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TRADING THE FUTURE: 2008, 59 MIN
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Trading the Future is a video essay that questions the inevitability of
apocalypse and its repercussions on environmental urgencies. Starting
with a personal memory, the fear of the rapture, the video addresses
the Christian narrative for the end of times, and draws connections to
secular apocalypticism and our ready acceptance of a cataclysmic end.
The video also challenges the philosophical and practical underpinnings
of the symbolic of death, the desirability of the growth of the market
place, and the politics of apocalypse, while proposing possible
alternatives in the idea of natality, the productivity of biodiversity
and the agency of everyday activism.Decidedly un-heroic, or
non-messianic, Trading the Future refuses to reproduce the apocalyptic
images that we have been inundated with in media and movies. Instead
everyday and contextual images from the locations of travel, cities and
the natural world, are combined into experimental and impressionistic
montages, integrated with interviews and voice over narration. Twelve
chapters create a complex weave of ideas, combining street interviews
and dialogues with academics and activists: Grace Jantzen, Valerie
Langer, David Noble, Lee Quinby, and Vandana Shiva.b.h. Yael
traveled from Toronto to Patmos Island in Greece (where John wrote the
book of Revelation), from Tofino, B.C. to New York, from England to
Megiddo in northern Israel. The question of why we havn't done more
to allay environmental degradation and the desire to challenge our
readings and assumptions of ‘the end of time’ has fueled this quest.
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