The film follows two American lawyers and union leaders as they attempt to bring a case against the soda pop giant for its alleged complicity in the murders of union leaders at bottling plants in Columbia.

 Cinema Politica founder Ezra Winton said the letter claimed the film was “defamatory” and included details of private negotiations between the company and the subjects of the documentary.

Cinema Politica, in cooperation with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), plans to screen The Coca-Cola Case at Cinema Politica locals. It stopped at Concordia on January 18 and its tour will include screenings in over 20 cities across the country and abroad.

“[Coca-Cola] knew about the film from the early days and I’m sure followed its progression. They probably thought that it would play at some film festivals then go away,” Winton told The Link after the letter was received on January 11.

“Now I think that [they’re contacting us because] it’s not just going away – that in fact it’s having a resurgence through our network,” he said.

Filmmakers Carmen Garcia and Germán Gutiérrez have said that Coca-Cola and the film’s subjects had already settled prior claims of a breach of confidentiality.

The corporation now requires information about where and when the documentary was filmed, but could not force the filmmakers to cut footage.

Coca-Cola never contacted Garcia or Gutiérrez directly, choosing instead to level its criticism at the subjects of the documentary and Cinema Politica.

“The idea that you can take legal recourse against an exhibitor is pretty unheard of,” said Winton. “The film is already in the can. It’s already out in public with thousands of copies circulating. It’s with a national public production house. So [when their lawyer sent us that letter] it’s kind of just them going after the little guy because we’re grassroots.”

Winton said he felt Coca-Cola was concerned about the Cinema Politica screenings because they will mostly take place on university campuses, in full view of the youth and students who are the company’s target market. Coca-Cola routinely seeks – and gets – exclusivity contracts with universities and other institutions.

Students at schools including the University of Guelph have held successful campaigns to ban Coke from campuses, citing the company’s record of human rights abuses. Most recently, a Norwegian student association shut out Coke products from all universities and colleges across Norway.

Cinema Politica plans to go ahead with its Coca-Cola Case tour regardless.

“If the NFB or the filmmakers asked us to stop screening it we would. But lawyers that represent Coca-Cola that simply don’t agree with some of the representations in the film – with what the characters in the film say, not the filmmakers [themselves] – it’s as if they’re saying Coca-Cola is beyond any kind of criticism in a documentary film,” explained Winton. “Now they’re sending us this letter, which to me means we’re doing something right.”

The lawyer who sent Winton the letter, Faith Gay of Quinn Emanuel Trial Lawyers in New York City, did not return The Link’s phone calls.

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“People have developed a more sedentary lifestyle,” Whyte said. “If there were more facilities, people would have access to a greater range of activities and more possible times to do them.”

Kahnawake is a First Nations reserve of about 7,000 located on Montreal’s south shore. Over 800 people, nearly 12 per cent of the population, have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes – more than twice the national average of 5 per cent.

“It’s a lot of people,” Whyte said.

A survey conducted for Health Canada’s First Nations and Inuit Branch in July revealed that while increasing numbers of First Nations people are aware of the programs promoting physical activity in their communities, few of them connect exercise with the prevention of diabetes.

First Nations populations with diabetes are more likely to point to genetics or diet as the disease’s cause, according to the survey.

The same survey reported that under half of the First Nations people surveyed rated their communities’ sports facilities as “good” or “excellent.” Whyte pointed out that even Kahnawake’s minimal facilities are better than most.

“We’re unusual compared to other First Nations,” she said. “In other places, like up north, they don’t even have an arena at all.”

Jun-Li Liu of Montreal’s Fraser Laboratories for Diabetes Research said that exercise is one of the most important factors in preventing or treating Type 2 diabetes, a disease that occurs when the body is unable to properly process insulin, which regulates the amount of sugar in the blood.

“Exercise builds muscle and muscle is better at responding to insulin,” Liu said. “The bottom line is, if you’re afraid of becoming diabetic, you need exercise.”

While Whyte admitted that healthy habits are the responsibility of the individual, she said the community’s athletics facilities would be hard-pressed to aid widespread health initiatives.

