Bird of Prey, the multi-award-winning feature-length documentary from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, weaves a remarkable story of the world’s rarest eagle species and the heroic individuals working tirelessly to save it. Since its release in 2018, Bird of Prey, has screened to countless audiences around the world and throughout the Philippines where the film has become an invaluable tool for raising awareness and support for conservation of the critically endangered Philippine Eagle.
To learn more about Philippine Eagles and how you can help support their conservation visit here.
We Are The Best! International Trailer 1 (2014) – Swedish Drama Movie HD
Three 12 and 13-year-old girls decide to form a punk band in 1982 Stockholm.
This video is called Exclusive Clip From Punk Film ‘We Are The Best’.
The start of this band of young girls’ start is a bit like the first concert of Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1976. When Siouxsie had never played on stage, Steve had never played bass, Sid Vicious had never played drums, and Marco Pironi had only played some guitar in his bedroom.
Two atheist Swedish girls on drums and bass invite a Christian acoustic guitar player called Hedvig to join them. Not because of agreement with her religious views but because they don’t like that she is shunned at school. They can’t persuade Hedvig to give up religion, but they do convince her to cut her long hair off.
A member of a mainstream rock band offers to give Hedvig electric guitar lessons. But it turns out that without previous electric experience, she is a much better electric guitar player than him. Finally, the girls get respect from older rock musicians.
There really was a band of 12-13-year-old girls, in the Netherlands in early 1980. Sub-trax were interviewed on national radio.
Unfortunately, their drummer had to stop. So their intention to play in March 1980 in Voorschoten with Crass, Poison Girls, Cheap ‘n’ Nasty and other bands could not go ahead.
This 26 February 2021 video from Britain says about itself:
Poly Styrene: I Am A Cliché | Official Trailer | Available to Watch 5 March
Directed by Paul Sng and Celeste Bell
Documentary | English | 89 min
Poly Styrene was the first woman of colour in the UK to front a successful rock band. She introduced the world to a new sound of rebellion, using her unconventional voice to sing about identity, consumerism, postmodernism, and everything she saw unfolding in late 1970s Britain, with a rare prescience. As the frontwoman of X-Ray Spex, the Anglo-Somali punk musician was also a key inspiration for the riot grrrl and Afropunk movements.
Featuring unseen archive material and rare diary entries narrated by Oscar-nominee Ruth Negga, this documentary follows Celeste as she examines her mother’s unopened artistic archive and traverses three continents to better understand Poly the icon and Poly the mother.
ON RELEASE ACROSS UK/IRELAND MARCH 5
This film has been on public view in Britain and Ireland. Will it ever be possible to see it outside Britain and Ireland?
Ten artists, known as the “Hollywood Ten”, originally refused to cooperate with HUAC and were cited for contempt of congress. They were fired and blacklisted by the Motion Picture Association of America the next day in a public announcement. All ten served up to a year in prison, were fined $1,000 and faced great difficulty working in Hollywood again.
In 1950, a pamphlet called “Red Channels” accused 151 actors, writers, directors, musicians and performers of having pre-war connections to left-wing or communist organizations. Those listed were blacklisted from working until they renounced their affiliations and testified to the HUAC. As individuals cooperated and “named names”, the list grew. Altogether some 320 people in the entertainment industry were blacklisted for suspected involvement in “subversive” activities.
“Friendly witnesses” included Gary Cooper, Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney, who claimed the League of Women Voters was a Communist front. HUAC critics, on the other hand, formed the Committee for the First Amendment in support of the Hollywood Ten. It included Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Henry Fonda, Gene Kelly, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra. The group flew to Washington D.C. in October 1947 to protest HUAC hearings.
In 1952, the famous director Elia Kazan named eight former friends from the Group Theater in New York as communist party members (his 1954 film “On the Waterfront” is often viewed as a defense of informers). This ended his long friendship with Arthur Miller and inspired Miller’s play “The Crucible” (1953) about the Salem witch hunt of 1692. In 1957, Miller was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name names.
The blacklist was effectively broken in 1960 when Dalton Trumbo, an unrepentant member of the Hollywood Ten, was publicly acknowledged as the screenwriter of the films “Spartacus” and “Exodus.”
