Call for submissions: Cinema Politica's Divine Interventions

Cinema Politica, the Montreal-based Canada-wide screening series for politically and socially conscious documentary, is launching a new project and have announced a call for submissions.

Divine Interventions: Documentary, Spirituality and Social Justice is a special screening project that examines the intersection of spirituality and social justice. It "explores the role spirituality, religion and secularism play in fostering or inhibiting a plurality of perspectives, understanding across cultural, religious, and ethnic borders, and participation in social causes. This screening initiative starts in inclusive spaces where audiences, artists and activists interrogate the intersection of spirituality and social justice, and subsequently moves on to a sustained online conversation with the aim of fostering engaged communities across geographic barriers."

2012 CIMA Film & TV Awards – winners

The Catholics in Media Associates (CIMA) has announced the winners for the 19th Annual CIMA Film & TV Awards.

The CIMA Motion Picture Award will be given to Martin Scorsese's Hugo, the 3D adventure drama based on Brian Selznick's novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret. The film won five Academy Awards and was named Best Picture by the National Board of Review.

The Documentary Award will go to Tom Shadyac's I Am. Although primarily known as a director of comedies such as Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty, Shadyac suffered a cycling accident that left him confronting his mortality. I Am is his first-person exploration of two key questions: what’s wrong with our world, and what can we do to make it better?

2012 Movieguide Faith & Values Awards - winners

Movieguide held its 20th Annual Faith & Values Awards Gala Friday night at the Universal Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. As with the Movieguide website, awards were given based on adherence to American conservative "Christian" principles. It's one of the more absurd and irrelevant awards presentations, led by Movieguide editor Ted Baehr who authored a 76-page report that together with gala tickets cost $1,000.

Movieguide rates films highly according to supposed Christian values like patriotism and capitalism, and negatively for portrayals not only of swearing and nudity, but environmentalism, feminism, homosexuality, evolution, socialism or any other "liberal" viewpoints. Without any hint of irony, Baehr and Movieguide conflate Christianity with capitalism and American conservatism, ignoring Christ's own teachings in that regard ("You cannot serve both God and money." – Luke 16:13; "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven." – Matthew 19:21; "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." Matthew 19:24; "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." – Mark 12:17 (ie. pay your taxes); "'My house will be called a house of prayer,' but you are making it 'a den of robbers.'" – Matthew 21:12; etc.)