Tibet Film Festival 2010

18/09/2010

http://leavingfearbehind.com/node/49

The second Tibetan Film Festival will take place in Zurich on 29. and 30 October 2010. We intend to follow up on the first Tibetan Film Festival that was a huge success last year.

The festival focuses on short films of Tibetans. We would like to ask you to contribute a five minute short film to the second Tibet Film Festival. Your film should be about “identity”. We are excited to receive a whole variety of films from professional, semi-professional and new film enthusiasts. However, we also will show a selection of new documentaries and other film productions by Tibetans.There is the opportunity to send suggestions for movies to Filming For Tibet.

Filming For Tibet established the Tibetan Film Festival in cooperation with Tibetan Youth Association in Europe (TYAE). The event is dedicated to the Tibetan filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen. He has been sentenced to six years in prison on December 28th, 2009.
 

Tibete — Não há como ignorá-lo

Lia Diskin

Este texto é uma versão condensada do artigo “Tibete: não há como ignorá-lo”, publicado no Livro do Ano 2010 da Enciclopédia Barsa, gentilmente cedido pela autora e pelo editor Paulo Verano (@pauloverano)

Foto: Jungli Tsai, 2006

A despeito das previsões feitas por acadêmicos e cientistas sociais da década de 1960, o interesse pelas religiões e práticas espirituais não esmoreceu. E este fenômeno pode verificar-se mesmo no mais improvável dos países — a República Popular da China, onde o ateísmo é oficialmente sustentado há mais de meio século. Mosteiros e casas de retiro vivem lotados de jovens chineses em busca de um sentido maior para seus dias; peregrinações ao templo Buda de Jade em Xangai formam um rio humano incessante; obras de arte sacra são disputadas em leilões a preços cada vez mais exorbitantes; e em Xiamen as feiras anuais de objetos artesanais budistas congregam centenas de milhares de visitantes e compradores. O próprio presidente Hu Jintao chegou a expressar em discurso de janeiro de 2008 que “as religiões, incluso o budismo, podem colaborar para atenuar as tensões originadas pela disparidade de renda”.

Este é um cenário novo — não previsível nem programado — na República Popular da China, onde talvez seja possível revisar conceitos e políticas ideológicas que há 50 anos inviabilizam um diálogo assertivo entre as autoridades do Partido Comunista e as demandas legítimas do povo tibetano, que diariamente luta para preservar sua identidade cultural, suas tradições religiosas, seu idioma, costumes e herança histórica.

A virtual counter-revolution

The internet has been a great unifier of people, companies and online networks. Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it


Sep 2nd 2010
The Economist
 

THE first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious movement. Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful PowerPoint presentations reminiscent of stained glass, prophesied a digital paradise in which not only would commerce be frictionless and growth exponential, but democracy would be direct and the nation-state would no longer exist. One, John-Perry Barlow, even penned “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”.


Even though all this sounded Utopian when it was preached, it reflected online reality pretty accurately. The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier. For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with anyone else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone else for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a thing of the past. “You have no sovereignty where we gather,” Mr Barlow wrote.

Nature Publisher Aim to Save Planet by Democratizing Science

By Eliot Van Buskirk, 06/06/2010

Nature Publishing Group has disseminated information between scientists for more than 140 years, starting with the prestigious Nature journal. Now, it hopes to reach out to college and high school students, in part because so many of them lose interest in hard science around that time.

“Thirty percent of science students drop out of science programs after their freshman year in college, which is a really alarming statistic” said Nature Publishing Group SVP Vikram Savkar. In some countries, he added, such programs don’t exist at all.

At stake, he says, could be nothing less than the survival of our species.