Celebrating the Bicentennial of Mexico (1810-2010)

2,501 Migrants: A Journey

Global migration as seen through the eyes of Oaxacan artist, Alejandro Santiago

AVAILABLE ON DVD SEPTEMBER 14

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LOS ANGELES (August 10, 2010) – The small Mexican state of Oaxaca is the largest exporter of human labor to the United States.  Understanding the devastating effects of a town left behind, filmmaker and Oaxacan native, Yolanda Cruz takes a look at the other side of immigration to see what happens to a village when virtually all of its citizens have left for a chance at a brighter economic future.  In celebration of Mexico’s bicentennial (9/16/10), 2,501 MIGRANTS: A JOURNEY will be released nationwide on DVD on September 14, 2010.

This marks Cruz’s seventh documentary all of which deal in themes of Mexico’s indigenous people.  Her other films include:  “Entre Sueños,” Sundance Film Festival selection in 2000; “Women Who Organize;” “Sueños Binacionales;” “Guenati’za;” and “MENA.” She also worked with Brave New Films where she produced and directed three episodes of the ”Freedom Files” including: “Freedom to Marry,” “Freedom to Dream: Rights of Immigrants,” and “Freedom to Learn: School to Prison Pipeline.” 2,501 MIGRANTS: A JOURNEY was an Official Selection as the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and was the Winner for Best Documentary Film at the Expresión en Corto International Film Festival.  Additionally, the film has screened at the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and will be screening at the Smithsonian in New York and Washington DC during Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15 – Oct. 15).

Alejandro Santiago is one of Oaxaca’s leading artists having received critical acclaim in Mexico, the U.S. and Europe.  Born in San Pedro Teococuilco, he left the small village to pursue his art career, which eventually led him to France for a brief stay.  When he returned to his birthplace, he found more than half of the population gone.  Santiago then decided to re-populate the village with 2,501 life-size sculptures, each measuring just over 4-feet tall and weighing approximately 150 pounds.  The exhibition debuted in Monterrey, Mexico and Santiago’s plans are to permanently display the sculptures on the streets of Teococuilco.

SYNOPSIS : Every day, thousands of primarily poor and young indigenous Mexicans abandon their homes in communities throughout the country. Whole villages are left empty of everyone but children and old people as these migrants leave their families and cultures and journey to the first world in search of jobs and a brighter future – or, any economic future at all.

2,501 MIGRANTS: A JOURNEY illustrates this through the story of 45-year old artist, Alejandro Santiago. Affluent and erudite, Alejandro returns home to Teococuilco — after a brief self-exile in France — to a virtual ghost town. He experiences, first hand, the reality that Oaxaca has emerged as one of Mexico’s leading exporters of human labor to the United States. Inspired by this, he decides to create a monumental installation art piece: 2,501 life-size sculptures – an homage to each migrant who left his village.

Filmmaker and native Oaxacan, Yolanda Cruz, explores the questions of art and an indigenous community in the context of global migration and how that impacts the roots and livelihood of a small village. Alejandro’s quiet demeanor and passion for art is celebrated and captured as respectfully and as beautifully as each individual sculpture. His knowledge is shared with those who have stayed behind. They’ve dedicated their lives to this installation in honor of their small Oaxacan town.

BASICS:

SRP $19.95 | USA | TRT: 57 minutes

Street Date 9/14/10

UPC 88139419827 | Catalog CLS 1098

Genre: Documentary

In Spanish with English subtitles

Special Bonus Features: Extended Interviews • Photo Gallery • Deleted Scenes

For trailer, images and downloads, visit www.2501migrants-themovie.com, or click here for high res art.

Visit www.facebook.com/2501Migrants for more information.

ABOUT CINEMA LIBRE STUDIO

Cinema Libre Studio is a haven for independent filmmakers with one-stop shopping for production and distribution.  The company, a leader in distributing social issue films and narratives by young, up-and-coming filmmakers, is a full-service studio with a full array of offerings including:  acquisitions, theatrical distribution, international & television sales, grassroots outreach, digital download and post-production services.  Headquartered in Los Angeles, the company is best known for distributing award-winning films that include: “Outfoxed,” “Uncovered: The War on Iraq,” Participant Media’s “Angels in the Dust,” the Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award Winner, “Conventioneers,” and the studio’s own production, “The End of Poverty?”  The company has recently released Oliver Stone’s documentary “South of the Border.”  For more information, please visit www.cinemalibrestudio.com.

