiences, none of whom accepted Miguel in his entirety. “Popular depictions of bigotry tend to be extreme,” Aldarondo said of her uncle’s limited belonging in American society. “The story of exclusion tends to be more subtle.”

Over the course of the film, Aldarondo resurrects Miguel as the multidimensional person he was, not just who his family wanted him to be remembered as: Miguel the son, the brother, the uncle, the friend. He was also known as “Michael” the American actor to some, and Miguel the gay man, the Catholic, the Puerto Rican, the outsider to others.

It was important for Aldarondo to recognize the overbearing presence of religion throughout Miguel’s life, starting with his upbringing in an ultra-religious family in Puerto Rico. “Part of what I think about is the secularization of narratives around AIDS, and the way in which we talk about this notion that religion was only ever bad for queer people,” she said. “It forced me to try to see things in a more nuanced way.”

Aldarondo had to acknowledge her own contemporary biases and relationships with the people involved to reconcile the social and cultural chasms opened up by time. “It’s an ethical minefield,” she admitted. Bridging the gap between generations also meant navigating the devastating aftermath of the AIDS crisis. “I was really ill-prepared for the level of pain and unresolved grief that they all felt as a community,” said Aldarondo about members of the gay community who knew Miguel.

A collection of family photographs, as seen in Memories of a Penitent Heart.

The documentary depicts how the AIDS crisis, as well as the art, activism and social repercussions it produced, doesn’t occupy the same space in contemporary dialogue as other social movements from the past.

Like Miguel’s story, the epidemic is largely remembered through the lens of the mainstream media, a depiction that isn’t necessarily representative of the entire complex struggle. Aldarondo learned that identity politics were as present among the communities affected by the AIDS crisis as they were in Miguel’s own life.

“I do think of the film as a kind of intimate activism,” Aldarondo said, referencing the feminist phrase: “The personal is political.” Even as she encountered criticism that personal narratives do not belong in activist documentaries, Aldarondo remained steadfast in her belief that individual, human stories are the way to access bigger social issues. Telling stories to a mainstream audience that would have otherwise gone unheard is, in itself, a political act, she explained.

If Memories of a Penitent Heart is a walk down memory lane, then it is also a trek deep into turbulent, uncharted territory. Though the film began as a search for closure, it becomes apparent that an ultimate resolution can’t be reached. “It’s not like we know the definitive story of Miguel,” Aldarondo said. “He’s gone. It’s more about his absence.”

As much as the film is about revisiting old wounds left by shame and denial, the healing process takes place in the aftermath. Memories of a Penitent Heart fills in the gaps in memory so that what’s gone isn’t forgotten. “In a crisis like the AIDS crisis, there were so many people jockeying for power over that moment,” Aldarondo said. “It’s trying to sort of give him his moment back, in a way.”

Feature photo taken by Mackenzie Lad

Categories
Opinions

If Concordia classroom walls could talk

Graphic by Zeze Le Lin.

Women have spoken about this “open secret” before

I recently had a conversation in which my friend declared his surprise that sexual misconduct, the same thing that sparked the Hollywood mega-scandal, occurred in the microcosm of our university. I did not understand this reaction any more than I did when I opened an email from Concordia president Alan Shepard last week. In the email, Shepard stated how “disturbed” he was by the allegations of sexual misconduct made against faculty members.

As news story after news story breaks, I find myself increasingly suspicious of the surprised  reactions coming from the heads of host institutions. The way individual cases are framed as “scandals” undermines the severity of the issue of sexual misconduct as a whole, relegating it to isolated incidents committed by bad people, rather than a chronic, social malady. This culture that perpetuates sexual misconduct was created and functions based on the very behaviour now denounced as “scandalous.” If we can agree that women have been systematically oppressed throughout history, then why are cases of sexual misconduct often viewed as one-time, “scandalous” occurrences?

