The film is due to be playing in cinemas 11-12 November.

In response to transatlantic events, the Frontline Club and Byline Festival with FFR are coming to New York to launch a US version of their unique festival for independent journalism and free speech. This will be the opening night, a full itinerary of events will be happening on 7th November at the Edition Hotel New York. To book tickets for the 7th November click here.

Programme

Monday 6th November

7pm – Screening of MOSUL at the Bronx Documentary Center

7.30pm – 8.30pm Q&A with film director Olivier Sarbil hosted by Marcia Biggs

8pm – Late drinks reception

Oo is one of his nation’s predominant emerging filmmakers and of the many talents being showcased at the Frontline Club’s ‘A Country in Motion: Films From Burma’ event. Organised by the Czech Centre, the films highlight the recent political, cultural and social transitions in Burma.

Four films were exhibited. The Little Finger, A Peaceful Land, I Wanna Go To School and A Buffalo Boy. Focusing on a range of issues including development, human rights, democracy, education and exploitation, the films provided an illuminating insight into life in modern day Myanmar.

Interesting and thought provoking screening at @frontlineclub learning about human rights and activism in #Myanmar pic.twitter.com/drL04LQmXX

— Haylea Campbell (@HayleaCampbell) November 10, 2016

Left to Right: Human rights campaigner, Igor Blaževič, Burmese MP, Susanna Hla Hla Soe (National League for Democracy Party), Former Czech ambassador to the UK, Pavel Seifter

Chaired by the former Czech ambassador to the UK, Pavel Seifter, the event drew on the remarkable work being produced by a selection of Burma’s emerging filmmakers. During the open discussion after the films’ airing, Seifter was joined on stage by Burmese MP Susanna Hla Hla Soe (National League for Democracy Party) and the internationally renowned human rights campaigner Igor Blaževič. Oo joined on Skype.

Addressing the crowd from his native Burma, Oo is broadly positive about the course of progress in his country. He cautions however that further change is needed and highlights aspects of Burmese life that remain problematic. Oo spoke of the need to tell stories that had not been possible to tell in the past, rationalising that as a result, many of the documentaries emerging out of Burma are testimonial in nature.

Igor Blaževič agreed that despite the political developments made, problems remain. He outlined four major problems facing the country today:

“First is the military… the military protects the constitution and the constitution protects the military. The second problem is ongoing civil war… there is profound disagreement between the ethnic minorities and those in power. The third problem is ethnic nationalism… and the fourth problem is that the country is economically captured by the oligarchy groups created under the military”.

Oo concurred that the Army represents a major obstacle to further progress in Myanmar: “Now there is a new distinction between the Army and the Government. They used to be the same thing. It is fine to criticise the Government but the Army remain hard to touch”. He explained that filmmakers still have to submit material to a censorship board which decides upon what may or may not be shown to the wider public. This process prevented a number of films containing material critical of the Army from being shown at the Human Rights Human Dignity International Film Festival in June this year.

MP Susanna Hla Hla Soe concluded: “The first challenge is the expectation of the people… They would like to see the new Myanamar happen, but change is slow”.

Former Czech ambassador to the UK, Pavel Seifter

Film Reviews:

The Little Finger

Produced by: Shune Lei Thar, Kaung Myat Thu Kyaw, Saw Reagan

The Little Finger portrays the tale of the Burmese democracy in its infancy, covering the 2015 election from the perspective of two women leading notably different lives. One of the women filmed was Susanna Hla Hla (a guest at the Frontline Club for the evening), a parliamentary candidate for the National League for Democracy party, headed by Aung San Suu Kyi. The other is a grass grower living and working in rural Burma.

The film exposes the flowering yet fragile state of Burmese democracy. The shots of voting day queues, an old man sitting patiently waiting to cast his vote, a young man taking a ‘selfie’ in the queue, contrast with the concerns expressed by NLD activists regarding election tampering and voter documentation malpractice.

