IFC Center was hot last week. A Jihad For Love had a very successful US premiere there. A film that has and will stir up status quo thinking in the international Muslim community, A Jihad For Love looks at gay and lesbian Muslims and uncovers a hidden face of the world’s fastest-growing religion. It’s an emotional collection of personal stories gathered from India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, South Africa and France. It’s an important film, one that is sure to bring change even in just the telling of it. As the film’s director, Parvez Sharma states, “Our Jihad for tolerance, peace and understanding has only just begun.” Support this Jihad as it screens for a second week at the IFC Center.

Of course Arts Engine’s own eighth annual Media That Matters Film Festival also premiered at IFC Center last week. Brave new films like Hammoudi, an anti-war film showing civilian, often children, casualty of war opened to a packed theater on Wednesday night. The collection of 12 inspiring short films are now available online and on DVD. In the near future we will be getting their messages out to the world and we encourage you to do the same. You can view the films and take action here and can soon add them to your blog, curriculum, program or local screening.

Philadelphia rocked the second annual Black Lily Film and Music Festival this past weekend. I was there to lead a DocuClub session, featuring local filmmaker LeAnn Erickson. We watched a rough cut of Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII. In Rosies, LeAnn tells the story of a group of Philadelphia female mathematicians who did secret ballistics work for the Army during the war, and later became programmers for ENIAC, the first electronic computer. The documentary played to a packed classroom inside International House, near Drexell University. A special surprise for the audience was attendance by the three main female characters, Jean Bartik, Doris Polsky and Shirley Melvin, all of whom are in their 80s.

Director LeAnn Erickson and Top Secret Rosies Doris Polsky, Shirley Melvin, and Jean Bartik

The local audience was enthusiastic and provided LeAnn with valuable insight for her film.

DocuClub is set for a guest screening at this year’s SILVERDOCS festival, in Silver Springs, Maryland. We are work-shopping a rough cut of Stages, by the filmmaker collective Meerkat Media. The session is scheduled for next Tuesday June 17, at the Round House Theater, and is open to pass holders only. I’m certainly pretty excited about this DocuClub session, as well as by the rest of the festival line-up, and especially the Tribute to Spike Lee. See more details of the upcoming DocuClub on our page.

In case you had any doubts, this recent heat wave confirms that Summertime is finally here. A nice way to enjoy nature for active types is to take up outdoorsy sports. For avid and adventurous rock climbers, there are…tall mountains. For the risk-averse, there are cool, dark theaters and a new documentary by German director Pepe Danquart, To The Limit. The film depicts the attempt by Thomas and Alexander Huber, a World-renowned mountain climbing brother team, to speed climb El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, California. Speed climb, you say? Aside from the incredible amount of concentration, stamina, and upper-body strength required just to slow climb a mountain, the brothers try to set a World record in how quickly you can get up the 1,000 vertical nose of El Capitan.

Thomas Huber escalates the tension of the climb

There are gorgeous scenes, as can be expected of a film shot on location at Yosemite and in Patagonia, Chile. There is of course the requisite sibling rivalry between narcissistic alpha male older brother Alexander and sensitive introvert Thomas. The film opens in New York on June 13. If sufficiently inspired, you can take a beginner’s rock climbing class (albeit in an indoor climbing wall) with the City Climbers Club, at the 59th Street city gym.

Last night, I attended the launch party for the 21st Season of P.O.V. The event was held on the lovely rooftop of The Arsenal, which overlooks Central Park. Past and present (maybe future?) filmmakers whose work has been championed by P.O.V. were there, sipping white wine and chatting away. The documentaries featured in this new season of P.O.V. look fantastic and include the broadcast of Arts Engine’s own Election Day on July 1. Check out the rest of the line-up here.

The Tribeca Film Institute (now merged with the former Renew Media) recently launched Reframe. Their site describes Reframe as, “an innovative project which will help individual filmmakers, broadcasters, distributors, public media organizations, archives, libraries and other media owners digitize, market and sell their classic and hard-to-find films and video content using the Internet.”

I was asked to curate a list of films to appear on the site. I was feeling nostalgic so I decided to make a Coming Of Age list. Honestly, I had the hardest time coming up with a clever assortment of films so I kept the title vague. Of course I included some docs (Hoop Dreams, E Minha Cara: That’s My Face), some films that reminded me of my teen years (Smooth Talk, Metropolitan) and some more recent films that I thought were amazingly innovative and just plain good (Me and You and Everyone We Know and Half Nelson).

This list is by no means comprehensive. They are still adding additional films to the site so I change it all the time. I think they are a diverse lot. Check it out and make a list of your own!

There were many amazing sessions, one being Tools For Creating An Immigrant Safety Net. In this session artivist Ricardo Dominguez, presented a hacked Motorola i455 phone reconfigured into a lifesaving device for immigrants crossing the border between Mexico and US. This device has many tools built in to navigate the deadly desert border; built in compass, vibrates near water sources, tracks border patrol and more. Find out more about it at the Transborder Immigrant Project.

Other sessions like Undoing “Crime”: Media To De-Criminalize And De-Colonize broke down the corporate media’s role in criminalizing immigrants and communities of color and showed ways to combat it by producing first person stories, forming community radio stations, producing rapid responses to racist media and holding the media accountable for misrepresentations.

There are many more workshops/panels/talks to speak of but all in all this conference was and is vital in weaving media/technology/art/journalism seamlessly with creating real change.

Be on the lookout for Chinglish subtitles in the near future. According to an article on Wired.com, the fusion of Chinese and English is on its way to becoming a language of its own because there are so few native English-speaking teachers in Asia. In fact, the article claims that by 2020, 85 percent of English speakers will not be native English speakers.

In Singapore and Taiwan, where Singlish and Chinglish have taken off, Asian-English hybrids are already used in movies such as I Not Stupid and books like Eh, Goondu!, as well in musicals, online, and in ads. The Hong Kong Museum of Art even did an exhibition in celebration of it. So in the near future you may have to brush up on your Chinglish as well as Mandarin if you’re headed to the Olympics this year. And forget teaching English abroad. We may need to ask Chinglish tutors to trek to the U.S. But best of all, an end to those mismatched voiceovers, at least in the case of English films viewed in China and vice versa. Chinglish has you covered on both sides.

Personally, I’m excited for the added musicality from changes like using a different pitch to change a word’s meaning, but articles and word endings like –ation aren’t ready to be buried just yet. A, an, and the are still good for clarity and emphasis; they help us distinguish between a rock and The Rock.

-Kathryn Robertson