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March 1st 2013
March 1st 2013
Closing Remarks: Post North Paul Strickland, Contributor In her 1999 book, Don’t Think, Smile!, Ellen Willis, a New York feminist, says free speech has few friends today.
Sometimes to students it might appear in this intellectual climate that “the only alternative to the Right is a politics of repression, self-abnegation and guilt,” she continues. Available at the CNCSU Office
Willis wonders if the partisans of sexual correctness could eventually identify with the authorities in Orwell’s 1984 in seeking to abolish orgasm.
The Confluence - News
The anti-pornography movement inspired by legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon defines as violence “not only heterosexual acts but sexual desire, fantasy and representation,” Willis observes. Graham Pearce and people who understand his approach will help return desire from exile. Thank you, and good night.
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Paul Strickland is a regular contributor to The Confluence. A local writer with a lot on his mind, he read these closing remarks at the recent Post North V: Exile and Desire
Andy Johnson, Editor-in-Chief
Garett Svensen, Production Editor
Taren Johnson, Web Manager
CNC Trades Day Confluence Out Cinema CNC
Job Fair 10-3pm -Atrium
CNCSU Nominations Open
March 1st 2013
March 2013
Ski Trip
Ski Trip Payment Due International Women’s Day CNCSU Nominations Close
Confluence Out Bottle Water Free Day
World Water Day
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CNCSU Elections
Farmer’s Good Friday Market CNCSU Sustainability Closed Showcase
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The Confluence - News
St. Patrick’s Day
Gathering Place Opening -Atrium
Weather
Submissions, inqueries and requests can be made to news.cncsu.ca, in person at the CNCSU office room 1-303, or mailed to “The Confluence c/o CNCSU 3330-22nd Ave. Prince George, BC. V2N 1P8” All submissions are welcome, the authors of edited works used in the confluence receive a $20 cheque upon publication. Advertisement rates are availiable upon request.
Friday, March 1: 4°C, Cloudy, Chance of Showers. Saturday, March 2: 3°C, -1°C, Snow. Sunday, March 3: 1°C, -6°C, Sunny. Monday, March 4: -1°C, -9°C, Sunny Tuesday, March 5: -1°C, -12°C, Sunny. Wednesday, March 6: 0°C, -13°C, Sunny. Thursday, March 7: 1°C, -12°C, Sunny.
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The Confluence is produced biweekly at the CNCSU office on CNC’s Prince George campus by Garett Svensen and Andy Johnson.
Environment Canada 7-Day Weather Forecast: For Prince George, BC. 1-7 March 2013
March 1st 2013
Cinema CNC
Garett Svensen, Production Editor The 17th Cinema CNC film festival starts Friday, March 1st at 7pm. The annual event is put on by Peter Maides, who teaches English, Film Studies and New Media at CNC. This year, the festival features the best of Canadian film with a solid lineup of 7 Canadian films ranging from comedies to dramas to documentaries. Here’s this year’s lineup (from the Cinema CNC Blog):
Inescapable Friday, 7pm
Successful Syrian-Canadian businessman Adib lives a comfortable life in Toronto with his loving wife and two college-aged daughters. On a typical afternoon at work, he receives a devastating piece of news: while vacationing in Greece, his eldest daughter secretly took a detour to Damascus — and vanished. Frantic, Adib immediately makes plans to return to Syria after more than thirty years. As Adib places a series of covert phone calls and makes secret rendezvous with former contacts, it gradually becomes clear that he was once a major player in the Syrian resistance movement. Aided by the ex-fiancée he left behind, and a dubious Canadian embassy official, Adib wades through vague clues, government subterfuge, and a web of conspiracies that stand between him and his daughter. When the regime discovers his former identity and accuses his daughter of being a spy, Adib must once again take up arms and fight for what he holds most dear.
former life threatens the new life they’ve spent decades painstakingly building? Expertly building the tension to a fever pitch, Nadda withholds her answers until the final, nail-biting minutes.
My Awkward Sexual Adventure Friday, 9:30pm
A hyper-repressed and schlubby accountant (Jonas Chernick) strikes a deal with a worldly but disorganized stripper (Emily Hampshire): he’ll help her with her crushing debt if she helps him become a better lover. Sharp direction by the versatile Sean Garrity and a very funny script by Chernick ensure for an uproarious — and surprisingly educational — sex comedy.
two different quests: Jordan’s drive to become less of a hyper-repressed schlub and win back Rachel, and Julia’s struggle to gain control of her life. They aren’t mutually exclusive journeys, and neither plays out exactly how the characters envision. Ultimately, they are left with opposing choices: Jordan must give up his fantasy while Julia has to embrace hers. It’s hardly certain that either will have the courage necessary to do so. My Awkward Sexual Adventure is sharply directed by the versatile Garrity, with a very funny script by Chernick, who leads the exceptional cast while racing from one catastrophe to the next as if his hair’s about to catch fire. And, perhaps unusually for a sex comedy, it’s surprisingly educational.
