In beautiful surroundings of St Luke’s Church, north London, on Wednesday 4 June at 7.30pm,
90 guests joined us for the premiere of our short documentary about the Bethlehem Unwrapped festival at St James’s Church Piccadilly last Christmas. There was also an auction of the graffitied Wall panels – a historic snapshot of when the Wall came to London.
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We hope this springtime finds you well and able to find at least a little bit of time to enjoy this beautiful time of the year… Here is our spring news update. Lots of good things happening and coming to fruition! A few ‘save the dates’ to share with you:
OPEN BETHLEHEM film & campaign
On May 15th, we held a preview screening for funders, press and distribution partners, hosted by C4’s Jon Snow. The response to the film was excellent. Our plan is for a UK cinema release late autumn/early winter, after the RGS event in late September. TPFF will also be hosting previews in June for NGO/charity partners interested in the film’s outreach and campaign.
WE ARE MANY film
We are delighted that Amir’s film has been selected for two screenings at Sheffield Doc/Fest. Our wonderful Executive Producer Omid Djalili will join Amir and one or two of the film’s contributors for one of the post screening discussions on Sunday 8th or Monday 9th June. The film has recently secured a UK sales agent to sell the film internationally, as well as the support of highly respected film-maker and producer of many of Sam Mendes’ films, Pippa Harris. We are delighted to have her on board as one of our executive producers. We’re aiming for a UK cinema release in autumn this year.
BETHLEHEM UNWRAPPED: short film premiere, exhibition and auction
Wednesday June 4th at 7.30pm at St Luke’s Church, Hillmarton Road, London N7 9RE (Nearest tube Caledonian Road, Piccadilly line, 5 mins walk. Doors open at 7pm. Admission is free / voluntary donation at the door).
Join us for the premiere of our Bethlehem Unwrapped short film by Tom Pursey; an exhibition of our WALL at St James’s Piccadilly followed by its auction! Funds to go to our B/U partner, The Holy Land Trust. We are working together with another Bethlehem Unwrapped partner, the P21 Gallery, for this event.
The WALL was in place for two weeks from 23rd December 2103; it had 30,000 visitors from all over the world and accumulated the graffitied drawings and messages of many of them. It became a major collective work of protest art, reported and reviewed by global television, radio, print and online publications, reaching a social media audience of 8 million via Twitter.
And if you can’t join us on 4th June we’ll be sending out a link to Tom Pursey’s film after the event.
Tipping Point North South
Tipping Point North South’s main activity is our Film Fund, but as we now starting to widen our activity to include non-film specific projects( including the development of our own in-house campaigns), we are undertaking this work under the TPNS banner.
The Five Percent Campaign – a Tipping Point North South initiative
We are delighted to have received a two year grant from the Polden Puckham Charitable Foundation as well as funding from a major donor to support the next stage of our military spending campaign. We are keen to take this issue to the mainstream development sector – we feel strongly that military spending is every bit as important to understanding the imbalance in relations between the rich world and the global south, as debt, trade, tax and climate change. Indeed, it is inter-connected with all of them. We are delighted to be developing this work with colleagues across the development, health, peace and environment sectors.
From Pink to Prevention – a Tipping Point North South campaign with The Alliance for Cancer Prevention
The film Pink Ribbons Inc highlighted the nature of corporate ‘pinkwash’; the takeover by business of a disease that has now become cloaked in ‘pink’ – the public are asked to engage with breast cancer primarily through fundraising, and via highly effective PR campaigns. But this swamping of the issue by ‘pink’ results in the marginalising of many unaddressed issues such as the role that the wider environment plays in breast cancer. Why is this?
We are working with The Alliance for Cancer Prevention to try and raise awareness about the ‘barriers’ to understanding what prevention is, what it means, what it looks like and why – most importantly- it is so marginalised by the mainstream cancer charities and government bodies alike.
To support our work on researching the ‘vested interests’ that we believe stand in the way of debating environmental and occupational links to breast cancer, we are delighted to have received a grant for this year from The Ratcliff Foundation.
That’s our news for now – as ever, do drop us an email if you’d like to know more about any particular aspect of our work or if you’d like to support what we are doing.
Email info@tippingpointfilmfund.
You can also find us on FACEBOOK or TWITTER.
But before we sign off…
We joined with all those who expressed their sadness at the passing of Tony Benn. Stop the War are organising an evening to celebrate his extraordinary life on Thursday 5 June 6.30pm, Camden Centre, Judd Street, London WC1H 9JE. Tickets book in advance or call 020 7561 4830.
All the best from us at TPFF
‘As film-makers we’ve got to ask the big questions – not just look at the symptoms and go, “Oh there’s a victim, let’s tell their story.”’ Ken Loach
We hope this springtime finds you well and able to find at least a little bit of time to enjoy this beautiful time of the year… Here is our spring news update. Lots of good things happening and coming to fruition! A few ‘save the dates’ to share with you:
Bryan Bender, “From the Pentagon to the private sector,” 26 December 2010, The Boston Globe
Franklin C. Spinney, “The Best Government Money Can Buy,” 11 February 2014, CounterPunch
Winslow T. Wheeler, “America’s $1 Trillion National Security Budget,” 16 March 2014, Truthout
Scarcity of money is not their problem. Pentagon costs, taken together with other known national security expenses for 2015, will exceed $1 trillion. How can that be? The trade press is full of statements about the Pentagon’s $495.6 billion budget and how low that is.