Kahnawake’s Sport and Recreation Unit received about $12,000 of funding last year from the federal and provincial governments combined, an amount Whyte called “peanuts.” She said the recreation centre would have to expand its facilities if it wants to add more programs.

“Sometimes people will come at night because they want to walk around the arena, but it will be crowded with kids,” she said. “They ask, ‘When will it be less crowded?’ and we have to tell them to come back during the day. We just need more room.”

Whyte added that Kahnawake’s hospital has been proactive in organizing activities like walking groups.

The post Diabetes plagues Kahnawake appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“Comment est-ce qu’on dit ‘can I go to the washroom?’”

“Comment est-ce qu’on dit ‘the answer is 24?’”

Our teacher would sigh and tell us comment on le dit. We would nod, say, “d’accord,” then resume our conversation in English.

I never thought I’d move to Quebec.

Imagine my shock when I came to my senses behind the counter of a Second Cup in Montreal and found myself struggling to explain the contents of a brioche to a disdainful Swiss tourist – en franglais, bien sur.

I was born and raised in Vancouver. My move to Montreal was executed to the tune of well-wishers reassuring me I “wouldn’t even need to speak French at all.” “It’s okay, because I’m almost fluent anyway,” I replied again and again.

Nine months and an insular residence experience later, I was being force-fed my words in the form of stale café pastries. Determined to live in Montreal year-round, I had ventured out to find myself a job. I was looking for work in a coffee shop. Describing beverages and reading numbers off the cash display – how hard could it be?

The one and only interview I secured with my (entirely in English) CV was at the Second Cup by Place des Arts downtown. It was a disaster. My resolve dissolved like biscotti into lukewarm coffee the second the manager decided to conduct the interview in French. In a state of anxiety so acute as to provoke an out-of-body experience, I watched my brainless body stumble through French like it had never spoken it in its life.

By the end of it, an enormous smile was pasted to the front of my flushed face. I looked mildly hysterical. The manager leaned forward and fixed me with a pitying look.

“To be honest, your French is really not very good.” He gestured towards the employees chatting behind the counter. “Some of the people who work here don’t even speak English. And I don’t think you’d be able to work in a francophone environment.” I nodded dumbly, mortified, already resigning myself to telemarketer work. Instead of delivering the final coup de grâce, however, the manager took pity on me. “There’s another Second Cup in Phillips Square, a few blocks west of here. It’s more English. I’ll ask the manager if he needs someone.”

To my astonishment, I was hired at the Phillips Square location two weeks later. My hysterical interview smile must have made me seem friendly instead of panicked. Customer service managers find it hard to resist smiling young girls.

Every anglo asshole complaining about immigrants not speaking English should be sentenced to a week working at a coffee shop in Quebec. It’s the perfect place for a good humbling. Despite the manager’s insistence that I wouldn’t be able to work at his café, I was brought back there for my training. My coworkers were mostly friendly and tolerant, aside from a glaring Quebecoise or two. I had never worked in a café before, and had no idea what I was doing. I sentence any xenophobeto do exactly what I had to: complete their first week of training during Jazz Fest. Jazz Fest goes down at Place des Arts. Where was I working? Place des Arts. Trial by fire.

The line consistently snaked out the door, and I was the wrench in the gears of the counter operations. I never went to Second Cup before working there, so I didn’t know the menu at all, nevermind in French. I could barely make head or tail of the Quebecois accent. Yelling over the din, I asked customers to repeat themselves again and again and again, then gave them the wrong orders anyway.

“Il y a quoi dans ce gateau?”

“Pardon?”

“IL Y A QUOI DANS CE GATEAU?”

“Uhhh…pardon?”

“LE GATEAU!”

“[clears throat, clearly still not understanding] Uhhh…”

Post-Jazz Fest, it got better, as it always does. I took up permanent residence at the Phillips Square location, which was indeed more “English.” The traditional geographical divide in Montreal – anglo West and franco East – does still exist in a way. However, we did get enough French-speaking customers that my ego was constantly being battered, or at least slightly bruised.

To be honest, those first months were tough. I was living in a shitty apartment and still recovering from a break-up that had dragged my self-esteem down to levels not seen since early adolescence. I was vulnerable as hell and still eating humble pie almost every time I worked a shift.

