Truth Needs a Soldier

I grew up on the West Coast of Canada, in the midst of the world’s largest temperate rainforest. I lived in a quiet suburb that was nestled at the foot of the mountain, and every spring, my back yard was teeming with passing wildlife. Deer would come to graze, bears with their young would wander up the driveway in search of any food scraps that might have fallen from our garbage bins, and at night, racoons would scurry and frolic around the shrubbery. Naturally, growing up in this setting moulded me into a full-fledged nature lover, and I never took for granted the fact that the animal kingdom regular perched itself at my doorstep. Now I live in the city, and though I run into the occasional skunk, or raccoon that’s wandered out of a city park, it’s just not the same.

Being a nature lover, generally means you have a brood of animals living under your roof, and mine happen to be of the feline variety. So naturally, a trip to Africa a couple of years back afforded me the opportunity to see wildlife I had only read about in books, or seen in movies, but I actually worked along side lions on a release project. I was learning how to become a vet tech at the time. Running around the Serengeti with 200lb lion cubs was a dream come true, and if you ever  have a month to spare for an escape, Africa needs to be on your radar. But this post isn’t about selling you on a trip to Africa, this post is about one of the most fascinating and well done documentaries about the top predators of the African Serengeti, Cats.

Africa Cats is an incredible documentary about a pride of lions, and a cheetah mother and how these two completely different species of cat survive the wilds of the African savannah. Every last morsel of footage is taken in the epic Masai Mara reserve in Kenya, and the filmography is some of the most impressive I have ever seen. The film is a soap opera of sorts, and follows the lives of two main families. The first, Layla, an aging mother lion who spends the course of the film fiercely protecting her beautiful cub, Mara. Layla has to stave off the wilds of the Savannah to ensure the survival and success of her only cub amidst a pride that is weary of this elderly mother. The other family featured in this film, is Sita, a majestic young cheetah who is struggling to raise her five beautiful cubs on a savannah that is bursting with threats left, right and centre. The film also features a uniquely large bachelor pride that endures a series of power struggles to gain a hold on a large pride of lionesses and their young.

There is so much action in this film, I couldn’t possibly put it all into words, and I don’t want to give too much away. What makes this film so unique is the footage it managed to acquire. However, it is by no means the best film nature film on the market today. And I can’t say that Samuel L. Jackson, though I adore his acting work, couldn’t quiet lend the same credibility to a nature film as the legendary Sir David Attenborough. Jackson may have created some sense of drama to the film, but there is a nervous energy behind his voice, and lacks the experience of Attenborough.

Nonetheless, if you are in the dark when it comes to life and times of Africa’s most beautiful creatures, I suggest that you consider picking this little gem up, you’ll enjoy it!

I have this bucket list of documentaries a mile long, and there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to dedicate an hour or more to watching television. But because I’ve been suffering from some severe back issues of the last couple of weeks, I’ve been able to put my feet up, throw on a good “Docu”, and let my fingers do the talking. This week was a fascinating hour long documentary on overprotective parenting, and how it’s effecting their children. It focused on Canadian parents specifically, which is always refreshing since I am Canadian, and a majority of the programming and TV Docs that we get up here, are all American based.  In spite of it being a Canadian program, the points made in this film are 100% universal, and whether you’re a Canadian or American, we all can relate to this ridiculous epidemic!

The documentary is entitled, Hyper Parents & Coddled Kids, and it’s all about, you guessed it, parents that are becoming increasingly overprotective and how their children are actually unable to function properly out in the real world once they step out from under their parents thumbs. The documentary transforms us back to the 1980′s when baby boomers decided to not only have children much later in life, but to have fewer of them. The offspring of these baby boomers were thought of as “precious cargo”, and it was at this time that parents began engineering not only their children’s current schedules, but their futures also. With piano lessons, gymnastics, Little League, and after-school tutoring sessions, children become projects and parents are transformed into project managers.

The message that was meant to be absorbed, was that parents have completely lost the plot when it comes to their children. With all of their efforts to give their children a leg up in life, they’ve in turn created little monsters. Instead of producing well-adjusted, intelligent and hardworking individuals, these “Millennial Babies” are frequenting their university counsellors’ office, with complaints of anxiety and stress because they feel they have impress their parents. And when they graduate, and step out into the work force, they’re incapable of holding down a career, they’re spoiled, rebellious and incapable of cutting the cord.