The Little Finger reveals the intertwined excitement and nervousness of democracy in action. It is hopeful yet truthful, it doesn’t fail to expose the disappointment felt by those left out of the democratic process. “They never failed to collect our taxes but now they are saying we can’t vote,” says one man upon finding out he can’t be registered to vote due to residential status issues. A warts and all look at the democratic process in action — The Little Finger records the joy of those who have waited so long for the vote exercising their democratic right, and the pain felt by those who’s wait goes on.

A Peaceful Land

Produced by:Sai Kong Kham, Lamin Oo

The early shots of toy soldiers in the sand beautifully set the scene for the story that unfolds throughout A Peaceful Land. This is the tale of land taken, of an entire way of life disrupted. Drawing on a range of interviews with those impacted, the film documents the 2005 government initiated nation-wide campaign to plant Physic Nut – a bush-like tree, used for biodiesel production.

Following Government orders, the Army set about confiscating acres of farmland as part of the programme, forcing farmers to plant the trees and work the land appropriated.

Faced with hardship and injustice, four courageous farmers from Nat Mauk (Magway Division) stood up against the authorities and fought for their rights and land.

Following prolonged harassment and even in some cases imprisonment, the afflicted were offered miserly compensation from the Government in return for seized acreage. Many felt forced to accept the terms and as such lost their deep connection to their farmland.

Despite intense pressure from the authorities, one female farmer explains why she refused to give up her plot: “The money will run out in the end, but the farmland will never run out”.

The documentary is beautifully shot and tenderly portrays the widespread pain felt by Burmese farmers at their loss of land and community. The documentary closes with frames depicting earth eroding into a river beside rural fields, symbolising the farmers plight.

I Wanna Go to School

Produced by: Nyan Kyal Say 

A powerful, short animation about a Burmese brother and sister who dream of going to school together. The story demonstrates effectively the obstacles to education faced by children in Burma. It highlights the prevalence and impact of gender inequality, poverty, child labour and abuse. With one in five Burmese children not in education and one in three Burmese children working, the story told is sadly an everyday reality for many young boys and girls in Myanmar.
A Buffalo Boy
Produced by: Mai Ah Nway (Ta’ang Chitthu) 

A fiction film detailing the life of a small boy in a rural village in the Burmese countryside. The boy is caught in the midst of warring parents, with his father a destructive opium addict and his mother struggling to provide for the family. The boy longs for an education and to join the other children from his village at school but is instead forced to work for the family, performing tasks such as gathering water and organising the family home.

The film provides a potent insight into the life of this one young boy, carefully detailing the everyday defeats inflicted upon him which curtail his happiness and development. After an argument between his parents, his mother is arrested whilst trying to buy opium for his father. The boy is left alone with his dad and is soon after sold off to a stranger to finance his father’s habit. Hard hitting, raw and skilfully weaved together, this is the story of the innocence of youth lost.

On Friday 22 January 2016, a panel joined a packed audience at the Frontline Club for a lively discussion following the London premiere screening of Michelle Shephard‘s Guantanamo’s Child. With unprecedented access to former fellow prisoners, family members and government officials, the documentary explores the political and ethical implications of the harrowing case of Omar Khadr.

Richard Gizbert, presenter of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera English, moderated the discussion. The panel was comprised of investigative reporter and filmmaker, Michelle Shephard; former Guantanamo Bay prisoner and director of outreach at CAGE, Moazzam Begg; and Cori Crider, head of the Abuses in Counter-Terrorism team at Reprieve.

“All the best work that comes out of Guantanamo either has her name or Karen Rosenberg’s on it,” Gizbert began, praising Shephard‘s substantial journalistic achievements in investigating Camp Gitmo over the past decade.

