U B U W E B - Film & Video: Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman

UbuWeb Film

UbuWeb

Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman

Big Kahuna (2008)

Let 100 Flowers Bloom (2006)

Wildflowers (Series)

Grace Lee Boggs

Kathy Milberg

Reverend Jim Holley

These text animated portraits show extraordinary people in heavy circumstances rejecting politics, opting instead to work on changing concepts of "common sense".

Since the local and federal government has failed Detroit so spectacularly, every miniscule change over the past 40 years has happened on an individual level. Today's leaders are motivated as much by the basic human issues of living in Detroit (the politics of shopping for quality food and breathing clean air for example) as they are about theoretical civil rights issues. As we have seen in New Orleans, the systematic dismissal of large populations of people is a chronic issue in the United States (and beyond), but Detroit may be the most extreme and extended scenario in the nation. Generally speaking, there are two sorts of activists: individualists who work from utopian processes outside the system, and pragmatists who address immediate issues one at a time. In both cases, their efforts are effortlessly marginalized by the mainstream. In the following videos Detroiters articulate their battles and give human voices to the "grassroots".

Produced by Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman in Detroit, and at Hangar Centre de Producció D'Arts Visuals, Barcelona. (www.hangar.org)

RESOURCES:

Alejandra & Aeron in UbuWeb Sound