Faces of Media is the theme for this year's Carnegie International Film Festival
Fourteen recent films examine how media is shaping our culture, and vice versa
by Al Hoff
Faces of Media is the theme for the annual Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival, running from March 21 through April 13. The 14 recent films deal with how media is shaping our culture, whether through the use of social media as an activist tool, the pervasiveness of self-documentation or even the human-rights costs built into our gadgets.
The following films are scheduled for March: The We and the I, a fresh take on Bronx adolescents, from Michel Gondry (March 21); Crocodile in the Yangtze, a documentary about China's first Internet entrepreneur (March 22); and the Israeli social-media examination InContact (March 23). Also screening on March 24 are docs about over-fishing (Sushi: The Global Catch) and Egypt (Tahrir: Liberation Square).Â
The first week of April sees three docs: Blood in the Mobile (April 3), about mining in Congo; Gaamer (April 4), a profile of a Ukrainian computer gamer; and a year at Los Angeles' Fame High (April 6), a performing-arts school. April 7 offers Fragments of a Revolution, in which emails and video are compiled from Iranian protests; and Hello! How Are You?, a Spanish feature film about a middle-aged couple who explore internet chat rooms.
The last week wraps up with: Abendland (April 10), an essay about life at night; You've Been Trumped (April 10), in which a Scottish town fights against Donald Trump's golf course; the Finnish punk-band doc The Punk Syndrome (April 11); The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (April 12), a doc about a British avant-garde musician and his wife's quests to merge their identities; and Back to the Square (April 13), a catch-up with participants in the Tahrir Square protests.
