Balinale puts Bali firmly on the Hollywood Map
“Eat, Pray, Love” filming confirmed
Is this Bali’s “Lord of the Rings” moment, as it was for the Kiwis? In a distinct coup an exultant Deborah Gabinetti, founder of Balinale (now in its 3rd year) confirmed to me that the movie of recent best-seller and New Age spiritual odyssey “Eat Pray Love”, is to be part-shot in Bali. The movie’s Executive Producer, Stan Wlodkowski, currently back in Bali to start setting up, is no stranger to the island, having participated in the 2008 Balinale. “EPL”, the movie’s inevitable acronym, is being produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment and will star Julie Roberts. The movie is to be distributed by Sony Pictures. Producer Wlodkowski and director, Ryan Murphy, are determined the movie will be as authentic as possible, shot on location in Italy, India and Bali. The four key Balinese roles will be played by Balinese or Indonesians.
Despite Bali’s undoubted mystique for Westerners as an exotic tropical paradise, powerfully kicked off in 1920 with Gregor Krause’s book of photographs, along with flickering snippets of bare-breasted pubescent maidens firing-up the fevered imaginations of Europe’s getaway-from-it-all artists as the new and improved Tahiti, plus a sprinkling of well-heeled celeb tourists of the day - the island has had little if any real contact with Hollywood. The nearest thing to it being John Coast’s delicious Legong dancers clowning around onset with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby during the filming of “Road to Bali. The film “South Pacific”, with its Bali Hai dreamy choir-filled sequences likewise, conjured up visions of mysterious oriental tropical isles akin to Bali to Eisenhower era Americans, but it was in another ocean altogether and just as far from reality.
What’s next for the Balinale girls who seem to be on a roll putting Bali and Indonesia on the map, with great films and really useful workshops for local filmmakers scheduled in the run-up to Balinale 2009 this October 20-25th? There was some talk a while back of filming Eric Ambler’s dark thriller “The Nightcomers”, set in Indonesia’s turbulent 1950’s. That’d be good. Or, can we look forward to Michelle Pfeiffer starring as K’tut Tantri in “Revolt in Paradise”? Then again, what about EPL’s Parts 2 & 3? If I was Odyle Knight I’d put a firecracker up my Ozzie agent or look for one quick as a flash in tinseltown to flog me film rights before the rest of Ubud’s questing ladies get in on the act.
Oh! Balinale! What have we wrought?
“Evian” backwards spells “naïve”
The Dirty Politics of Water
Spell Evian backwards and what you get is “naïve” and April 1st, being April Fool’s Day is not a bad time to show the award-winning movie “FLOW - for the Love of Water” on the politics of water, showing how corporate greed combined with bureaucratic folly and ecological inertia not only leaves 2.3 billion of the world’s neediest without access to safe drinking water but increasingly threatens access and affordability for us all.
Once again we have Balinale to thank, in collaboration with The Green School, for bringing producer Steven Starr back to Bali for a charity re-screening at Ubud’s ARMA Museum and take part in the ensuing Q & A session. This was Starr’s was first overseas stop in his capacity as Obama’s ‘Water Ambassador’ making a guest appearances world over to talk about the movie and the dangers facing the world’s water supplies.
If you haven’t yet seen the movie or aren’t aware that what’s happening with our water and oceans make a point of downloading the movie, buying the DVD or just visiting the website FLOW - the movie. There is a gigantic corporate theft (they call it privatisation) of water from the commons going on perpetrated by the likes of Nestlé, Coke and Pepsi, which is taking spring water for nothing (that is when they don’t take it from the municipal tap) and flogging it back to us in toxic plastic bottles at ten times the price. The whole process of hydro-privatisation is being driven by the Wold Bank and huge transnational corporations like Suez who cook-up opaque and corrupt deals with susceptible governments, promising much and delivering little.
The message is loud and clear. Water is a universal right. It is in the Commons. It must not become a commercial commodity, sold back to us by anonymous corporations whose executives are motivated by inflated remuneration whipped on by shareholder expectation. There is a movement now to add Article 31 to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, confirming the universal right of access to clean and affordable water. One can only assume that the UN’s founding fathers (and Eleanor) thought that was a given. Better late than never.
If the ageing suits like Camdessus at the World Bank together with other wicked old French smoothies at Suez, Nestlé et al (somehow francophones seem to have made the archetypal aqua-villain a role all of their very own) come in for much-deserved stick in the movie, it’s good to remember our world is more nuanced than movies like this can portray. Giving way to eco-Manichean finger pointing, however satisfying, won’t actually help us much. That’s why it was great to hear from an operational line manager from the World Bank present at the screening. The World Bank was a multi-layered body reflecting many, often conflicting, policies, he told us. His work involved initiating micro-projects in over 40,000 Indonesian villages. He finished with the observation that the World Bank doesn’t need to spend a $billion on a 100 projects, it needs to spend a $million on a million projects.
Filth from Source to Mouth say Green Kids
The Green School is to be commended for organising the evening for the retrospective funding to send five students to the EARCOS (a regional body for international schools) meeting in Bangkok earlier in March with a 20-minute video they’d made of their findings sampling the waters of Ayung River, which flows mid-campus. What they found was not good news, though hardly a surprise. The students took six different samples from the river. From the Pengosekan Spring, the Payangan Spring, the river at Payangan, the subak canal near the Green School and near the mouth of the river. All samples were heavily contaminated with fecal coliform bacteria, nitrates, phosphates and ammonia. Surprisingly, however, nitrates were higher at the source spring than in the river and the lowest nitrates were in the subak canal.