Any assessment of McCarthy’s attitudes towards Jews has to begin in 1950, as he was launching the Red-baiting crusade that would turn his name into an ism.
One of his first targets, Anna Rosenberg, was such a star when she worked for the War Manpower Commission during World War II that General Eisenhower made her the first female recipient of the Medal of Freedom and President Truman bestowed a Medal for Merit. When the Korean War was gearing up, Secretary of Defense George Marshall tapped Rosenberg to find the troops needed to fight there, protect Europe, and safeguard the homefront. Never had the Defense Department offered such an influential posting to a woman — never mind a Hungarian-born, liberal-leaning Jewish woman.
Within a day, a chorus had formed to oppose her nomination, uniting critics of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, racial desegregation, Zionism, and the Nuremberg verdicts. It wasn’t just her gender and politics that enraged them, but the conviction that anyone named Rosenberg ipso facto was a Soviet spy.
McCarthy was already acquainted with this nefarious crowd, some of whom denied Jesus Christ had been Jewish. As early as 1946, the senator had heard about Gerald L.K. Smith, who would later warn his followers to “keep the Zionist Jew Anna Rosenberg from becoming the dictator of the Pentagon.” He met early on and seemed impressed with the Holocaust-denying Ku Klux KlansmanWesley Swift, who would later instruct congregants of his Church of Jesus Christ-Christian that Rosenberg was not merely a “Jewess” but “an alien from Budapest with Socialistic ideas.”
While he was an instinctual people person, McCarthy was an increasingly indiscriminate judge of character. He listened to a callow staff eager to please him and a coterie of professional anti-Communists out for scalps, rather than to the Republicans on the Armed Service Committee who joined Democrats in unanimously approving Rosenberg’s nomination. In the end, McCarthy was forced to do an about-face, joining the overwhelming majority of senators who confirmed her by a voice vote.
Was his attack on Rosenberg driven by anti-Semitism? The Senator’s own words over the years offer grist for that theory, as even his closest friends acknowledged in interviews. He’d referred to his own lawyer as “a Hebe”.
That lawyer was self-hating Jew and self-hating closet gay homophobic witch hunter Roy Cohn.
A Jewish businessman he suspected of cheating him was “a little sheeny”, another anti-Jewish slur. Years later, according to Army General Counsel John Adams, he repeatedly called a staffer he disdained “a miserable little Jew.”
Then there was the backing McCarthy got from notorious Jew-haters like Smith, founder of the America First Party, and the backing he gave William Dudley Pelley, the fascist activist and writer. McCarthy liked to shock friends by pulling out his copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, calling it inspirational or saying “that’s the way to do it.”
Religious bigotry resurfaced as an issue in 1953, when McCarthy went after what he said were spies in the U.S. Army generally, and especially at a Signal Corps facility in New Jersey. Forty-one of the 45 civilians suspended at Fort Monmouth were Jews, or 95%, whereas 25% of its overall civilian workforce was Jewish, according to the Anti-Defamation League, which urged the Army secretary to do a full-fledged study of possible prejudice. Nearly all those targeted by McCarthy would be reinstated, but not before their lives were upended and they were left to wonder why.
“There is an assumption,” said Allen Lovenstein, a Jewish engineer at the fort, “that there is an anti-Semitic movement.”
Interestingly, Senator McCarthy generally did not lash out against higher-profile Jews, such as Albert Einstein — at least not in public. Among his papers, I found a never-delivered draft of a speech about Einstein, the Nobel Laureate in Physics who was also an avowed Socialist, a pacifist and gay rights advocate, a Jewish-German refugee, and a sufficient worry to the FBI that it kept a 1,449-page file on him.
“I don’t challenge the legal right of Professor Einstein to be a Communist, a fellow traveler, or just a plain political dope,” McCarthy wrote in the draft dated October 1950. “Albert Einstein is one of the great scientific geniuses of all time. On the other hand, it is clear that Albert Einstein has grossly abused the privileges which he has been accorded by the gift of American citizenship.”
The text, which was crossed out with a dark pencil and a pink note saying “Cut from Atomic Scientists’ Speech”, claimed Einstein had “been affiliated with not less than 27 Communist-front organizations,” and ended with this line of poetic vituperation: “The clichés of the rabble-rousing soapbox Socialist pour from his pen as easily as his cosmic equations.”
