Crazy Wisdom makes The Global Culture Girl's Guide to Last Minute Gifts on Huffington Post:
My favorite pastime is watching films. But not just any moving pictures, ones that will change my life. Fortunately, just in time for Christmas, three DVDs of personal favorites are available to buy and there is no excuse not to infuse your friends' lives with a little culture and a lot of cinematic love. ... for the spiritual junkies in your lives Crazy Wisdom is both entertaining and extremely enlightening.
Zombie movies always have a component of political commentary but how appropos that the Cubans have taken the popular genre and adapted it to satirize their own political revolution.
“Juan of the Dead” tells the blood-drenched tale of a slacker who decides to save the island from an invasion of cannibalistic zombies. As the zombies turn Havana into a gory circus of flying limbs and severed heads, the nightly news anchors continue to calmly assert the government line, that the attacks are not the work of the undead but dissidents in the pay of the United States.
Crazy Wisdom is now available for download-to-own, which includes a limited edition white label DVD that ships free. Available only from Alive Mind Cinema to US viewers. Tell your friends!
Limited Edition DVDs are Sold Out! (Update 01/10/12)
Just back from IDFA, where there was a plethora of great docs. The official prize for Best Feature Length Doc went to the South Korean film Planet of Snail and the Audience Award to 5 Broken Cameras. Other festival favorites: Putin's Kiss and Mads Bruegger's newest film, The Ambassador. We released his prior film, Red Chapel, which you can download here.
Sushi: The Global Catch also had its European premier and will be coming to a featival or theater near you soon.
Stay tuned for more.
Mashabble.com gave this review of the Taqwacore doc by the Canadian filmmaker Omar Majeed:
Stripped down and laid bare of all cultural referents,Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam is a rock ‘n’ roll road movie. Made by Canadian filmmaker Omar Majeed, it feels similar to its frenetic and lionized antecedent Another State of Mind, which showcased and documented the efforts of Better Youth Organization-related bands, like Youth Brigade and Social Distortion, to tour and connect disparate communities in far flung locales during the heyday of early ‘80s hardcore punk.
Yet that analogy doesn’t encompass the full breadth of this film. With stealth, the filmmaker and participants dissect America’s so-called mosaic or melting pot culture in-depth by examining the tale of emergent Muslim-American youth. In doing so, it exposes fervent politics, abundant identity crises, varied social, religious, and inter-generational conflicts, and undeniable mixed cultural heritage.