In retrospect, I had it easy. My coworkers were patient. The rent got paid. Most people in Montreal speak at least a little English, so I did have that to fall back on if the French completely eluded me. While I did, admittedly, feel a little sorry for myself, what I really took away from that summer was a greater empathy for those who have it a lot harder. If a Canadian with some knowledge of French struggles, how is it for someone coming from another continent?

A year and half later, I have a new job and can’t imagine not speaking French every day. I am definitely not fluent, but I’m working on that. My boyfriend is pure laine Quebecois, and we moved in together in July. We speak a kind of pidgin, flowing smoothly in and out of languages mid-thought – Frenglish at its best. I baby-talk our cat in French and whisper “hostie” when I’m frustrated. We flip between the CBC and Radio-Canada and irritably tell each other to wash “la fucking vaiselle.” It’s beautiful.

And when he says “Je t’aime,” I always understand the first time ‘round.

The post Adventure: Totally bilingue: French immersion outside the classroom appeared first on The McGill Daily.

The film follows stray cat enthusiasts in three European cities: Brussels, Hamburg, and Rome. To give you an idea of my relationship to this film, said enthusiasts were mostly elderly, and watching them was like previewing the twilight years of my own life.

But Les chats isn’t some kind of cat-on-map pornography. The film is, instead, a unique meditation on humanity’s nasty habit of imposing arbitrary distinctions. Using a lovely mix of aerial photography, cat footage, and interviews, André examines our obsession with deciding what is useful and what is – that most damning of words! – useless.

“Is there any useless information on this map?” a German mapmaker is asked. His reply is quick and brusque. “No, everything is of a great importance.”

Eschewing the conventions of narrative and journalistic documentary, André ventures through underbrush and abandoned parking lots to uncover the stomping grounds of local cat gangs. She introduces the viewer to the loose-knit communities of cat-lovers who pour their money and time into the care of the titular chats errants, a commitment they make to themselves as much as to the cats.

“Are stray cats useful?” André asks an Italian woman. Unlike the practical German mapmaker, the woman is unsure what to say. She shrugs. “Sono belli, e basta” (“They are beautiful, and that’s enough”).

In an era of heightening focus on environmental issues, Les chats errants reads as a reminder of yet another kind of human waste: the rejection of “useless” space. The film’s drawling narrator challenges the viewer to imagine a room in an apartment with no use at all. It’s a surprisingly hard thing to wrap one’s head around. As the voiceover says, “How to think of nothing without surrounding it with something?”

Even the term “stray cats” implies human priorities. In Rome, where wandering cats are so ubiquitous as to be considered “part of the monuments,” the word “stray” does not apply. Instead, a law has officially named these cats “free.”

Gatti liberi are expert wanderers. With no agenda beyond meeting their basic needs, cat gangs lead enviable lives in the forgotten corners of human society. Because I’m human and can’t resist, I wonder if cats’ embrace of the useless is their primary role – and, throughout the film, André seems to think the same thing. She interviews a German man who couldn’t agree more. With obvious affection, he casually assigns his beloved animals a purpose: “Cats keep places existing that have fallen off the map.”

Les chats errants plays at 7:30 p.m. on November 18, at Cinémathèque québécoise (in French only).

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“My sense of lab.synthèse is one of an institution truly coming into its own after a tumultuous but wholly successful year of trial and error,” says Trevor Barton, recent Concordia graduate and one of Beaubien’s seven editors. “[Putting] together [Beaubien’s] first issue is a microcosm of that process.”

The editorial team also includes Concordia student Jeff Boyd, and McGill students Rosie Aiello, Claire Boucher, and Alex Cowan, as well as “blissfully unassociated” Sebastian Cowan and Emily Kai Bock. None of the magazine’s staff have any prior experience in self-publishing – a world often fraught with minimal budgets and distribution challenges. Luckily, Beaubien’s editors can call upon their creative friends – and Daily readers – to provide the content.

Unlike other Montreal-born magazines Lickety Split – a self-proclaimed “pansexual smut zine” – and Worn Fashion Journal, Barton admits Beaubien’s team has not yet identified a specific theme for contributors to follow. “We are bound to take a lot from this initial experience and definitely sharpen and narrow our themes and objectives heading into future issues,” he says, “but, as simplistic as it may sound, at this point, we are merely looking to be impressed.”

