END:CIV with Filmmaker Franklin Lopez this Saturday

This culture will eat you alive
Fight back; resist & survive

If your homeland was invaded by aliens who cut down the forests and contaminated the food supply, would you resist? If creatures from outer space made the water so poisonous you wouldn't dream of drinking it, would you try to stop them? If monsters released toxic chemicals that caused cancer in the people you love, would you fight back?

These aren't idle questions. It's happening now – except there are no aliens. The culture that's cradled us since birth is a killer.

END:CIV illustrates the brutality of a civilization addicted to systematic violence and environmental destruction, and the heroism of those who confront it head-on. Rapid-fire video-game graphics, interviews, war footage and satire mock the excesses of the global economic system, even as it implodes around us.

Screening of "END:CIV" with Director Franklin López
Saturday May 21, 2011 7pm
Flying Squirrel Community Space
http://thesquirrel.org
285 Clarissa St, 14608
More info: http://endciv.com/
585-415-7808

Based on the best-seller Endgame by Derrick Jensen, END:CIV begins with the harsh reality that all civilizations eventually end. The ancient Mayans, the dynasties of China, and the mighty Roman Empire, as long-lived and powerful as they were, inevitably crashed. Western Civilization is no different. It's coming down, but not fast enough.

Jensen asks: "If civilization lasts another one or two hundred years, will the people then say of us, 'Why did they not take it down?' Will they be as furious with us as I am with those who came before and stood by? I could very well hear those people who come after saying,'If they had taken it down, we would still have earthworms to feed the soil. We would have redwoods, and we would have oaks in California. We would still have frogs. We would still have other amphibians. I am starving because there are no salmon in the river, and you allowed the salmon to be killed so rich people could have cheap electricity for aluminum smelters. God damn you. God damn you all.'"

Interviews include Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society and writers James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency), Gord Hill (500 Years of Indigenous Resistance), Waziyatawin (For Indigenous Eyes Only), Lierre Keith (The Vegetarian Myth), and Stephanie McMillan (Minimum Security). López interviews indigenous activists Qwatsinas (Nuxalk Nation) and Rod Coronado (Pascua Yaqui); environmentalists Steven Best, Zoe Blunt, Dru Oja Jay, Macdonald Stainsby, and many more.

About Director Franklin López
Hailing from San Juan, Puerto Rico, López hosts “It’s the End of the World as We Know It and I Feel Fine," the world's most subversive news show. In 2005, his post-Katrina video remix “George Bush Don’t Like Black People” reached a million people and got a nod from the New York Times and the Washington Post. Wired Magazine listed subMedia.TV in its top ten online video sites in 2006, the same year López was hired to produce Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!
"Franklin López is a fantastically talented filmmaker who has created a powerful and important film about the most important topic ever: how to stop this culture from killing the planet." – Derrick Jensen

"By far, the most routinely-praised contemporary media activist is Franklin López. His shows and films not only possess a distinctive look and feel, but they also contain a wicked sense of humor … López’s work engages in constructing a new vision where popular culture serves the interests of the poor and dispossessed, where humor is reignited within activism, and the D.I.Y. ethics of punk and hip-hop allow those with talent and gumption to be the media, once again." – Chris Robé, Pop Matters

END:CIV. The future depends on it.