It should be no “open secret” that women have always faced varying shades of sexual misconduct across all professions and within all social institutions. The teacher-student dynamic offers an extra level of vulnerability; I can’t help but feel like I’ve fallen into a terrible trap every time I receive an unsolicited sexual or otherwise inappropriate comment from a teacher who is too friendly for the wrong reasons.

I know too many of my peers have found themselves in these situations and worse. We often carry into the classroom the same anxiety, the same enduring mentality of self-preservation we feel when walking alone at night.

To deny knowledge of these allegations proves only greater faults in the university’s administration. Women have long been trying to speak out about what has only now become a front-page scandal. For Concordia’s president to say he will “respond effectively when it does happen” and yet only respond when a male former student retrospectively declares remorse for having witnessed it—this only reinforces a system that effectively silences or ignores women when they try to speak up about their experiences.

A thorough investigation is a place to start, however overdue it may be, because merely being “shocked” and “disturbed” is not nearly enough to change an institution and the toxic culture that pervades it.

Graphic by Zeze Le Lin

 

Categories
Opinions

If Concordia classroom walls could talk

Graphic by Zeze Le Lin.

Women have spoken about this “open secret” before

I recently had a conversation in which my friend declared his surprise that sexual misconduct, the same thing that sparked the Hollywood mega-scandal, occurred in the microcosm of our university. I did not understand this reaction any more than I did when I opened an email from Concordia president Alan Shepard last week. In the email, Shepard stated how “disturbed” he was by the allegations of sexual misconduct made against faculty members.

As news story after news story breaks, I find myself increasingly suspicious of the surprised reactions coming from the heads of host institutions. The way individual cases are framed as “scandals” undermines the severity of the issue of sexual misconduct as a whole, relegating it to isolated incidents committed by bad people, rather than a chronic, social malady. This culture that perpetuates sexual misconduct was created and functions based on the very behaviour now denounced as “scandalous.” If we can agree that women have been systematically oppressed throughout history, then why are cases of sexual misconduct often viewed as one-time, “scandalous” occurrences?

It should be no “open secret” that women have always faced varying shades of sexual misconduct across all professions and within all social institutions. The teacher-student dynamic offers an extra level of vulnerability; I can’t help but feel like I’ve fallen into a terrible trap every time I receive an unsolicited sexual or otherwise inappropriate comment from a teacher who is too friendly for the wrong reasons.

I know too many of my peers have found themselves in these situations and worse. We often carry into the classroom the same anxiety, the same enduring mentality of self-preservation we feel when walking alone at night.
To deny knowledge of these allegations proves only greater faults in the university’s administration. Women have long been trying to speak out about what has only now become a front-page scandal. For Concordia’s president to say he will “respond effectively when it does happen” and yet only respond when a male former student retrospectively declares remorse for having witnessed it—this only reinforces a system that effectively silences or ignores women when they try to speak up about their experiences.

A thorough investigation is a place to start, however overdue it may be, because merely being “shocked” and “disturbed” is not nearly enough to change an institution and the toxic culture that pervades it.

Graphic by Zeze Le Lin

Categories
Music Quickspins

Walter TV – Carpe Diem

Walter TV – Carpe Diem (Sinderlyn, 2017)

Carpe Diem is the third album from Montreal-based trio Water TV. The album lives up to its name, “seizing the day,” with laid-back guitar lines and dreamy vocals throughout. “Begotten,” opens the album with timid vocals over soft strumming that builds and breaks with crashing cymbals and clapping hands, before tumbling into the high-energy second track, “Graceland.” “Spring Time” is a sunny interlude, a sonic ray of light juxtaposed beside the eerie “Laura Palmer,” a fitting reference to the crime drama series Twin Peaks. “Alaska Cruisin’” is a refreshing, upbeat moment amongst the sleepy nostalgic vibes that define the rest of the album. Where it capitalizes on warm, relaxed melodies to sustain its mellow vibe, Carpe Diem seems to lose emotional intensity in its redundancy, making for light, easy listening and not much else.

7.1/10

Trial track: “Spring Time”

Exit mobile version