Still buzzing from tonight’s event at @frontlineclub – the film and discussion after were brilliant #mustseefilm pic.twitter.com/lItRso6GXE

— Camilla Pallesen (@CMPallesen) January 22, 2016

Shephard began by elaborating on her experiences and knowledge of Guantanamo Bay, broadly explaining why certain people were imprisoned and others were not. “What decided how you were dealt with and when you were released from Guantanamo was not the merits or demerits of your case, but what passport you held (…) Guantanamo was never created as a place to try for war crimes. It was created as an intelligence gathering unit.”

Gizbert then asked Begg if the film fell short of capturing the difficult times experienced during his imprisonment. He responded: “There is a part of the story you will never get to see. For example, the conversations I had with my lawyer while at Guantanamo were classified. When I left, I asked for the notes of these meetings and they told me I can’t have them because they are classified.”

Referring to the strict rules that journalists experience when covering Guantanamo, Begg continued: “When you can’t film a person’s face, when you can’t show what he looks like, what his expressions are, and how he feels, it takes away from the humanity of the situation.”

Crider picked up on this point and expressed her respect for lawyer Dennis Edney. He features heavily in the documentary as Khadr’s lawyer, and his role in exposing Khadr’s story has been an essential one. “So much of what the Guantanamo lawyer has to do isn’t traditional legal work in any event. They have to get these stories past the censors and into the world to convey these peoples’ humanity. I think for a solo practitioner to do something like this for Omar is absolutely extraordinary.”

Gizbert asked how important it was that a wide range of characters – such as the interrogators and military lawyer – were included in the telling and depiction of the story.

Shephard responded: “It was really essential to get all voices in [the documentary]. Omar Khadr was seen as a murderer and rapist on the extreme right, and Nelson Mandela on the extreme left. He thought he was neither. So we really wanted to break down that character, but not do it in an activist way. We wanted to get the most complete picture possible.”

Indeed, the panellists agreed that the fields of human rights and counter-terrorism are never “black and white.” This ambiguity was highlighted by Begg, who concluded the discussion with a comment on his former interrogators and prison guards at Guantanamo: “I have 15 of them on Facebook, as friends.”

For information on future screenings, please click here.

This is an external screening taking place at the Sheikh Zayed Theatre (New Academic Building, 54 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London WC2A 3LJ). The event is free and open to all.

E-tickets will be available to book online after 10am on Tuesday 2 February via LSE online store. For any queries see LSE Events FAQ or contact events@lse.ac.uk.

A map of the LSE campus is available here

Full programme:

HOTEL 22
Director: Elizabeth Lo
2014 / 8 min / Germany

Each night in Silicon Valley, the Line 22 transforms from a public bus into an unofficial shelter for the homeless. This film captures one dramatic night on the Hotel 22 bus.

ENTREMUNDO (WORLDS ON EDGE)
Director: Thiago B. Mendonça
2014 / 25 min / Brazil

One day in the most unequal neighbourhood of Sao Paolo.

IF I DIE ON MARS
Director: Ed Perkins
2015 / 10 min / UK

Meet the three aspiring astronauts willing to leave behind everything—and everyone—to travel to Mars…and never return. Over 200,0000 people from around the globe are competing for four seats on a MarsOne spaceship and the chance to be the first humans to colonise Mars. In If I Die on Mars, director Ed Perkins asks three finalists about their ambitions, their fears, and their reasons for leaving earth forever.

PERFECTION IS FOREVER
Director: Mara Trifu
2015 / 18 mins / UK

Human beings always aspire to become something more, doing their best to hold back time in pursuit of eternal love, youth and beauty. In Hollywood, two lost souls seek to become heroes under the shade of a lonely palm tree.

LUCHADORA
Director: River Finlay
2015/ 12 mins/ United States

‘Luna Mágica’ is a professional Lucha Libre Wrestling star who dreams of becoming World Wrestling Champion while struggling to make ends meet as a single mom in Mexico City and regain custody of her son, who was taken by her estranged husband who claims she is unfit to be a mother because of her profession as a luchadora.

