Duke University will be launching an Axis of Evil film festival, showing films from Iraq, North Korea and Iran, and rogue states such as Cuba, Syria and Libya. Check out this quote by Ariel Dorfman, a professor of literature and Latin American studies at Duke University:
“I’d urge everyone who believes in cultural dialogue — and particularly those who don’t — to come and submerge themselves in these works of art from the very places that some in the United States would like to bomb out of sight and out of existence”.
Oh–I guess I missed the part where President Bush said he was going to obliterate Cuba with nuclear weapons. (Heck, we may be removing the nukes from many of our missiles.)
And then there’s this statement by Negar Mottahedeh, assistant professor of literature at Duke:
We know how Bush sees ‘the Axis of Evil.’ How does someone from within that Axis see his or her own everyday life?”
Given state-controlled censorship by many of these countries, how do we really know how these filmmakers “see his or her own everyday life?” But they’re probably deeply envious of the freedoms that most Americans take for granted, such as the freedom to both make movies and protest your government, and the freedom to make movies free of government interference. And the freedom to keep at least some of the profits from your work.
By the way–nice use of quotation marks by Reuters. And nice of Reuters to list a film series about largely enslaved film makers under their “Oddly Enough” category.
(Link via James Russell.)
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