There is much more than $495.6 billion in the budget for the Pentagon, and there are piles of national security spending outside the Pentagon-all of it as elemental for national security as any new aircraft and ships and the morale and well-being of our troops.
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Simon Duffy, “Counting the Cuts,” 18 February 2014, Campaign for a Fair Society and The Centre for Welfare Reform
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Ben Quinn, “Revealed: the MoD’s secret cyberwarfare programme,” 16 March 2014, Guardian
The Ministry of Defence is developing a secret, multimillion-pound research programme into the future of cyberwarfare, including how emerging technologies such as social media and psychological techniques can be harnessed by the military to influence people’s beliefs.
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Annie Isabel Fukushima, Ayano Ginoza, Michiko Hase, Gwyn Kirk, Deborah Lee, Taeva Shefler, “Disaster Militarism: Rethinking US Relief in the Asia-Pacific,” 14 March 2014, The Nation and Foreign Policy In Focus
… Paralleling these disasters has been the disaster response of the US military. According to this “disaster militarism”—which is a pattern of rhetoric, beliefs and practices—the military should be the primary responder to large-scale disasters. Disaster militarism is not only reflected in the deployment of troops but also in media discourse that naturalizes and calls for military action in times of environmental catastrophes.
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David Blanchflower, “Bankers don’t deserve their bonuses. They should be taxed and the money used to help our struggling young people,” 16 March 2014, The Independent
Ricardo Fuentes-Nieva, “A Tale of Two Britains: Inequality in the UK,” 17 March 2014, Oxfam GB
Today, the five richest families in the UK are wealthier than the bottom 20 per cent of the entire population. That’s just five households with more money than 12.6 million people – almost the same as the number of people living below the poverty line in the UK.
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Stephanie Gaskell, “Pentagon Wants to Keep Controversial War Budget Beyond Afghanistan,” 5 March 2014, Defense One
… But despite the massive drawdown, Pentagon officials want to keep a comparably oversized war chest funded well into next year, quickly raising eyebrows among members of Congress.
The fiscal year 2015 budget calls for $79 billion for Overseas Contingency Operations, or OCO, which funds the war in Afghanistan and other overseas operations. Although the U.S.footprint in Afghanistan has shrunk over the past couple of years, the war budget has stayed robust. This year Congress approved $85 billion for the account.
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Emily Hois, “More Solar Installed In 18 Months Than Past 30 Years,” 7 March 2014, Clean Energy Collective
Tracy McVeigh, “Inequality ‘costs Britain £39bn a year’,” 16 March 2014, Guardian
The ever-increasing gulf between rich and poor in Britain is costing the economy more than £39bn a year, according to a report by the EqualityTrust thinktank. The effects of inequality can be measured in financial terms through its impact on health, wellbeing and crime rates, according to statisticians at the independent campaign group.
Researchers pointed to the fact that the 100 wealthiest people in the UK have as much money as the poorest 18 million – 30% of all people – and said that the consequences of such unusually high rates of inequality needed to be acknowledged by politicians.
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“Japan could be building an irresistible terrorist target, experts say,” 11 March 2014, The Center for Public Integrity
Sanho Tree, “An Inside Look at the Drug War Vs. Civilization,” 5 February 2014, The Fix
We unfortunately live in a society that likes to talk in simple dichotomies—good or bad, yes or no, black or white. It carries over very often into the way we talk about drug policy. Historically, when I would debate drug warriors, because I would be critical of prohibition and the war on drugs, they would say, “Oh, so you want to sell heroin in candy machines to children.” No. I actually want more control over these substances. The myth of prohibition is that prohibition doesn’t mean you control drugs. It means you give up the right to control drugs.
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Nafeez Ahmed, “Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for ‘irreversible collapse’?,” 14 March 2014, Guardian
A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.
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Nick Turse, “Washington’s Back-to-the-Future Military Policies in Africa,” 13 March 2014, TomDispatch
Since 9/11, the U.S. military has been making inroads in Africa, building alliances, facilities, and a sophisticated logistics network. Despite repeated assurances by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that military activities on the continent were minuscule, a 2013 investigation by TomDispatch exposed surprisingly large and expanding U.S. operations — including recent military involvement with no fewer than 49 of 54 nations on the continent. Washington’s goal continues to be building these nations into stable partners with robust, capable militaries, as well as creating regional bulwarks favorable to its strategic interests in Africa. Yet over the last years, the results have often confounded the planning — with American operations serving as a catalyst for blowback (to use a term of CIA tradecraft).
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Kyle Mizokami, “The Independent Air Force Is a Mistake,” War is Boring
… In Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force, Farley argues that the Air Force is redundant. And, he claims, its existence actually hurts American national security.
Now, Farley doesn’t suggest getting rid of air power. Instead, he recommends the Pentagon dismantle the Air Force and hand its missions—and aircraft—over to the Army and Navy. …
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