Picture Day Saturday, 1pm
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The Confluence - Feature
One of the most charming and vibrant debut features by a Canadian After an almost perfunctory filmmaker in recent memory, Kate montage of Winnipeg night scenes, Melville’s Picture Day features Sean Garrity’s My Awkward rising star Tatiana Maslany as Claire Sexual Adventure cuts to the chase: Paxton, a teenage girl who has all the Accountant Jordan Abrams is having freedoms of adulthood but none of sex with his longtime girlfriend, the responsibilities. Forced to repeat Rachel. It’s not going well... Rachel — the woman Jordan plans to propose her last year of high school due to bad to on the weekend during a romantic grades and absenteeism, Claire still prefers to cut class whenever feasible getaway to Niagara Falls — has and spends her nights clubbing, living in fact dozed off. When she finally on the fringes of the adult world she’s wakes up, she tells Jordan she’s had enough of his bedroom inadequacies almost part of. and promptly dumps him. Decimated, When two men enter Claire’s life, he heads off to Toronto to stay with things begin to change radically. his best friend Dandak, a notorious Jame, the singer in a popular Toronto player who throws Jordan an faux-funk band, is intrigued enough impromptu party packed with by Claire to pick her up from school available women. the night after they sleep together. Unfortunately, our heartbroken hero Claire is soon confronted by someone from her past: her former babysitting can’t talk about anything else but Rachel. Kicked out of his own party, charge, Henry, a shy, geeky science whiz who keeps shoeboxes full of Jordan stumbles into a strip joint. There he continues to bemoan his fate mementoes — most of them relating to Claire. After a chance meeting and until, after far too many drinks, he’s a shared blunt, Claire is determined Nadda spent four years as a teenager tossed into the alleyway where he’s to help Henry get noticed at school rescued by one of the dancers, Julia. living in Damascus, which surely The next morning in Julie’s apartment, — hardly difficult, since she’s already informs her convincing evocation which is littered with unpaid bills, she infamous. of the climate of paranoia that is and a somehow pantless Jordan strike cultivated by totalitarian regimes. As Claire bounces back and forth a bargain. She’ll teach him how to be Along with its chillingly authentic between the teenage and adult a better lover; he’ll help her deal with atmosphere, Inescapable poses a worlds, the flaws of both become her crushing debt. series of vital, ethically charged increasingly apparent. If her teenage questions. What happens if the past friends judge her too much for her won’t stay in the past? What desperate Raucous, sexy, and frenetic, My past, the adult world doesn’t guarantee Awkward Sexual Adventure charts lengths could someone go to if their
An irreverent epic of Shakespearean proportions, shot through with moments of arresting intimacy, Midnight’s Children is a production of truly impressive scope, featuring state-of-the-art computer graphics, impressive production design by the director’s brother Dilip Mehta, and sixty-two locations. A luxurious feast of a film brimming with romance, spectacle, intrigue, sly social commentary and uplifting optimism, Midnight’s Children is as vast and beguiling as the great country to which it pays homage.
Smoothly directed by Melville, Picture Day sketches a scruffier, less upscale version of the world inhabited by Noah Baumbach’s lost adolescents. The film is anchored by an extraordinary performance by Maslany, who more than delivers on the promise evident in Grown Up Movie Star. Together, Maslany and Melville have created a protagonist as unique, infuriating, complex and memorable as the heroines of New Waterford Girl, Emporte-moi or Double Happiness.
The End of Time
Rushdie’s inspired adaptation of his own Booker Prize–winning novel follows the destinies of a pair of children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very instant that India claimed its independence from Great Britain—and which, in Rushdie’s brilliant magic realist conceit, endows the children born on the same night as their country’s liberation with supernatural abilities ranging from flight to invisibility, with those born closest to midnight possessing the most powerful gift. “Handcuffed to history,” and switched at birth by a nurse in a Bombay hospital, Saleem Sinai (Satya Bhabha), the son of a poor single mother, and Shiva (Siddharth), scion of a wealthy family, are condemned to live out the fate intended for the other. Imbued with mysterious telepathic powers, their lives become strangely intertwined and inextricably linked to their country’s careening journey through the tumultuous twentieth century.