On Friday 15 May, the Frontline Club hosted the UK premiere of This Is My Land, followed by an insightful discussion with director Tamara Erde. Screened on the 67th anniversary of Israeli Independence and Nakba Day, the film poses an important and highly relevant question: how does teaching of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict affect younger generations in the contested region?

This Is My Land follows several history teachers and students in six schools over an academic year. It provides a nuanced perspective of how educational institutions across Israel and the West Bank grapple with national identity, curriculum censorship and a relentless fear of the ‘other’. Observational in style, the film reveals gaping discrepancies between concepts of freedom and historical truth, and a sense of how trauma and conflict are transmitted onto the next generation through the pages of a textbook.

At the beginning of the film, Erde explains how, as an Israeli student, she was never taught to consider Palestinian history. It was not until she joined the army that she gained greater awareness of the other side of the conflict. During her discussion at the Frontline Club, she commented on her motivations for making the film.

“For me, something that is really important and lacking in education, is the other side’s vision, narrative and history. The first step is just to realise that there is another side and story, that is today being completely ignored. It’s [about] opening up to tolerance and understanding that you are not alone in the world… to see people on the other side with their pain from the past, all this complexity.”

Thought provoking evening @frontlineclub: This is my land | Tamara Erde http://t.co/VHnxaohRFM

— Stephanie Biden (@StephanieBiden) May 15, 2015

Asked by an audience member how she had approached each school, Erde said:
“You have to get approval from the Ministry of Education for each teacher. From the Israeli side, all the teachers who were centre-left were not authorised.”

She added that while there were numerous schools from which she was denied access, the teachers she filmed were intriguing, both in their characters and the way they approached teaching.

“What I was looking for was teachers who on the one hand represent the national curriculum, but on the other hand do try to challenge themselves or ask questions within what they can do.”

Despite the complex personalities of the teachers, several audience members noted how bleak the film seemed in terms of optimism, and asked whether Erde felt any sense of hope that the two sides could find a solution.

She responded: “While editing, there were times when I thought I’d like it to have a happy ending. But at the same time, I wanted to stay loyal to what I felt and what I saw during this process… From what we’ve seen over the long years, the solution doesn’t come from politics. We need to try and bring it from other places, and I think education could have been one of the major places. But today, it’s just following politics completely.”

One audience member asked whether the film had been screened in Israel or Palestine and, given the contentious topic, the reactions it received.

Erde said: “We did some private screenings in the cinemas on the Israeli side and Ramallah… There were many good responses from teachers who saw the film and said it raised many important questions for them. On the Israeli side we did some screenings in April. There were first reactions saying, it’s okay for us to see it inside Israel but don’t show it outside so you don’t reveal anything about the problems here.”

She added that her ultimate aim would be to screen the film in schools.

“What I would have loved to do is to bring it to schools, to teachers and to kids from both sides to see. I think it will be a long process. We managed to do it in the schools that we filmed, and in some private teachers organisations. We tried through the Ministry [of Education], but I’m not surprised it didn’t work. On the Palestinian side, we are trying now and I hope it will work in some way.”

Visit the This Is My Land website for more information on the film and upcoming screenings.

“We use nature because she’s valuable, and we lose nature because she’s free,” comments Pavan Sukhdev in Banking Nature, which screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 2 March. Sukhdev, the CEO of Gist Advisory, is just one of the multitude of economists, analysts and activists interviewed in the film, which focuses on the commercialisation of the natural world. After the screening, director Sandrine Feydel joined the audience for an insightful discussion.

Sandrine Feydel

In Banking Nature, Feydel and co-director Denis Delestrac document how protecting the planet has become big business. Financial companies like Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan Chase now promote environmental markets to investors who buy up areas of land, largely full of endangered species, so they can sell them for ‘nature credits’. Companies whose actions harm the environment are obliged to buy credits to offset the damage that they have caused. Banking nature poses the question of whether financial markets can succeed where politics has failed.