Being a Millennial kid myself, I thought I’d have to temper my feelings, but I was completely on board with what the professionals were saying; Parents are becoming ridiculous, and their children are absurd. I started to think about my own cohort, even my own sibling. There is a serious ring of truth here. Thank goodness my parents didn’t spoil me, because I turned out great! 

As a student working on their liberal arts degree, there are few things that I love more than to sit down with a bowl of popcorn and soak in a really thought-provoking documentary, but every now and then, I’ll come across one that just leaves me scratching my head. I’m talking about none other than The Perfect Vagina. Now, if you could just stop blushing for a moment or two, I’m going to give you a little insight into one of the most disturbing documentaries I’ve ever watched! This film exposes a frighteningly popular type of reconstructive surgery on your, yup you guessed it, your secret garden! Labioplasty is a procedure to help women correct their less than lovely labias. As an informed feminist and human rights activist, I was aware of Labioplasty for women who were victims of vaginal mutilation and female circumcision, but I had no idea that women were undergoing this pricey procedure for elective purposes.

What I was most concerned about was this whole notion of magazine perfect female genitalia. What does that even mean? We were clothes don’t we? Unless we’re active members of a nudist colony, we’re not running around like a troupe of baboons with our genitalia on display, so what I couldn’t understand was why the fairer sex has all of a sudden decided that the way their nether region looks in a bikini is all important.

Where the documentary goes so right, is by warning the public, and prospective female patients, that there is a miniscule amount of research or study that has been conducted to determine the long term side effects of undergoing such an extreme surgery. Regardless of this, women are paying upwards of £3000 (USD$4800) for the procedure without understanding the physical or psychological ramifications.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, one could comment that this appears to be seemingly similar to male circumcision and that this obsession with the genital aesthetics is nothing new. And, I might have to agree, to a point. Several studies have been conducted on male circumcision and its long term effects and it is still considered to be a fairly small and far less painful procedure than Labioplasty.

Now that you’ve finally stopped blushing, take a moment to think about how ridiculous the human condition has become. With the exception of those women who have undergone the most unspeakable acts, whether due in part to tradition, or against their will, if women are considering surgery down there for the aesthetic purposes, my advice to you? Wear shorts, or get over it!

A few years ago, I had an epiphany while I was enjoying a meal at one of my favourite local restaurants. I suddenly stared down at the perfectly seared pork chop on my plate, nestled alongside a seasonal green salad and impeccably cooked heirloom vegetables. You see, the thing is, I knew exactly how my the vegetables on my plate were grown, and where they came from, but I had absolutely no clue where my pork chop came from. How did it get here? Was it reared with careful nurturing like my organic vegetables?
Being a naturally curious person, and an avid animal lover, I wondered why I had never pondered this before. I shared my epiphany with my better half, a self-proclaimed foodie, and we decided to explore the shroud of mystery surrounding the issues of rearing livestock. I took the same approach as if I were researching top online colleges, I went in search of all of the experts and great minds on the subject. I read books like Eating Animals and the Omnivores Dilemma by authors Jonathan Safran and Michael Pollan. But nothing I came across was as vile, and heart-wrenching as the film Death on a Factory Farm.

Without revealing too much of the content within the film, the image of a large sow, being swung through the air, hanging by its neck, alive, flailing, is an image that I haven’t been able to erase from my mind since the moment I saw it. Death on a Factory Farm chronicles a court case about the treatment of pigs in Wayne County, Ohio, and the inhumane methods used to euthanize pigs that are to be consumed by humans. This is not a film for the feint of heart, and I would recommend strongly against children watching it. The images are raw, sickening, and the sounds of infant piglets being mutilated before death is beyond disturbing, but if you eat meat, pork especially, you have no right to eat another morsel without knowing what they endure to be on your plate.

Wayne County is not an isolated case of animal cruelty against factory animals. But it is an extraordinary example of life on a factory farm. As a meat-eater, I felt it was my responsibility to either seek out alternate meats or, to seek out farmers who refused to mistreat their animals, and opted for more humane methods.