Spend an afternoon perusing the zine library at Mile End café Le Cagibi, and it will become clear: the freedom afforded by self-publishing often translates directly into unbridled subjectivity. Although this freedom can also translate into unsubstantiated ranting, the world of underground publishing plays a crucial role in the ecology of the printed word.

Canada has one of the world’s most consolidated media systems, meaning that an exceptionally large amount of the country’s mainstream media is in the hands of very few people. Once a publication is absorbed into the corporate blob, it becomes vulnerable to the whims and philosophies of the big kahuna – a recent example being he Gazette reporters’ struggle with CanWest, the newspaper’s owner. Putting out a magazine like Beaubien may not be a direct blow to corporate media, but it can be a defence of unhindered creativity. Original voices are sorely needed in the face of such massive editorial homogenization.

“Academia encourages us to constantly subsume and obscure the subjective element in any analysis,” Barton points out. “We would rather encourage the presence of the individual bend in any piece.”

While the Internet arguably affords the same opportunity, a magazine like Beaubien does what no personal blog can: give young writers and artists the chance to see their ideas in hard copy, validated by the work of the printing press. Lab.synthèse also plans to distribute Beaubien outside Montreal – namely, in Vancouver, Toronto, and New York.

Barton says they are hoping to reflect lab.synthèse’s “aesthetic attitude which is at once esoteric and diverse” in contributions ranging from “poetry, short stories, black and white illustrations, and editorials, to research-based columns on any topic.” The Beaubien team will be accepting submissions until November 1 and debuting the first issue at Expozine, taking place at the end of November. Contribute with the knowledge that you are building something beautiful.

All submissions can be sent to beaubienmagazine@gmail.com.

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His September 12 death was called “an apparent suicide” – and that was it. Wallace, a skillful satirist of American pop culture and consumerism, would have expected nothing more.

Perhaps it’s for the best that this impromptu obituary was kept so sparse. Print has its limits; it can’t push a book under its readers’ noses and say, “Why was Wallace so important? Find out for yourselves.” And with Infinite Jest running at over a thousand pages, Wallace’s talent required a lot of legroom.

The 46-year-old American, most recently a professor at Pomona College in California, also authored the less wordy novel The Broom of the System and the short story and essay collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, among others. “I’m no good at titles,” he once said; we beg to differ.

Despite myriad comparisons to Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, Wallace’s writing style was nothing if not iconoclastic. He was often cited as a proponent of his generation’s newly forged addiction to irony, when, in fact, he saw it as a literary tool like any other. “When irony and ridicule become cultural currency,” he once said in an interview, “then the great terror is not that you’re gonna hit me or that you’re gonna disagree with me – it’s that you’re gonna make fun of me.”

Rather than cashing in on this cultural currency, Wallace’s protagonists are remarkable for their earnestness. Setting his stories in a world shaped by branding, where the omnipresence of technology keeps people disconnected and aloof, Wallace both celebrated and lamented North Americans’ bumbling pursuit of emotional connections. “The idea of writing realistic fiction where people aren’t spending six hours a day watching TV seems absurd to me,” he said, “because that’s what people do.”

Infinite Jest, published in 1996, is set in the United States of the early twenty-first century, a world where even calendar years have been sold to the highest bidder (resulting in such monstrosities as the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment”). Wallace explained he wanted to write a book about what it was like to live in America at the turn of the century, saying he felt “there [was] something particularly sad about it, something that [didn’t] have very much to do with physical circumstances or the economy. It manifest[ed] itself as a kind of lostness.”

Jay McInerney, a New York Times book critic, criticized Infinite Jest, saying that Wallace’s momentum “seem[ed] to be sideways rather than forward.” Wallace was undeniably wordy and unapologetically intellectual, and for those reasons he will never appeal to everyone. What was refreshing about him, in a world dominated by ratings, was his acknowledgement and acceptance of his own marginalization. “If novelists were treated the way TV stars or musicians are,” he reasoned, “it would so warp us and so distort our capacity for standing on the sides and watching.”

Sorry, Mr. Wallace, but all eyes are on you.

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