Community, Melbourne

The circle of strife: GPS tracking of garbage – where it came from and where it went!

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Litter Trackers is a collaborative project between RMIT and Melbourne Water, supported by the Victorian Government.  The project is the first of its kind for Victoria, and only the second time that litter has been GPS-tracked in Australian waterways.

In a Victorian-first citizen science project, GPS-tracked bottles will be released in suburban waterways around Melbourne to reveal precisely how litter makes its way from our streets to our beaches.  The Litter Trackers project will see RMIT University scientists working with schools and community groups to deploy 100 GPS-tracked bottles in 20 locations across Melbourne’s catchments and you’ll be able to see it LIVE and watch the interactive map that follows the journey of litter in our waterways!

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Sydney Film Festival

Vai: One Character played by 9 different indigenous actresses in 7 Pacific countries

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Feature Film (New Zealand)
Duration: 90 minutes

A film about female empowerment that spans the breadth of the Pacific telling the story of one woman’s life in eight separate moments from the perspective of eight different pacific island cultures.  ‘

Vai’ is a portmanteau feature film made by 9 female Pacific filmmakers, filmed in 7 different Pacific countries: Fiji, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Kuki Airani (Cook Islands), Samoa, Niue and Aotearoa (New Zealand). It is about the journey of empowerment through culture over the lifetime of one woman, Vai, played by a different indigenous actress in each of the Pacific countries. In each of these Pacific nations ‘vai’ means water.

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Film, Interview, Sydney Film Festival

The Big Little Farm: The 91 minute documentary shot over 8 years (Interview)

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Media Screening (Neon Films)
Documentary (USA)
Duration: 91 minutes

A testament to the immense richness of nature.  The Biggest Little Farm follows two dreamers and a dog on an odyssey to bring harmony to both their lives and the land. When the barking of their beloved dog Todd leads to an eviction notice from their tiny LA apartment, John and Molly Chester make a choice that takes them out of the city and onto 200 acres in the foothills of Ventura County, naively endeavoring to build one of the most diverse farms of its kind in complete coexistence with nature.  The land they’ve chosen, however, is utterly depleted of nutrients and suffering from a brutal drought.

The film chronicles eight years of daunting work and outsize idealism as they attempt to create the utopia they seek, planting 10,000 orchard trees and over 200 different crops, and bringing in animals of every kind– including an unforgettable pig named Emma and her best friend, Greasy the rooster.  When the farm’s ecosystem finally begins to reawaken, so does the Chesters’ hope – but as their plan to create perfect harmony takes a series of wild turns, they realize that to survive they will have to reach a far greater understanding of the intricacies and wisdom of nature, and of life itself.

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Film

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (Review – No Spoilers)

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Media Screening
Duartion: 114 minutes

It’s the final installment in the X-Men tetralogy of prequels possibly marking the end of the franchise that began 19 years ago  in the current form as we know it.  While the jury is still out, industry insiders continue to speculate on the integration of X-Men back into the current universe of Marvel Studios which was split up across competing production houses before owner, Disney merged with Twentieth Century Fox.

Did they miss a beat with the setup of this scene?   Could the mixed reviews from the recent “feminist” driven and diversified incarnations of Star Wars led to this area being a no-go zone to explore?   Corporate restructures and politics aside, whether you enjoyed it or not, it was the movie that had to tie up loose ends of the prequels that began in 2011 and there are some inconsistent hits and misses with the shift of focus moving away from core characters Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Professor X (James McEvoy), Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) and Beast (Nicholas Hault).   The story revolves around Sophie Turner’s rendition of Jean (ex Sansa from Game of Thrones) who appeared in a supporting role in the last film.

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Community

4 million Australians go hungry everyday: Kellogg’s combative plan for food security!

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In the last 10 years alone, Kellogg has provided 3 billion servings of food to people in need, supported 329,000 farmers through climate-smart agriculture programs and reduced greenhouse gas emissions to the equivalent of taking 317 million miles off the road2.

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“Today, the number of people affected by food insecurity is staggering. There are more than 820 million hungry people in the world1, the majority of whom are women and girls.   As a leading global plant-based food company, achieving food security is at the heart of Kellogg Company’s commitment to society.”  said Chairman and CEO, Steve Cahillane when announcing its Corporate Responsibility Report, Creating Better Days.

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Film, Sydney Film Festival

One Child Nation: The consequences of a lost generation (Review)

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Media Screening
Documentary (China)
Duration: 89 minutes

One Child Nation is a documentary by Gary Maddox (Amazon Studios) that sheds new light on one of international history’s most controversial family planning policies ever written into a national constitution.  It delves deeply into an upsetting period of China’s past,  taking us through the rationale of the one child policy’s genesis, the reverberations of its propaganda and post-trauma that now begins to surface across the grief-stricken generations since it ended four years ago. 

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