A manufactured landscape. What does that mean? Well, when something is manufactured, it can mean a few things. It generally infers that something starts in a raw form, and is finished through a process, resulting in an altered final product. The geographic landscape of Mainland China is undoubtedly an altered product. China has been touted as the sleeping tiger, in direct reference to its accelerated industrialization in the last three decades and its current world position as the number one manufacturer of just about everything under the sun.

The documentary film, Manufactured Landscapes, is a full length film that artfully illustrates the intense industrial productive powers that drives the Chinese economic machine. In the opening scene, the cameraman pans across thousands of somber-faced factory workers. For nine seemingly endless minutes, the camera captures several football fields worth of factory floor space.

Not only does it illustrate the wretched destruction caused industrialization, but it also highlights the capabilities by the human machine. The accelerated environmental devastation caused by China’s race to economic greatness has had such a profound impact that scientists and environmentalists are scrambling to find solutions.  The construction of the Three Gorges Dam was a twenty year project that forced nearly 1.3 million people, under the direction of their own government, to manually dissemble their thousand year old villages, and take up residence elsewhere. Thousands of civil engineers worked feverishly to complete the gargantuan project and the end result was unlike anything the world had ever seen. The Dam is a whopping 50% larger than any other dam in the world and is despised by scientists, human rights activists and environmentalists alike.Manufactured Landscapes is chalked full of sobering images. Clips of vast mines, miles wide, resemble the geographic marvel of the Grand Canyon, but also show the effects of our full scale assault against Mother Nature. It is a somber reminder that the human species has much to learn about the delicate balance of nature vs machine.

A good documentary presents the viewer with the directors version of perceived truth. In a literal sense, they are a non-fiction version of a reality, provide the viewer with biased perspective. Documentaries are my favourite kind of film. They provoke thought, provoke emotion, and most importantly, provoke action. There is something so intimate about a documentary, that can’t be captured in a motion picture film, they force you to take a little piece of the film with you, and a documentary called Life and Debt resonated with me so fiercely, that it has altered my perspective on tourism in the Caribbean for life.

Life and debt is actually a film I was assigned to watch while I was a university student. The class was Sociology of the Global South, an in depth comparison and contrast between the wealthy Global North and the stark contrast of the poverty stricken nations of the Global South. And this contrast is appropriately represented in Life and Debt as we explore the world of a nation, so in debt, it has been brought to its knees and has no other choice but to rely on the handouts from the industrial world, the same industrial world that created their debt crisis in the first place.

The film opens with images of wealthy tourists escaping the winter misery of their home countries, and landing in a what feels to them, as paradise on Earth. Lured in by the hypnotic din of a steel drum, pristine beaches, turquoise waters and a culture seemingly eager to please their foreign guests, are all part of an elaborate game of smoke and mirrors. In 1977, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, Michael Manly, under duress, signed an agreement that would guarantee Jamaica’s first loan from the IMF as an independent nation. Under the crippling structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Jamaica’s market was practically blasted open, and a flood of foreign companies, in one foul swoop, rendered Jamaica unable to self sustain. Rather than providing funding to Jamaica so it could build it’s infrastructure, invest in agriculture, health care and education, Jamaica’s loan debts are so sky high, they are actually forced to spend their loans on repaying debts!

Opening up the Jamaican market was opened up to the world spelled disaster for Jamaican dairy farmers. American and European companies systematically shut down Jamaica’s dairy industry by selling milk products to impoverished Jamaicans at prices that were so artificially low, buying local milk was unaffordable. The same disaster struck the agricultural industry when foreign countries exported fruits and vegetables to Jamaica at lower rates than their home-grown produce. With the exception of their banana industry, which is in grave danger, Jamaica was able to capitalize on Britain’s “guilt” over it’s past colonial territories, and purchases bananas almost exclusively from Jamaican banana growers, even though they’re more expensive than their South American competition.

Life and debt paints a bleak and realistic landscape, ravaged by the greed of the Global North, the stupidity of the IMF and World Bank, and a people so down-trodden by ill treatment, they have become resentful of superpowers like the USA and China, and rightfully so. It doesn’t take a financial analyst to understand that funneling copious amounts of money into nation that is incapable of paying it back, is a recipe for disaster.

Please take a moment and watch this film. You will gain a greater understanding into why Jamaica is suffering so greatly, and it might even make you think twice before you book your next luxurious holiday to a nation on its knees.