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For more information contact press@cinemalibrestudio.com.

]]> http://cinemalibrestudio.com/clsblog/2010/08/24/2501-migrants-a-journey-coming-to-dvd-on-september-14/feed/ 0 http://cinemalibrestudio.com/clsblog/2010/08/24/cars-to-be-built-from-hemp-yes-and-electric-cars-at-that/ http://cinemalibrestudio.com/clsblog/2010/08/24/cars-to-be-built-from-hemp-yes-and-electric-cars-at-that/#comments Tue, 24 Aug 2010 17:22:52 +0000 Lee http://cinemalibrestudio.com/clsblog/?p=807 Motive Industries’ Cannabis Composite EV Satisfies Your Need for Speed, Weed

BY ARIEL SCHWARTZ Fri Aug 20, 2010

Motive Industries recently announced plans for Canada’s first biocomposite electric vehicle–made of hemp. Will cops have automatic probable cause to search it?

In a move that will only strengthen the association between potheads and environmentalism, Motive Industries recently announced that it is working on Canada’s first biocomposite electric vehicle. The biocomposite in question? Hemp.

Read On Here.

In 2006, Charlene Strong lost her wife of 10 years, Kate Fleming, in a flash flood accident in Seattle, Washington. At the time of Kate’s hospitalization, Charlene was denied the basic right to be by her partner’s side, and was refused dignity and respect following Kate’s passing, as the funeral director dismissed Charlene’s existence in funeral preparations.

Here she is in a clip for the US Census Bureau, telling her story and how the 2010 Census could help gays and lesbians.

Watch and Read More Here.

Originally posted on: Jun 20, 2010

DHAKA — Up to 77 million Bangladeshis have been exposed to toxic levels of arsenic from contaminated drinking water, and even low-level exposure to the poison is not risk-free, The Lancet medical journal reported.

Over the past decade, more than 20 percent of deaths recorded in a study that monitored nearly 12,000 people in the Araihazar district of the capital Dhaka appear to have been caused by arsenic-tainted well water.

By some estimates, between 35 and 77 million people in Bangladesh have been chronically exposed to arsenic-contaminated water as a result of a catastrophically misguided campaign in the 1970s.

Millions of tube wells were drilled in the aim of providing villagers with clean, germ-free water. Many wells were inadvertently dug into shallow layers of soil that were heavily laced with naturally occurring arsenic.

The UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO) has called Bangladesh’s arsenic crisis “the largest mass poisoning of a population in history.”

Read More Here.

Water Wars is coming to DVD on August 31st, 2010.

This month we check in with the Native Program.  In May of this year, Bird Runningwater, director of Sundance Institute’s Native & Indigenous Program gathered a group of four fellows and three advisors in the beautiful lands of the Mescalero-Apache people in New Mexico.

Bird explains the lab in this way: “In Apache we refer to life’s journey as Nda’i bijuuł sia’, which speaks to “life’s living circle.”  The Native Program at Sundance Institute is also a part of a circle: one that begins with a filmmaker’s own point of origin, extends with their experiences through the Native Program, and flows onward through the creative journey of completing their film.  At some point, we hope this circle will bring finished films back to Native lands and Indigenous points of origin to inspire new generations of storytellers. “

Yolanda Cruz, one of the fellows at this year’s lab, is an indigenous Chatino from Oaxaca, Mexico, and the producer-director of seven award-winning documentaries.  Her project,La Raya, tells the story of 11-year-old Papio, who has his eyes set on emigrating to the U.S. with the help of an abandoned refrigerator.  We asked her to tell about her journey to the lab.

Read some more.

By: Olga García Echeverría

I’m not really sure if real women have to have curves (I know some flacas who are pretty chingonas), but in my opinion female filmmakers, especially indigenous female filmmakers like Yolanda Cruz, have to have a lot of nerve.

