Open Source Cinema - An Open Source Documentary Film about Copyright

Who I am is a product of my upbringing within two worlds. In the first world is my mother and her bare feet as she danced in the kitchen, singing and slapping out a rhythm on the breakfast arepas grilling quietly on the stove. I can smell the fresh Colombian coffee brewing and picture the faces of my parents as we sat around the table eating and laughing. It’s a reminder of how far my parents travelled in hopes of raising their child in a better world than what they knew.

The second world, the one they thought was better, is outside, heavy with pop culture and its empty consumerism, where confused young Latinos like myself try to fit in. It’s a muddled sense of self; you’re expected to be a certain way, as a Latino — by Anglos and Latinos alike. You hear salsa and cumbia from the kitchen and hip-hop from your bedroom. Anglo kids call you spic and Latinos call you gringo. From these two extremes, you want to cull something of your own but don’t want to turn your back on your Latin roots or your Canadian future. Over the years, you try on different looks, different sounds: you’re a hip-hop head, a punk, a party kid, a clubber, an explorer. That is, until the day you meet a group of Latinos who don’t dress or look like J-Lo or Ricky Martin.

These Latinos are into more than just salsa, cumbia, mernengue and bachata; they don’t just want to shake their bon-bons. They know where they’re from and where they are, with an awareness of the political strife they’ve left behind. Their music drives with a familiar clave groove, but there are guitars, breakbeats and dubby bass lines too. You’re at home in a place where piercings, dyed hair and tattoos mix with native beads, Spanglish and sneakers, where timbales and congas intertwine with turntables and mixers. You are amongst your people. You are an Alternative Latino and you finally have a soundtrack.

In this community I found a home, and there are many other Latino-Canadians out there who believe the same thing. People like Juan Carlos Valencia, whose group Plan C won Canadian Music Week’s best Alternative Latin band for their soulful re-arrangement of traditional Colombian music. Like Fernando Pinzón, whose band Sonora Calavera is beginning to tear shit up in Montreal with their combination of Latin-ska-reggae-rock. Like Cuervo Loomi, whose group Black Caco have been making some serious noise in the hip-hop scene for being some of the first in Montreal to mash up the hip-hop mentality with Caribbean-Latino rhythms. Or Paula Gonzales, also known as La Bomba, whose work over the years in Toronto as a lyricist and musician has allowed her to experiment with and explore all that the Canadian cultural panoply has to offer.

Over 30 years ago, my parents immigrated to Canada. Arriving in Toronto, they created a new community with other immigrant Latinos; they danced and sang and worked together to make this a new home. Their children have had the luxury of that established community, and set out into the Western world that seemed like our birthright. But many young people born and raised in Latin America see this same pop culture as both a symbol of spiritual weakness and an ironic invader of the developing world. But to all of us, Alternative Latin is a combination of our musical, political and spiritual roots, and the modern influences of culture and technology.

Cuervo Loomi, founding member of Black Caco, one of Montreal’s most respected hip-hop en español groups, felt the move to Canada at the age of 17 both held him back and pushed his music forward. "I came from my country a few months before I was to finish high school," Loomi says. "I had to learn French and it slowed me down. I had an idea of what I was going to do in my own country, but life can throw curveballs. You get here and you get used to everything — the weather, whatever. If you decide you’re going to do something, you can do it if you’re ready to apply all your energy toward having and reaching these goals. As a musician, I learned a lot about technology that my country never had and took advantage of it as much as possible."

Much of the Alternative Latin or Alter-Latino sound is layered thick with sampled beats and heavily influenced by many electronic elements, something that stems from the extensive exploration of music than many immigrants embark upon immediately. The ability to access hip-hop, R&B, soul, funk, house, drum & bass, punk rock, metal and country with a turn of a dial or a subway ride downtown is one of the first things that made the trip to Toronto, alone at the age of 19, a bit easier for Plan C’s Juan Carlos Valencia.

"It wasn’t a negative move, because if I hadn’t come here I would never have been exposed to all the music here," Valencia says. "All the music was starting to come to Colombia, but it wasn’t at the level that it’s at here. Here it’s a giant movement. I was exposed to the world because Canada is a country where the whole world can be found. I loved that."

Exposure to these artistic opportunities has pushed many wide-eyed Latino musicians to involve themselves in a variety of scenes, like Toronto’s La Bomba. After her family left Chile as refuges, Paula Gonzales arrived in Toronto and was immediately taken by the punk scene. In 1988, La Bomba began to play bass in all-girl punk group Chicken Milk and a few years later she joined Smear, whose first gig was opening for D.O.A. Smear got some attention in Toronto and New York, but Gonzales grew bored with the increasingly trendy punk scene and wanted a change.

"In 1994, I joined the all-female reggae outfit Women Ah Run Tings," she says. "I finally felt like I had found a cool bunch of women, also immigrants like myself, and also bold and loud. They taught me how to rhyme, and they taught me how to play reggae. I was an eager student, because they were such a fun crew, but also because they treated me with such respect and really taught me more than a few tricks on the bass.

"It was here that I began rhyming in Spanish, egged on not just by the band, but by the people who would come to see our shows. Most of the time we played to the Jamaican community and people really cheered when I rhymed, so I kept doing it, and getting better."

With not just an established Latino community, but support from other, similarly disjointed immigrant communities, young Latino musicians have a good shot at success here in Canada. But no matter how established the community is, it can’t take the place of home.

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More on-topic to Open Source movie-making: You face a lot of struggle and pain if you want to do it purely with Free Software. This is something that needs fixing if the creative commons is to become self-sustained. The current parasitic culture (by "parasitic" I mean using unlicensed software on a large scale) will never become truly legitimate.
There is an increased interest in making serious Free video editing software happen. Check out the mailing lists for Estudio Livre, Piksel-devel and Cinelerra-CV, especially January and February 2008.

The struggle doesn't stop once you have Free multimedia software made from scratch, though. Once you have avoided the Copyright issues, you face the software patent monster. If you think the state of Copyright is unfair, you will see software patents as downright evil! Check out MPEG-LA and FFII.

--
Herman Robak
herman at skolelinux no

I work for a State TV in Brasil, and have to say that here there´s a feeling of civil disobedience that makes all of our softwares pirate, even for who works for the government, as there´s no open source softwares (at least not any known to me) like after effects and maya.. i know there´s that 3d one, elephant, i guess, but here, on the public tv that covers the senate, we use pirate maya and 3d max and also pirate ae. there´s a coletive felling that this is moral, better than paying money for the rich countries... i think this is good

do you need help with this?

I work for the Brazilian government, and used to work with the Pontos de Cultura, including planning the Digital Culture action.

pixel [at] vjpixel.net