Presentation:
CHALLENGE FOR CHANGE
Presented by Ezra Winton and Tom Waugh
Fri. Nov. 7- 4:00pm
WFG Cinematheque

Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle (CFC/SN) has been called “a revolutionary program that used documentary to intervene in Canadians’ social problems during the late sixties and seventies”. It has also been called “a colossal waste of taxpayers’ money that produced 200+ films and videos that were aesthetically bankrupt and that no one saw.”

Regardless of one’s opinion, this infamous National Film Board of Canada adventure remains a moment in both the cinema and political history of Canada that is anything but dull. CFC/SN was an initiative with the lofty goal of addressing issues such as poverty, housing, urbanization, sexism and First Nations rights by making documentaries. Central to the program was involving these subjects and communities in the process of constructing the film, to produce media that could be used as a tool for communication, education, self-reflection, inspiration and community-building.

Professor Tom Waugh and PhD student Ezra Winton will discuss the trajectory of the program, its controversies and its hits, while connecting it with larger socio-political and media currents of the golden age of the New Left in Canada. They will also show a clip reel from the program’s huge output in English and in French, two short films from the legendary Fogo Island and Working Mother series as well as the longer and iconic You Are On Indian Land (Mort Ransen & Mike Mitchell, 1969).

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Thomas Waugh has since 1976 been teaching film studies at Concordia University Montreal, where he has also developed curriculum in queer studies and AIDS. A lecturer, programmer and critic on documentary, queer film and media, and the national cinemas of Canada and India, his books include Show Us Life: Toward a History of the Committed Documentary (Scarecrow 1984) and the forthcoming The Right to Play Oneself: Historical Essays on Documentary Film 1975-2008. He is co-editing with Ezra Winton and Michael Baker an anthology on "Challenge for Change."

Ezra Winton is interested in the power of cinema to move mountains (of people into action). He is currently pursuing a PhD in Communication Studies at Carleton University where he is focused on network philosophy, documentary film and radical pedagogy. He has made documentaries, starred in them, curated and theorized them, and hopes one day to teach them. Ezra created Cinema Politica in 2001, a pan-Canadian network of political documentary screening sites that has over 30 locals in Canada with five in Europe and another in Brazil. Recent publications include articles in POV Magazine and forthcoming chapters in The Challenge for Change Reader and Mediascapes, an undergraduate textbook for Communication students.