This is the website of Penny Lane, maker of things. The kind of things you might like, if you like that kind of thing.
INDEPENDENT MEDIA IN A TIME OF WAR
2003
28:30
Part scathing critique, part call to action, Independent Media In A Time Of War argues that dialogue is vital to a healthy democracy. "Independent media has a crucial responsibility to go to where the silence is," says narrator Amy Goodman, "to represent the diverse voices of people engaged in dissent." Goodman criticizes the refusal to report civilian war casualties during the 2003 Iraq invasion and the new phenomenon of "embedded reporters" as examples of a pro-military bias in the corporate U.S. media. A diverse team of producers from Hudson Mohawk Indymedia collaborated to create this extraordinarily rich, compelling and often disturbing portrait of a media system gone astray at a critical moment in history. Independent Media In A Time Of War is the last installment of three HMIMC documentaries about the Iraq invasion.
PRODUCED BY Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center
DISTRIBUTION
Educational sales: Media Education Foundation www.mediaed.org
All other sales: Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center www.hm.indymedia.org
TO VIEW ONLINE VISIT:
http://www.oftheworld.tv (Quicktime)
http://www.democracynow.org/static/IMIATOW.shtml (RealPlayer)
SELECTED SCREENINGS & AWARDS
TV Broadcasts: Free Speech TV (09/03 - present) & Cable access stations throughout U.S.
November 7, 2003- Media Reform Conference - Make the Media (Madison WI)
November 22-24, 2003- Select Media Festival (Chicago IL)
January 3-6, 2004 - Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago IL)
>January 15-24, 2004- Freedom Cinema Festival (Park City UT)
January 17, 2004- Art In General Video Marathon (New York NY)
January 25-29, 2004- Rotterdam International Film Festival (The Netherlands)
January 26, 2004- Grand Rapids Media And Democracy Film Festival (Grand Rapids MI)
February 7, 2004- Arab and Iranian Film Festival (Seattle WA)
February 2004- Resistance Cinema (New York NY)
March 20, 2004- Other Cinema (San Francisco CA)
May 2004- Media That Matters Film Festival (New York NY)
March 2005 - MOMA Documentary Fortnight
CAST, CREW & OTHER DETAILS
A diverse team of over twenty students, artists, historians, reporters and activists worked together over an eight-month period to create a trilogy of videos in response to the US invasion of Iraq. "Independent Media in a Time of War" is the third and final piece in the trilogy by Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center, a grassroots collective located in upstate New York.
This video was made over the summer of 2003. We spent hundreds of hours scouring local libraries, searching through Democracy Now! archives, and logging home-recorded tapes of the news coverage of the war. We edited in an attic in rural New York, taking turns in the chair in front of the computer. (The chair was occupied 24 hours a day for about three months!) Only our outrage and frustration about the corporate news media's take on this unjust and unprecedented war kept us going through the hot summer days.
Since the video's completion in September 2003, we have had a tremendous - almost overwhelming - response. Tape sales have surpassed our wildest hopes. Many viewers have taken it with them to class, to church groups, and to show their parents. To many, the narration of Amy Goodman says so powerfully and eloquently what they themselves had wanted to say while the military embedded itself into the news and marched us off to war. It speaks to the frustration and the helplessness many of us feel in the face of what could only be called State Media. We believe it is for this reason that the video has been such a success.