“I can’t trust that these same financial institutions that led us to the last financial crisis, big corporations that [caused] so much damage to the environment, could be the ones who now say ‘no problem, don’t worry, we’ve learned our lesson and are now able to protect biodiversity’,” said Feydel.

Feydel spoke of her unease with the methods used by the companies working in these new environmental markets, when so many of these same tactics – speculation, insider trading, market trading – had led to the devastation of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. “This is the same logic we are facing here,” said Feydel.

Members of the audience spoke of their shock at the reality of the situation, as the film at first seems largely pro-market before revealing the devastating consequences of treating nature as a financial commodity. “A lot of what is presented as green is not. This is what the film is trying to show,” said Feydel.

Feydel also spoke of how governments have facilitated the process, enabling financiers and corporations to invest heavily in nature.

“For the companies that want to mitigate the damages they are posing the environment, [they follow] the ‘mitigation hierarchy’. First, you avoid any destruction. If you can’t, you have to minimise the impact. And at the very end, if you can’t either avoid or minimise, you have to mitigate. And this is what is really shown by corporations and governments: it’s a way of pretending that they want to protect nature,” said Feydel.

Feydel also spoke in greater depth about the actual process of mitigation in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, where the first green stock exchange opened a year ago.

“Landowners had to keep 80% of the forest they own, they are just allowed to cut 20% of the forest, but the government found out that the law was not really enforced. So two years ago they decided to change the forestry code. And so now they say, ‘Oh you cut 60-70% of the forest you owned? It’s not a problem. You can go the stock exchange and you can buy credits from some other landowner who didn’t cut and still has 80% of his forest’,” said Feydel.

The session concluded with a question from an audience member about what role politics can play in this new market. Feydel said: “What was surprising when we made this film [was that] NGOs had no clue about these financing mechanisms. This is the new way of making profit for financial markets.”

For more information on Banking Nature and upcoming screenings, click here.

On Friday 27 March, the Frontline Club partnered with the London School of Economics to host a series of films for the 7th annual LSE Literary Festival. The external screening, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, was packed out with members of the public for a night of short films exploring the foundations of identity and place. The five films took the audience on a journey to far flung corners of the earth, from rural Turkey to the Arctic Circle. While striking in their different visual styles, each shared a common thread by providing intimate snapshots of the lives of displaced individuals, traumatised and trapped in alien landscapes.

“You have nowhere to go. Nowhere to go,” whispers Habib Aydin as he captures a wild bird in a crude wooden cage on the outskirts of his village in south-east Turkey. This is one of the most symbolic scenes in Reber Dosky’s The Call, which follows the story of Habib and his determination to call his only son Ramazan back to settle in the village they fled in 1989. While Habib returned 7 years ago to remarry, his first family remained in Istanbul. “What does this village have to offer?” Ramazan asks during a short visit to see his father. Habib replies: “animals, rocks… what does it not have?” Touched with humour and a soundtrack of birdsong and bleating goats, Dosky presents a story about loss of tradition across a generational divide, where the disconnect between love of family and land is felt keenly.

Xenos, a short by Mahdi Fleifel, follows a group of impoverished Lebanese youths trapped in Greece which is in the grip of economic disaster. Their hopeless existence unfolds in a telephone conversation, played over shots of streets lined with drug addicts cowering in shuttered shop porches. The camera is grainy and uncomfortably intrusive, reflecting the desperate measures they take for money to buy hard drugs. “I’ve tried to mingle with the Greeks,” one youth says, “but when you do, they assume you are gay. They say ‘you want sex?’” Speaking of how they sell their bodies to strangers in a nearby park, another reflects. “This country ruins your soul.”

