Keanu Reeves Slams Police State As Scanner Lights Up Cannes
Media suggest films show world is in sorry state

Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | May 30 2006

Keanu Reeves has slammed the modern day police state and surveillance society, a centerpiece of the upcoming film in which he stars, during promotion for A Scanner Darkly at the Cannes film festival.

In A Scanner Darkly, the government, corporations and the elite conspire together to keep free thinking, free expression, freedom itself on the outside-- to facilitate a perceptive wall confining individuality itself to a realm doomed to the fringes.

The film chronicles how power interests exploit the drug war in order to create unthinking armies of drone servants and erect police state measures to prevent the people from ever glimpsing the dark truth behind a highly mechanized surveillance panopticon.

"Certain personal rights that were protected in the (U.S.) constitution for privacy are being chipped away at under the guise of homeland security without redress, and that's not good," Reeves told Reuters.

Several years ago the media tried to create a stereotype that Keanu Reeves isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, a complete 180 from the truth. Anyone that knows Reeves and has spoken in depth with him comes back with the same impression, that Keanu is a deeply engaged thinker and cares passionately about real issues.

Media reports out of Cannes have focused on the hard-boiled edge of the productions filling the screens this year, which include Aaron Russo's eagerly awaited America: From Freedom to Fascism, saying they represent a mirror for a world in a sorry state.

In reality the overwhelming rush of influential new films tackling topics of war, government control, surveillance and dictatorship are a creative backlash to the tiresome dumbed-down verbal diarrhea dished out by the establishment propagandists.

In a nation where the White House produces fake government PR and packages it as 'news' for the indoctrination of a bewildered US television audience, movies like Scanner are a refreshing challenge to the conformist driven orthodoxy

The outstanding Scanner Darkly website is continually updated and has a new audio clip of one of Alex's rants from the movie. Click here for the website and then click 'substance D'.

A Scanner Darkly is set for release on July 7. Read producer Tommy Pallotta's Cannes blog by clicking here.

Documentary tells story of execution
by Bobbie J. Clark - The Daily Iberian

ST. MARTINVILLE — Willie Francis practiced walking up and down the hallway of the Iberia Parish Jail. He wanted to make sure his legs would be under him when he made the march to the electric chair.

He didn’t want to embarrass his family by having his legs fail him.

Francis was scheduled to be put to death May 3, 1946, for murdering Andrew Thomas in St. Martinville. However, something went wrong, and Francis survived the execution.

A long legal battled ensued, going all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled another execution should take place.

Francis was finally executed in May of 1947. He was 18 years old.

Francis’ ordeal has been documented in several books and studied by many legal scholars. It is now the subject of a documentary titled, “Willie Francis Must Die Again,” written and directed by Allan Durand.

Durand lives in St. Martinville and practices law in Lafayette. He graduated from Catholic High School and went on to earn his bachelor’s degree at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He graduated from Louisiana State University Law School.

He moved back to St. Martinville in 1981, and shortly after started making movies.

“I’ve been working on this film on and off for the last five or six years,” he said. “The Willie Francis case is probably the most famous case to come out of the 16th Judicial District. It’s one of the most famous capital punishment cases to go to the Supreme Court. It’s the only time in U.S. history that anyone’s gone to the electric chair twice.”

The lawyer who took Francis’ case was Bertrand DeBlanc, Durand’s great uncle. Durand said Francis’ father paid DeBlanc with two gallons of potatoes.

“Bertrand knew he wasn’t going to get paid,” Durand said. “This offended his sense of fairness to put a kid in the electric chair a second time.”

DeBlanc’s family had kept all the files from the case over the years. Durand used those files, along with some books written about it and articles from The Daily Iberian for his research.

Since the completion of the documentary, Durand has been traveling the film festival circuit. In April, the film was named Best Documentary at the Memphis International Film Festival. At the Santa Barbara Film Festival, it was nominated for the Social Justice Award.

The next stop is the Atlanta Film Festival, where the film was nominated for best documentary short. If it wins, it will be in contention for an Academy Award. Durand was recently honored with the visual arts award at the Ninth Annual Bunkfest Arts, Heritage and Music Awards program.

Durand said his ultimate aspiration for the documentary would be for it to be made into a feature film.

“I’ve tried to pitch it as a feature film for (several) years,” he said. “Everyone says it’s a good story, but has a sad ending. It might have been made by now if it had a happy ending.”

He said Madonna’s film company, Maverick Films, has expressed interest in the film, but added he has not heard from the company about it.

PBS has decided to run the documentary regionally and maybe nationally, which could give it the publicity it needs to be made into a feature film.

“It helps when you’ve got an unusual story,” he said. “At some point, someone will see it.”

Durand knows how the film industry works. He has several projects under his belt, including the film, “Belizaire the Cajun,” staring Armand Assante and Robert Duvall.

He’s recently gotten the green light to do a documentary on a guy from Breaux Bridge who went to New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina and saved 798 people.

