Search Results: film (152)

Cannabis historically catches a bad rap in motion picture, depending on your views of the sweet leaf. It may have started with Reefer Madness in 1939, which created an initial scare about the dangers of cannabis use. Skip ahead four decades to the slack-jawed ramblings of Cheech and Chong, followed by such films as FridayHalf Baked and Pineapple Express, and cannabis in motion pictures became a caricature of mislabeled stereotypes.

Remembering Us, a forthcoming short film from Denver’s BS Filmworks, may be a needed step to change the stigmas surrounding cannabis, as well as stigmas attached to other issues. “We have a history of creating films that start the conversation, especially on topics that people don’t necessarily want to talk about,” says director and co-writer Scott Takeda

Windy Borman grew up during the height of the DARE era in the ’80s and ‘90s. She never smoked cannabis, which she knew as a gateway drug, because addiction ran in her family.

But Borman, 37, moved to Colorado for a job in 2014, the same year recreational pot was legalized. She had produced and directed films on topics such as elephants that stepped on landmines and learning disabilities, but she found a new subject in her new home: women in the cannabis industry.

After completing a fall film festival circuit, Bormann will travel to four more festivals this spring. She’s also doing a grassroots tour in seven cities across the country, including Denver, to stir up conversations around cannabis in local communities. In an interview with Westword, Borman talks about “puffragettes,” today’s social challenges surrounding cannabis and the first reactions to her film.

Lighthouse Cannabis Project launched last June as an initiative of CID Entertainment, with a goal of hosting sightseeing tours. But now it has a new project: music sessions in grows.

“We wanted to bring cannabis and music together in the most literal way possible and actually have musicians play in the grow,” says CID’s Kobi Waldfogel, who has a passion for music and event production. “It’s something we’d been kicking around since we started developing partnerships in the cannabis industry.”

Waldfogel is the city’s event-planning member on the Social Consumption Advisory Council, and he’s leveraging his entertainment contacts to bring them into cannabis spaces, starting with Reed Mathis & Electric Beethoven at Terrapin Care Station.

Playing a Lighthouse session at Terrapin is similar to performing at a radio station, Waldfogel says; the musicians come to the grow and play a set. But the audience is different: A 1962 study by Dr. T.C. Singh found that music, especially classical music, could stimulate plant growth. And while stimulating plants is not the project’s primary goal, Waldfogel says that it can’t hurt to expose the plants to live music.

New York Police union president Patrick Lynch A pig.


On Monday, we told you about Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed New York City police officers killing an unarmed, nonviolent alleged illegal cigarette dealer named Eric Garner last month and Orta’s arrest over the weekend for firearms charges after cops stop-and-frisked him along with a teenage girl he was with. In case you had any doubt that was purely for revenge, the police union rep has since come out to further drag Orta’s name through the mud. On Sunday, he issued a release, calling Orta a “criminal” who “stands to benefit” by smearing the good name of police officers.
“The arrest of Ramsey Orta for criminal possession of a firearm only underscores the dangers that brought police officers to respond to a chronic crime condition in that community,” he wrote. “It is criminals like Mr. Orta who carry illegal firearms who stand to benefit the most by demonizing the good work of police officers. Sadly, in the effort to keep neighborhoods like Tompkinsville safe, a tragedy occurred. But that doesn’t change the fact that police officers routinely risk their lives for the benefit of the community and that they have earned their support and understanding.”

Ramsey Orta in a Time interview.


According to several news sites out of New York, Ramsey Orta, the guy who filmed New York City police officers killing Eric Garner in a chokehold, was arrested Saturday. Cops say he was profiled after going into a Long Island hotel that cops say is a known drug hangout and arrested afterward for gun charges. A 17-year-old female he was with was also charged with marijuana possession.

Adam Hartle (left) with Tom Tancredo.


In January 2013, ex-Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo had promised to puff a joint on camera as part of a comedian/filmmaker’s movie about Colorado’s new marijuana laws should the measure pass — which it did.
Tancredo later welched on his bet under pressure from his family. But in Mile High — The COmeback of Cannabis, the now-completed documentary, which screens tonight through Thursday (with Hartle promising to give out free legal pot to adults 21 and over outside theaters), Tancredo watches as the director blazes.

Kym Kemp
“Humboldt pot farmers maintain one of the last remaining small farming economies in the country, the last of a tradition where people working the land with their hands could still sustain themselves and their families.” ~ Mikal Jakubal

By Kym Kemp
Redheaded Blackbelt
“In Humboldt County, everyone has sticky stuff on their fingers…Every business in this county relies on the marijuana business,” proclaims a subject in One Good Year, a new documentary nearing completion that is based on the cannabis growers of this area.
To outsiders and, even to some who live here, the scope of the marijuana business in this community is unimaginable. Local documentary maker, Mikal Jakubal, examines that world by moving intimately through the lives of four local marijuana farmers (see the trailer below.)
Jakubal, who in addition to film-making owns a nursery, is a volunteer firefighter, and writes a blog in Humboldt County, began production on One Good Year in February of 2010–just in time for Prop. 19 which attempted to legalize marijuana in California.  He followed his subjects through their growing season and through the political upheavals that Prop. 19 brought.  In the process he tells the story of many in Humboldt County.

Pot.tv

As voters begin receiving their voter pamphlets and as voter registration closes, the Yes on 80 campaign is bringing the soon-to-be-released social documentary, Legalize It, and its filmmaker, Dan Katzir, to Oregon for a series of screenings and private events.

Legalize It is an inspiring journey demonstrating that even those without wealth and political connection can bend the arc toward greater social justice.  
 
The public screenings give Oregonians a special opportunity to preview the documentary, which follows the Proposition 19 campaign in California that, in 2010, transformed a fringe social issue into a mainstream political topic and set the stage for marijuana-policy reform efforts in 2012 in Oregon, Colorado and Washington. 

Seattle filmmaker Josef Wilke is doing a documentary on Washington state Initiative 502, Local Voices: I-502, a voter initiative regulating the sale of marijuana which will be on November’s general election ballot.

“We are attempting to show the entire story of I-502,” Wilke told Toke of the Town in an exclusive interview. “We want to balance the media coverage which has ignored the DUI legislation and other concerns, specifically medical marijuana patients’ concerns.”

“Our documentary is not going to make a difference in the November 6 election,” Wilke said. “In fact, it is going to be more about what happens after the election.”

“I-502 seems to be marching to a victory,” Wilke said. “We intend to release our film in April of 2013. We want to document the promises that are being made b y the campaign to address legitimate concerns and hold them to account as we gauge the reactions and of actions by both our state and federal governments.”

Wilke is working through local Seattle video production company Confluent VideoMedia, owned by Tim Sheehan. Tim is producer for the film.

Toke of the Town got a chance to ask Wilke and Sheehan a few questions about the 502 documentary.

 



B. Dolan’s “FILM THE POLICE” pays tribute to N.W.A.’s infamous “Fuck the Police,” serving as a call to action for the digitized media movement while responding to the recent explosion of police brutality all across the world.

This free MP3, courtesy of Strange Famous Records, features a reconstruction of Dr. Dre’s original beat, brilliantly reanimated by UK producer Buddy Peace. Label CEO, Sage Francis, opens the song by picking up the gavel where Dr. Dre left it 23 years ago, introducing a blistering, true-to-style flip of Ice Cube’s original verse by SFR cornerstone, B. Dolan.

1 2 3 16