Tuna Kaptan and Felicitas Sonvilla offers a different perspective of the conventional refugee narrative in Two at the Border, by focusing on the plight of two smugglers stationed at the Turkish city of Edirne near Greece. Ali, from Syria, and Naser, from Palestine, form a strong bond through their shared financial hardship and longing for home. “I thought about returning to Palestine,” Naser admits in the confines of his apartment. “My parents are seriously ill. They cry on the phone for me to come home. I haven’t been able to send a single lira back.” Stuck in their own limbo, their lives consist of traversing the distance between their apartment and the heavily patrolled borders.

In October 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Morgan Knibbe’s Shipwreck is a testament to the horrors faced by those who resort to crossing into Europe by sea. The camera sways and lurches as hundreds of coffins are loaded onto a military ship at the harbour. Between the hysteria and silence of loss, one survivor, Abraham, whispers his story as he walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks.

In the last film of the evening, Adrift, Frederik Jan Depickere follows the story of Simu, a Ugandan who fled political persecution. He now works as a construction site cleaner 150km above the Arctic Circle. With all his family dead or missing, Simu stares out over the ghostly tundra landscape. “I used to dream of being a pop singer,” he says. “But according to my situation now, I think that dream is dead.” The camera pans over a field of snow peppered with bare black trees. “I don’t belong here. But at home they would just make me disappear.”

For more information on the LSE Literary Festival 2015, click here.

On Monday 23 February, a screening of Tomorrow We Disappear transported an audience at the Frontline Club in rainy central London to the vibrant Kathputli slum in Delhi. The film follows the families of acrobats, magicians, painters and puppeteers resident in the artist colony of Kathputli as they battle the authorities who have sold their land to private developers. This screening of Tomorrow We Disappear, a sensitive and genuine depiction of the inhabitants of India’s “tinsel slum,” was followed by a Q&A with directors Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber.

The filmmakers began the discussion by commenting on their masterful use of sound and lighting in the film. “We really took our time from a technical perspective,” Weber said. In order to capture truly natural moments, the filmmakers planted microphones throughout the slum. “We would walk around covertly to collect audio,” Goldblum explained.

“In documentary, it’s really important to understand the obstructions you’re working with… we had to have a very tactical approach.”

The bright colours of the puppets and costumes of the artists and performers, along with the warm Indian sunlight, awarded the film a cinematic quality which would have been difficult to recreate in another location. The directors explained how they went to New Delhi to start filming after realising that the mystic place of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children was in fact real. The story of the residents of Kathputli was one “that spoke to us on so many levels.”

Goldblum explained how the filming had to take place over several years as they conducted initial interviews, identified the origins of the characters and the story, then watched the conflict unfold with the Raheja developers. “We would leave and we would edit for basically a year,” he said. “We were constantly creating and destroying our movie until we got something that was emotionally honest.”

An audience member wondered how two American documentarians had succeeded in creating such an emotionally honest documentary about a culture of which they were not a part. Weber and Goldblum suggested that the universality of the experience of the Kathputli artists, whose cultural heritage was in the process of being eroded by modernisation, made it possible for them to accurately portray their story.

Goldblum also paid testament to the translator on their second trip to New Delhi, a fellow American who had been fascinated with Indian culture since the age of fourteen, which enabled them to establish a “peer to peer” relationship with the artists. The translator’s “respect for the culture allowed us to build relationships on the ground,” Goldblum explained.

Despite the language barrier, Weber described how “over time we got so comfortable with them… that we picked up a way of communicating.” The film pays witness to heated disputes amongst the artists about how best to deal with the threat of their homes being destroyed. It also offers a snapshot of the incredibly personal moments of its protagonists, such as a young boy entertaining himself by bringing his puppets to life in a dimly-lit room.

“Sometimes it [the language barrier] works in your favour,” Weber explained. “The camera sort of disappears… and characters are just living out a scene very genuinely in front of us.”

“I think our outsider status worked,” Goldblum added.

Although only around 300 of 3,000 people have moved into the ‘transit camp’ (temporary accommodation whilst the slum is renovated into modern flats), the situation in the Kathputli colony remains tense as its inhabitants refuse to leave their homes. The bulldozers have not yet arrived but small incidents often turn into full scale police raids.