Did he hold back for fear of being accused again of being anti-Jewish, or because an adviser cautioned temperance when it came to the revered genius? The Senator’s papers do not explain.
The truth is that there is evidence on both sides of the was-he-or-wasn’t-he anti-Semitic question, much the way there is today with the divide over how to balance President Donald Trump’s embrace of anti-Semites with his strong support of Israel and closeness to Orthodox Jews (including his daughter and son-in-law). McCarthy had Jewish friends as well as aides, and he boosted Israel … .
What’s clear, however, is that McCarthy’s reckless accusations and trampling of witnesses’ rights were offensive to age-old Jewish values, with or without overt anti-Semitism. That’s easy to say in hindsight, but was also the verdict of Jewish Americans at the time. They were the one religious group that consistently and overwhelmingly rejected McCarthy, with 15% viewing him favorably and 71% unfavorably.
Einstein captured that Jewish outrage better than anyone. “America”, he wrote, “is incomparably less endangered by its own Communists than by the hysterical hunt for the few Communists that are here.” And he advised colleagues called to testify before legislative panels probing communism to refuse, even if it meant “jail and economic ruin.”
Larry Tye, a longtime reporter for the Boston Globe, is the author of eight books, including the just-published “Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy.”
The Swiss Alps: Wild Animal Paradise | Free Documentary Nature
Gentle, green meadows, rugged rock faces, mysterious lakes, dense forests, tall mountains, low-lying river deltas, quietly meandering mountain streams and smack dab in the middle, a unique fauna – THIS is Switzerland! We trace the elementary power of nature and present animals and plants in landscapes that have hardly ever been touched by mankind.
Switzerland is an alpine country, but it is also Europe’s surge tank. Rivers such as the Rhine and the Rhone have their sources here. Glaciers, crevasses, icy cold caves and the underwater dome of the Verzasca are the unusual settings we chose for this film. We meet with rare, selected animal species and present their behavioural patterns, such as the Swiss or Arven jay [meaning the spotted nutcracker], the lynx and albino catfish. Cold, wind, snow and extreme locations demand adaptation that make us marvel.
The Norwegian fjords are one of the most impressive regions in Europe. A surprisingly rich underwater world lurks in the deep, cold waters: from vast coral reefs full of luminescent sea creatures to herring-hunting killer whales and humpback whales. Award-winning nature filmmaker Jan Haft reveals the special diversity hidden in the dark water and shows underwater behaviour that has never been seen before. Fjord is an intimate portrait of a unique wilderness.
On 13 June 2020, I went to see this film about northern Norway. Most chairs in the cinema were kept empty, to make spatial distancing against the coronavirus possible.
This beautiful film shows the importance of the billions of herring wintering in the fjords for the food chain. Killer whales attack them: then, dead herring drift upwards as food for herring gulls. Other dead herring sink to the bottom, as food for seastars, crabs, lantern shanks and flatfish.
Apart from humpbacks and orcas, the film mentions a third cetacean species: harbour porpoises. Unfortunately and unnecessarily, the film says, each year 10,000 porpoises die as bycatch in fishing nets in Norway.
In winter, the fjords are mostly frozen, stopping much sunlight from shining underwater. That attracts a deep-sea species which cannot stand much light: Periphylla periphylla, the helmet jellyfish.
The film also pays attention to wildlife in the mountains around the fjords. Like Megabunus diadema, a harvestman species. And bird species: capercaillie, bluethroat and ruff.
22-year-old film-maker dies in Egyptian jail after two years behind bars without trial
A YOUNG artist detained without trial in Egypt for two years for making a film mocking President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi has died in prison, his lawyers say.
Shady Habash, who was just 22, died on Saturday in Cairo’s Tora prison complex. Lawyer Ahmed el-Khwaga said the cause of death was not known. Friends published a letter he wrote from prison last October in which he said he was “going mad or dying slowly because you’ve been thrown in a room two years ago and forgotten.”
Rights lawyer Khaled Ali said he ought to have been released two months ago, having served the maximum jail time pending investigation.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
