Activism & Protests (11)
By Colette On April 22, 2013 | 0 Comments
Help us reach our goal of 5000 boosts by midnight April 25!
Hello Cool World is excited to be working on the media relations for Occupy Love, an inspiring new documentary from award-winning Canadian filmmaker Velcrow Ripper (Scared Sacred, Fierce Light). Occupy Love explores the cultural uprisings of our time from the Occupy Movement and Arab Spring to the European Summer and environmental protests and asks the question, “How could the crisis we are facing become a love story?”.
Check out the trailer HERE.
Occupy Love is being self-distributed by a talented team led by Velcrow and producers Nova Ami and Ian Mackenzie. Their crowd sourced, social media driven approach to distribution is consistent with the theme of the film, which successfully raised $80,000 through the crowd-funding platforms IndieGoGo and Kickstarter!
The global response to the film has been amazing with over 200 grassroots screenings being self-organized by individuals and organizations in over 25 countries, and more being added every day. The largest community screening so far took place in Porto Allegre, Brazil on April 11th attracting a whopping 1,500 attendees!
We look forward to watching the momentum grow!
Occupy Love marks the completion of Velcrow's Fierce Love Trilogy, a twelve-year journey which began with Scared Sacred, named one of Canada’s Top 10 movies of 2004, and winner of the 2005 Genie (Canadian Academy Award) for best feature documentary. It continued with 2008′s award winning Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action. (We've got a special to buy both these DVDs on our webstore for 40% off.)
We worked on outreach and DVD production for Scared Sacred. As with our work with The Corporation, and The Take, we've been inspired by how films with a social message, can find audiences and inspire those audiences to action. All these films are available on our webstore, and all our profits go to our campaigns, and now also to the distribution platform for social cause media we are developing. Check out our proposal to CFC's IdeaBOOST program, and please BOOST us, our dream is to better help films like Occupy Love engage with audiences, and to encourage audiences to organize actions as well as screenings.
Occupy Love is a moving, transformative, heartfelt film, featuring Ripper’s signature stunning visuals and rich soundscapes along with interviews from leading visionaries including Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Jeremy Rifkin, bell hooks and Charles Eisenstein.
The Occupy Love US theatrical tour starts Friday, May 3, 2013 in New York City, with screenings and special events to follow in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Seattle.
Coming to Canadian theatres starting June 2013! Check out more screenings and opportunities to get involved after the page break...
Tag(s):
Aboriginal,
Activism & Protests,
Adbusters,
Alternative Economics,
Arts and Culture,
Blogging,
Climate Change,
Distribution,
Environment,
Film Launch,
First Nations,
Hello Cool World,
Local Events and Parties,
Middle East,
Naomi Klein,
Occupy Movement,
Poverty and Economic Justice,
Social Justice,
The Corporation
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Colette joined Hello Cool World team back in 2003 and was a key organizer for The Corporation and The Take's grassroots outreach efforts across North America. After being inspired by the organizing and awareness building potential of the internet and social issue films, she returned to school to study Communications and sharpen her skills. Once graduating, Colette returned to Hello Cool World once again as a grassroots campaign consultant. She is now the Director of Distribution for Hello Cool World's new fair trade distribution arm.
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By Katherine Dodds On April 05, 2013 | 0 Comments
At Hello Cool World we really are dreamers, and it's a good thing too. We dream of tools for social change, amplification engines for all our visions of alternative futures. The dream is what keeps me going.
There is a story behind every dream. Since I learned to read (such a long time ago), the technology that is the alphabet changed my life forever. But I also had the first massive moment of facing my limits because I had always assumed that once a person learned to read, they simply went on to read all the books. Which is what I set out to do.
The moment when I realized I could never read all the books was devastating. I also discovered there were more languages than I could ever learn. The tower of babble fell on my five-year old self, already drunk on fermented knowledge apples. It was one of my most profound moments, the friction between desire and reality, and I never recovered from learning my personal limits.
Since then I have been obsessed with systems. And collaborations. Things that help people do more than what they can do alone. And which is why, in such a personal way, I fell in love with the possiblities of the internet.
When we began working on The Corporation over a decade ago, our dream was to mobilize a grassroots network that connects audiences to ideas and actions. I remember excited conversations with Mark Achbar, before the film was even in production, about grassroots outreach and the possiblities of email. We were excited about websites and heady over hypertext. It was a time when blogs barely existed, and Facebook and Twitter were years away.
But the people and projects behind the technology were the point all along. What I fell in love with was the power of connecting people. We had a grassroots hit on our hands armed with little more than an email list. As we foraged forward, we built the technological infrastructure to go with it, a centralized platform to create and launch campaigns. We always liked to say that our platform balanced content, technology and outreach.
And I could not have done ANY of this alone. Films take teams of people. So do websites, databases and strategies. What we built in the early days (with the strategic advice of Scott Nelson and the hands-on help of Phillip Djwa, followed by David Griffith, and more recently with Atef Abdelkefi & Sandy Haksi), has been serving us well.