“I can’t point out a time where I decided I wanted to make movies,” he said. “It’s just something I grew up always wanting to do.”

In 1990 - to commemmorate Earth Day - founders launched the Midwest Renewable Energy Fair.

"Reneweable energy is a different kind of a thing," says Randy Udall. "...and we're a little divorced from it. The beauty of a fair like this is it's bringing people back in touch with... flows of energy which are always going to dwarf fuels. Flows are much bigger than fuels. The sunlight hitting all the people outside of this tent right now left the sun eight minutes ago... It's travelled 93 million miles in eight minutes. It's hauling ass, and it's not just a good idea it's the law!"

The 17th annual Renewable Energy and Sustainable Living Fair takes place this summer from June 23-25, 2006. The Fair will again be held at the ReNew the Earth Institute, MREA’s educational facility, in Custer, WI (just 7 miles east of Stevens Point).

Udall says, "Some people would ask, in terms of our energy future, 'Why are we working on anything else?'"

Here's a great 10-minute video made possible by Focus on Energy, on the event...
The "World's Largest Renewable Energy Event" (QuickTime recommended)

Gor'es movie opens tomorrow... in theaters

"By their contempt for expert opinion on everything from Iraqi reconstruction to the cost of their tax cuts, Republicans have turned Diagram (Al) Gore into a hero. By their serial dishonesty, Republicans have created a market for "An Inconvenient Truth" - the title of Gore's movie," says WAPO's Sebastian Mallaby.

Darwin's Nightmare is a tale about humans between the North and the South, about globalization, and about fish. Some time in the 1960's, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world.

Huge hulking ex-Soviet cargo planes come daily to collect the latest catch in exchange for their southbound cargo… Kalashnikovs and ammunitions for the uncounted wars in the dark center of the continent. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes and Russian pilots.

Watch for it to screen at the Coffeehouse as soon as it is released on US format DVD... and we are looking for a copy of this year's Best Wisconsin Film: TRIVIATOWN
directed by Patrick Cady and Brit McAdams - any help locating them would be appreciated.

Hey tinfoil-hatters!
Forget about Building 7, planned demolitions, missing surveillance tapes and a hole in the Pentagon that's too damn small to hold a big airplane...
The following film, shown recently at Tribeca, documents the run up, all of the pre-911 , and it connects all of the dots from A...bramoff to Z...arqawi that resulted in the 2nd Pearl Harbor. It is factual, chilling, unsettling and well documented:
Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime 1.0 (1 hr 11 min 48 sec)

"The West Point honor code, which mandates cadets will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do, defines honor and duty," says Joseph Wojcik, co-founder of West Point Graduates Against the War. "And this provides us with a lifelong sense of duty, a shared responsibility for graduates to do the right thing, even if that means admonishing our country's leadership."

The late General Dwight D. Eisenhower was a West Point graduate who also served as the 34th President of the US from 1953-1961.

"When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war."

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity. War settles nothing."

"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."

"If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison. They’ll have enough to eat, a bed and a roof over their heads. But if an American wants to preserve his dignity and his equality as a human being, he must not bow his neck to any dictatorial government."

Dwight D. Eisenhower


Eisenhower's Farewell speech delivered on January 17, 1961 should be mandatory reading for all future Presidents... it sets the tone for a new documentary that is currently in limited distribution, making the rounds of art house cinema - Why We Fight, directed by Eugene Jarecki. It will be released on DVD on June 27, 2006.

Robert Greenwald sent the following update on his forthcoming film:

Dear activists, colleagues and friends:

AMAZING!

We are stunned, energized and very moved by your outpouring of generosity to help make "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers." In the last eight days, you democratized film and political story telling. It's quite remarkable.

Overall, we raised $347,094, just blasting through our $300,000 goal! 2,701 of you contributed an average of $60. Because of that momentum, two large donors pushed us over the top: Erika Glazer and Dick Mazess who champions many great causes, most notably VotersForPeace.us. All of the money will be put to use specifically for this film, both for production and now with some funds to help with outreach, education and distribution.

But first we have to make the movie... so filming starts next week!

The plan: We shoot through the month of May with Kerry Candaele (story producer) and Nick Higgins (director of photography) on the road most of the time while story producers Abbie Hurewitz and Amanda Spain continue researching and interviewing. Lisa Remington is our line producer holding it all together with Ricardo Acuna assisting.

Come June, we'll edit. Carla Gutierrez and Mike Stanley (with Mike Beegle assisting) will start the cutting marathon so we can finish in late July or early August. Sarah and Devin are insisting late July, but I am begging for early August. (This happens with every film!)

And then it’s back to you to take the country by storm beginning in late September!

Stay tuned and hang onto your seats. This is explosive stuff. Your faith and money brings this to life. In September we will need your help again, this time by screening, writing, protesting, organizing and using the film to register new and mobilize voters to force the issue right into the heat of the '06 elections.

We can and will change the way this country runs.

And from the bottom of all our hearts at Brave New Films, THANK YOU for your incredible support!

Robert Greenwald