Rebelle [War Witch]
Sunday, 2pm The film is narrated by fourteenyear-old Komona, who recounts the past two years of her life to her unborn child. Abducted by a rebel army that invades her small village, Komona is forced to commit an unthinkable act — shooting her own parents — before being dragged off into the jungle. Over the next several months, she is inducted into the brutal lifestyle of the child soldier: she is beaten reThe film argues that time itself is, in peatedly, taught to fire an AK-47, and part, a notion we impose on ourselves kept in a drugged state by the admin— and that there may be other ways istration of “magic milk.” One day, to view, measure and experience time Komona has a vision of her parents, than the Western artifices of the clock who warn her of danger ahead; heedand the stock market bell. Travelling ing the apparitions’ advice, she is the the globe, Mettler explores a dizzyonly person to escape unscathed from ing range of perspectives on time: a ferocious firefight. from scientists working with a particle accelerator, who try to examine time Impressed by her premonitory powby smashing protons together in an ers, the warlord Great Tiger bestows immense, twenty-seven-kilometre Komona with the title of “War Witch,” long concrete structure miles beneath which earns her both privileges in the the surface; from Buddhists visiting camp and the threat of harsh punishthe tree where Buddha was enlightment if her powers fail. When Komoened; from DJ and electronic musician na befriends fellow soldier Magicien, Richie Hawtin, who locates a new she seems to have found an escape. frontier in his work with machines; The two soon run away together and from squatters in an abandoned area eventually fall in love — but the war of Detroit near where Henry Ford is never far away, and their romantic built his first factory, now a derelict idyll is cut short when they are recapbehemoth that evokes the broken tured by the rebels. Returned to the statue of Shelley’s "Ozymandias"; tyranny of her former life and still from the lone remaining resident in an haunted by the ghosts of her parents, area being consumed by lava pouring Komona soon becomes pregnant and forth from an active volcano. struggles to find a ray of hope in her desperate situation. En route, Mettler draws eerie connections between the most disparate This is undeniably grim material, but places and events (the patterns on the Nguyen leavens it with delicacy and ceiling of a Buddhist temple echo the tact, conveying violence by impli-
The Confluence - Feature
Saturday ,7pm
Charting the links between primordial mysticism and the furthest conceptual reaches of modern science, The End of Time is both mind-expanding and oddly familiar, as if reminding us of truths we forgot long ago.
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Midnight’s Children
Saturday, 9:30pm Peter Mettler’s The End of Time is a visually stunning tour de force, as one might expect from one of Canada’s greatest cinematographers. It’s also a rich, deeply rewarding and rigorous meditation on the nature of time. Mettler begins the film with archival footage of US Air Force pilot Joe Kittiger, who flew a balloon to the unprecendented height of 102,800 feet, then parachutes out. Watching these images of Kittinger in free fall suspends our notion of time.
multi-coloured circles in the tunnels of the particle accelerator) and locates parables of renewal and destruction in an astonishing sequence where a grasshopper is transported by an army of ants. Establishing a mood which oscillates between rumination and trance, Mettler relentlessly pushes at the limits of our understanding of time, and the ultimate fragility of the structures we have constructed atop it.
March 1st 2013
more maturity or understanding. The taunting and backstabbing at school are nothing compared to the casual insensitivity of James or her mother, who is too obsessed with her own tragedies — mostly involving her errant boyfriend — to worry about what Claire is going through. Rarely have the dynamics of a presented so honestly, as in a cutting scene when Claire finds her weeping mother on the phone, bemoaning her boyfriend’s departure once again. Looking Claire in the eye, she sobs, “What else have I got left in my life?”
March 1st 2013
cation and atmosphere rather than through direct depiction. The performances from the mostly non-professional cast are vivid and authentic, particularly the extraordinary Mwanza’s portrayal of Komona, which won her the Best Actress prize at both the Berlin and Tribeca film festivals. Heartfelt and helplessly moving, Rebelle guides us through the harsh world of a young girl whose circumstances are tragic, yet whose story is one of formidable courage and unquenchable hope.
Stories We Tell
The Confluence - Feature
Sunday, 7pm Stories We Tell is the acclaimed feature documentary debut from award-winning Canadian actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley. In the few short years since Polley first revealed her remarkable talents as a writer and director, audiences have already come to expect the aesthetic rigour and reserved yet deeply felt emotion she brings to her studies of human relationships. In her first two features, Away From Her and Take This Waltz, she rendered the complexities of intimacy and desire with the eloquence and control of filmmakers with far more experience. Away From Her in particular asked questions about how we can know ourselves or assess our lives if we can’t agree on the events of the past. Memory is truth — at least emotional truth. And nowhere in life are shared memories more fiercely contested than in the family.
with tender and powerful moments, the film also serves as a loving homage to one key player who is no longer here to share her version.