Yolanda, though, isn’t one to feel limited by past or present. Like many visionary artists, she’s about cultivating and creating, even in times of economic crisis and even within a field where far too often the voices of women of color are excluded. With seven award-winning films to her name, the last of which is a feature-length documentary, Yolanda’s proven that she’s not intimated by the industry and that she’s serious about increasing the representation of indigenous people in the media.

Read On Here.

A thriving marijuana industry has aided Canada’s economy – but political shifts in the US and at home are now threatening this.

Douglas Haddow, Thursday 5th August 2010

If you’ve been paying attention to some of the more peculiar side-effects of the global recession, you may have noticed that Canadians have been behaving uncharacteristically uppity of late. This new-found swagger is a result of Canada having the dubious distinction of being the “least-bad-rich-world-economy” – an honour that would be rather unimpressive if the rest of the G8 wasn’t so persistently gloom-stricken.

While most wealthy economies are still stagnant, in decline or disrepair, the Canadian economy has outpaced allcomers and will avoid the possibility of a double-dip recession that continues to haunt the US. But beyond the chorus of self-congratulatory backslapping coming from Ottawa, there has emerged a new and immediate threat of economic crisis that is being willfully ignored by Canadian politicians.

This November, in an effort to increase tax revenue, California will hold a referendum on whether or not to legalise the cultivation and use of marijuana. If passed, the change in law would be devastating to the Canadian economy, halting the flow of billions of dollars from the US into Canada and eventually forcing hundreds of thousands into unemployment.

Read On Here.

August 10th, 2010

By: D.M.Murdock

That title probably should say, “Why hemp could have saved the world all along,” because the plant should never have been banned in the first place, and its prohibition has led to untold suffering around the globe. If we—the global human population—had been able to grow the miracle plant hemp (Cannabis genus) locally and to use it for local industries and businesses, including and especially for fuel, we would never have needed to be addicted to oil, for one, an addiction that is at the root of much misery. We would never have allowed ourselves to be lorded over by international oil-mongers whose crimes against humanity have become legion, including wholesale invasion of other lands and slaughter of countless people.

None of this oil-related horror—along with the deplorable degradation of the environment globally—would have occurred if hemp had not been prohibited but had been used wisely and intelligently as a major foundation of human society. Indeed, hemp-based economies could still save the human world, while hemp planting could go a massively long way in rescuing the natural world as well.

Thousands of uses for amazing hemp

It is said that hemp has up to 50,000 uses, from fiber to fuel to food, but I’ll just provide a taste here:

Read On Here.

August 11th

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that all 31 states must recognize same-sex marriages performed in the capital, though its decision does not force those states to begin marrying gay couples in their territory.

In a 9-2 decision, the tribunal cited an article of the constitution requiring states to recognize legal contracts drawn up elsewhere.

It did not specify what degree of recognition must be granted to same-sex couples.

Read On.

By Margaret Hoover

Published August 10, 2010

As a conservative Republican representing the next generation of attitudes towards gays and lesbians, I encouraged the readers of FoxNews.com last January to take a careful look at the arguments and evidence in the Prop 8 trial, Perry v. Schwarzenegger.

The case was presented by a constitutional conservative, Ted Olson, who helped found the Federalist Society, successfully argued Bush v. Gore to the Supreme Court (among fifty-five other cases), and was George W. Bush’s Solicitor General. Working with his Democratic legal partner David Boies, Olson sought to prove that marriage equality is a constitutional question, not a partisan issue.

The trial assembled a thorough record of evidence that Prop 8 unreasonably discriminates against gays and lesbians, relegating them to second-class citizenship. Their plaintiffs, Kristen Perry and Sandy Steir, Paul Katami and Jeff Zarrullo, are the face of the marriage equality movement. They wish to share in the myriad societal, economic and psychological benefits of marriage, which the Supreme Court has ruled is a fundamental right owed to all Americans. By denying them the right to marry because of their sexual orientation and gender, Olson and Boies argued that Prop 8 violates the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment, and is unconstitutional.

Among the seventeen witnesses Olson and Boies called to the stand were experts in areas of psychology, political science, economics, socio medical sciences and history.

Read On Here.