For more information on the Kathputli colony and Tomorrow We Disappear, visit the film’s website here.

“Wherever you go in the world, democracy has been corrupted by individuals with a lot of power”, said Anthony Baxter by way of an introduction to a screening of his latest film, A Dangerous Game, at the Frontline Club on Monday 12 January.

The documentary, which follows on from Baxter’s first international success You’ve Been Trumped, depicts the devastating impact of luxury golf resort developments on local communities around the world. The film travels to locations as diverse as the historic site of Dubrovnik, Croatia, and the Scottish seaside town of Balmedie, to explore how tycoons influence authorities to concede to their lucrative plans, despite opposition from the residents who are most affected.

“The spirit in that city [Dubrovnik, Croatia] against this development is huge, and that would not have happened if it had not been for these people doing that referendum, and there is no doubt that the project is stalled at the moment”, the director stated, on the subject of the activists leading the fight against powerful developers in Dubrovnik.

Baxter first started to investigate the consequences of large-scale resort developments after American tycoon Donald Trump began construction on a golf course in Aberdeenshire, North East Scotland, just 40 miles from the filmmaker’s home town. He commented, “I felt the story had not been covered in a way that represented the people on the ground, and also the environmental aspect”.

Baxter related to the audience the many difficulties he encountered while making the film, including his arrest whilst filming in Scotland. Despite obtaining access to relevant police documents under the Freedom of Information Act, the director remains in the dark regarding the reason for his arrest. He said, “the official line is that their officers were met by a challenging, difficult and unusual situation when they found this interviewer with a local resident in her property, and they felt the need to arrest us”.

In response to an audience question, Baxter said that this was not the only obstacle that he and his team had faced during the project, as Donald Trump’s lawyers had threatened to sue the BBC before they broadcast You’ve Been Trumped. Fortunately the BBC ignored threats of legal action, airing Baxter‘s previous film to a highly positive reception.

The role of former First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond was also explored during the Q&A. Baxter highlighted that the golf resort under development by Trump was within Salmond’s constituency – “he drives past this site everyday” – and yet he had never visited the local community. Despite the success of You’ve Been Trumped, which highlighted the corrupt and greedy actions of Trump and fellow tycoons, Salmond is yet to demonstrate his support for this local Scottish community who have been irrevocably affected by the golf course development.

On the subject of the complicity of Scottish authorities, Baxter said: “We did not have any direct evidence of corruption of the Scottish government, but they were certainly, as David Milne, one of the local residents, says, blinded by the bling and by the promises”.

A Dangerous Game has screened at a number of film festivals worldwide, including Vancouver International Film Festival, Moscow International Film Festival and Edinburgh International Film Festival. The film has already demonstrated its impact: shortly after its release, UNESCO demanded that the Croatian government put a halt to all construction work until further investigations into the potential impact on Dubrovnik’s World Heritage Site have been carried out.

For more information on A Dangerous Game, including upcoming UK screening dates, click here.

In Morocco, the world’s first female Muslim leaders are setting out to change their country: empowering women through the teachings of Islam and challenging the attitudes which breed extremism. Casablanca Calling takes us into the heart of this quiet social revolution through the lives of the women at its forefront.

In a country where 60% of women have never been to school, a new generation have started work as Morchidat. Working within some of the country’s poorest communities and separating the true teachings of Islam from some of the prejudices emanating from a largely conservative culture, they work to support education for girls, and campaign against early marriages. They also encourage young people to build a more progressive Morocco, as opposed to pursuing the agenda that many young people in the country do, which is aspiring to a life in the West.

Through personal stories, family dramas and everyday lives, Casablanca Calling gives a unique perspective on women’s lives in contemporary Morocco. It tells the story of committed people, social change and a sacred mission.

Directed by Rosa Rogers
Duration: 70′
Year: 2014