on what homes, gardens, malls, even musical instruments will look like once we live on the moon. Then there is Dennis Hope, who in 1980 found a loophole in the United Nations Outer Sarah Polley’s portrait of her parSpace Treaty which prohibits nations ents’ marriage is a gripping tale, full from owning the moon, but not indiof richness, tenderness and emotional viduals — which led him to declare complexity. It’s difficult to tell what himself the owner of the moon and to making this movie must have entailed, make a fortune selling plots of land to and with what diplomacy and skill she hopeful future lunar colonizers (inmust have marshalled its participants cluding some former U.S. presidents). — but the result is a great pleasure to At the heart of the film, however, is an watch. eccentric young man named Christopher Carson, who is determined to be the first person to live on the moon. With humour and more than a little Lunarcy! sympathy, Ennis follows Carson's Sunday, 9:30pm often misfired efforts as he travels From the late 1950s to the end of the from place to place trying to convince 1960s, the thrill of space exploration people to help him reach his goal. captivated a world witnessing truly cosmic achievements. It was a time Energetic, illuminating and often hiwhen anything seemed possible — larious, Lunarcy! achieves the difficult Pan Am Airlines even began to take feat of pointedly depicting the humour reservations from regular citizens inherent in its subjects' endeavours for the first prospective commercial without condescending to them — and flight to the lunar surface. By the time it also raises larger questions about the 1986 Challenger disaster and the the human capacity to make dreams close of the Cold War ended the Space a reality. Are Carson's ambitions Race, the utopian dreams that had fu- any more outrageous than explorers elled the Space Age had already faded setting sail to discover new lands, from the public's imagination — but amateur inventors trying to take to the for a few true believers, those dreams skies, or two mighty nations racing to only intensified. This irresistibly zany, put the first human being in space? sharp-witted documentary from director Simon Ennis shuttles entertaining- As Lunarcy! reminds us, some of the ly from the ridiculous to the sublime most startling achievements in huas it introduces us to an unforgettable man history began with a seemingly group of characters whose years-long impossible dream. obsession with the moon has reached truly galactic proportions.
Among the lunar-fixated interviewees is Peter Kokh, who has been Stories We Tell is at heart a personal publishing The Moon Miners' Maniessay on the intractable subjects of festo since 1986, which speculates truth and memory. Using a combination of archival footage, still photos and testimonials in a captivating visual assemblage, Polley examines the disagreements and varying narratives of a single family as they look back on decades-old events.
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The responses from the “storytellers” chosen to share their version of things are heartfelt, revealing and even charmingly funny. The result is a lively and richly textured documentary that seamlessly blends past and present, the real and the imagined. Devoid of sensationalism and filled
Lunarcy!
The cashier treats me -condescendingly Thinking I can’t afford anything Thinking I’m under aged, that I’m going to pass her fake ID or one borrowed from a friend. She shifts onto one leg, flicks her hair, remnants of an old mane, back. “Cash or debit?” “Neither” she sneers at my card, sneers, at the package on the counter gesturing with garnished nails “For tonight?” “No” “That’s what they all say” She chuckles hoarsely, but stops As the bill rings up as I sign one bottle one aged, double wood whisky.
March 1st 2013 The Confluence - Arts
Katherine Douglas, Contributor
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Confrontation
March 1st 2013 The Confluence - Culture Page 7
“I hope my daughter won’t have to protest for her rights, but that she will be strong enough to if she must.”
March 8th 2013
March 1st 2013
POSTSECRETCNC International Women’s Day
A creative opportunity for women and men to share their stories, thoughts and experiences about women. Pick up a blank postcard at the CNC Library, Aboriginal Resource Centre (ARC), or International Education (IE). Create an anonymous postcard celebrating an achievement or challenge, hope for the future, or a personal story or experience. Add some art. Submit completed postcards by March 5th at 4:00pm in a drop-box at: the Library, the Center for Student Success (CSS), ARC, IE, or the Assignment Drop-box outside the Mailroom.
The Confluence - Culture
CNC Faculty Association: Status of Women Committee presents
Visit the CNC Library for more info or check out Submissions will be displayed in the Library for public viewing from MARCH 6TH - 8TH
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n91IC9m5YU
March 1st 2013 The Confluence - CNCSU
JOB FAIR
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Tuesday, March 5th, 2013 10:00am – 3:00pm in the CNC Atrium For more information please contact: Kris Dittman Room: 1-753 Counselling & Advising Centre Phone 250.561.5806 employment@cnc.bc.ca
March 1st 2013
Election Notice
2013/2014 Executive Committee Nominations Open: Nominations Close:
Monday March 4, 2013 Friday March 15, 2013
9:00am 4:00pm
Campaigning Open: Campaigning Close:
Monday March 18, 2013 Friday March 22, 2013
9:00am 4:00pm
Voting in the CNC Atrium: Monday March 25, 2013 Tuesday March 26, 2013 Wednesday March 27, 2013
The Confluence - CNCSU
Election Schedule:
7 Student Representative Positions available:
For more information on this election or for a nomination form please stop by the Prince George Campus Office (Room 1-303) or email info@cncsu.ca Please drop off completed nomination forms in Room 1-303
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Chairperson Secretary Treasurer Aboriginal Students’ Representative Women Students’ Representative International Students’ Representative Prince George Campus Representative