But now, we at Hello Cool World are up against the limits of our old code, and in the face of new frontiers it's time to BOOST our platform to new heights. In a way that will offer the economy of scale to our potential user and investors.
This platform connects all the work we have been doing. We are putting into practice everything we have learned before, during and after the launches of The Corporation and other documentaries The Take, Scared Sacred, and 65_RedRoses, as well as from book projects like Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and Picturing Transformation, Nexw-áyantsut, the book I am co-writing (with Chief Bill Williams and Nancy Bleck) for the Uts'am Witness Project. We're drawing on our experience with LACE Campaign, promoting cervical cancer awareness, and our many sexual health campaigns and cross-cultural projects, all of which require mobilizing and connecting people around a cause. We're proud of what we've accomplished and if we can scale it up, we believe we can do more good for more people.
Make our dreams come true, not only for us, but for you.
By Sandy Haksi On October 24, 2012 | 0 Comments
Over 118,000 people have signed the petition to ensure the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) does not create an Internet trap!
Now, Open Media is hosting a live online question-and-answer session about the TPP and other Internet issues with leading advocates and experts. Check out their info below...
Do you have a question about the future of the Internet? Want to learn more about secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership's (TPP) Internet trap? Have an idea for how we can reach more people with the StopTheTrap.net campaign?
We are...
- Grassroots Internet freedom group OpenMedia (Steve Anderson)
- Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian
- Ben Huh, CEO of The Cheezburger Network
- Digital rights advocates and experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Electronic Frontiers Australia, InternetNZ, Public Knowledge, Public Citizen, and Professor Michael Geist
- Online innovators Mike Masnick from Techdirt, Elliot Noss from TuCows, and Michael Tippett from Ayoudo
- Civil society leaders from the ACLU and Andrew Rasiej from the Personal Democracy Media
We’re here all day (9 AM – 7 PM Eastern)! Join us here and contribute to what is surely the most exciting movement of our time: Internet freedom.
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Sandy Haksi is the Web Campaign Manager and Sr. Writer at Good Company Communications.
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By Sandy Haksi On September 28, 2012 | 0 Comments
This blog is cross-posted on The Corporation.
NEWSFLASH - VANCOUVERITES DON'T MISS THE FINAL SCREENING OF SHADOWS OF LIBERTY TONIGHT AT VIFF. This is an amazing film, and a must-see for anyone who cares about independent media. Mark Achbar describes the film as "taking up where Manufacturing Consent Left off" and "the best films on this topic so far." Check out the film. ShadowsofLiberty.org/a> It ends with a call to action for the fight to keep the internet free!
... Read on for our Stop the Trap blog! ...
Stop the Trap! Send a message to governments involved in the TPP to make the process transparent, accountable, and open to public participation and to all interested stakeholders.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) has been described as "NAFTA on steroids," a trade agreement designed in secret by lobbyists from big corporations and industry. The breathtaking power grab would allow them to essentially write their own regulations and circumvent democracy, granting them powers over our health, environment, internet use, labour rights, and more. The countries involved in negotiations are United States, Canada, Australia, Brunei, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam.
When Big Tobacco/Oil/Media/Pharma/Agriculture/Retail and other corporations get together to party, we know we're in for one hell of a hangover.
By Michelle Reid On April 03, 2012 | 0 Comments
We're proud to work on so many great causes at Hello Cool World. Lately we've been buzzing about 65_RedRoses as the date of the US premiere on OWN Documentary Club approaches (May 3rd!), and also because we'll be releasing the new edition of the film on DVD (available in Canada only). Canadian supporters can get the deluxe collectors version at a discount price now - pre-sales for the Special Edition DVD (sorry, Canada only) are only $29.95 until April 15th! The regular price will be $34.95 so it's a great deal and the time is ticking down.
Not only are we excited about sharing this great film with people, but we're also thrilled with the packaging. We thoroughly research our sources and suppliers to develop campaign materials that are not only beautifully designed and high quality, but also sustainably, responsibly and ethically created. Since "green" and "eco" are buzzwords used so frequently that they've almost lost their meaning, we thought we'd tell you a little more about where our campaign awareness materials come from, so you can feel good about supporting cool campaigns!
The materials for the 65_RedRoses DVD cases are plastic-free using 100% recycled paper. Our #4Eva t-shirts are printed on sweatshop-free American Apparel t-shirts, made in a garment factory in Montreal. From there they are screenprinted by our friends at Special Screencraft, a small Vancouver-based printing business. Our #4Eva pendants are also printed locally, and assembled by hand with love and care by the Hello Cool World team!
Michelle is a freelance writer and anthropologist with a Master of Public Health from UBC. Her passions are promoting health and building community. She's worked in grassroots community organizations in Vancouver, Victoria and Oceania.
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