MISSIONARY: Look at you! You’re just wasting your life away, lying around like that.

SAMOAN: Why? What do you think I should be doing?

MISSIONARY: Well, there are plenty of coconuts all around here. Why not dry some copra and sell it?

SAMOAN: And why would I want to do that?

MISSIONARY: You could make a lot of money. And with the money you make, you could get a drying machine, and dry copra faster, and make even more money.

SAMOAN: Okay. And why would I want to do that?

MISSIONARY: Well, you’d be rich. You could buy land, plant more trees, expand operations. At that point, you wouldn’t even have to do the physical work anymore, you could just hire a bunch of other people to do it for you.

SAMOAN: Okay. And why would I want to do that?

MISSIONARY: Well, eventually, with all that copra, land, machines, employees, with all that money—you could retire a very rich man. And then you wouldn’t have to do anything. You could just lie on the beach all day.

excerpt from Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber

full movie here

Beautifully framed and enthusiastically edited, The Swedish Theory of Love discusses, criticises, and presents the idea of loneliness in Sweden through love, family, and communal values. The film talks about loneliness through unconventional topics such as artificial insemination, the elderly living alone, cases of people dying and only to be discovered years later, and a Swedish surgeon finding happiness in Ethiopia.

Sweden is well known for its welfare system. But while many other countries’ institutions of welfare state focuses on family units, Sweden’s welfare state focuses on the alliance between the state and autonomous individuals. This ideology is called Statist individualism. Coined by the historians Henrik Beggren and Lars Trägårdh, Statist individualism is the idea that a strong state and individual freedom are not mutually exclusive, and that with assistance from the welfare state, a person can freely choose to live their life the way they envision.

Part of the focus on the individual over the family unit comes from a manifesto written by a group of Social Democratic politicians in 1972: “The Family of The Future” (“Familjen i framtiden: en socialistisk familjepolitik”). The principle of the manifesto was simple: every individual is to be regarded as autonomous, and not as the appendage of a caretaker such as a husband, parent, or child. The idea is that no one should have to be forced to be in any relationships because of economic needs.

Now, after 40 years since its conception and implementation, Director Erik Gandini examines the problems that came out of this social system.  While modernity has brought Swedes more personal independence, Swedes lost the ability to connect with each other. The Swedish Theory of Love argues that this kind of independence is perhaps the root of all loneliness. Through the lenses of Director Erik Gandini, we see a somewhat melancholic and unusual side of Sweden.

Cinema Escapist writer Emily Hsiang sat down with Director Erik Gandini for an in-depth talk about The Swedish Theory of Love.

Children have played a huge role in tobacco advertising over the decades, and images of children fulfill multiple purposes for tobacco advertisers. Particularly in the Baby Boomer era, depictions of children with their mothers or fathers in cigarette ads reinforced the respectability of smoking as a part of normal family life, a perception often promulgated by the tobacco industry. Further, the images of youngsters tended to send a reassuring message to consumers about the healthfulness of the product, representing purity, vibrancy, and life – concepts which can be dangerous when tied to tobacco products. Finally, these depictions of children were an obvious ploy to attract females to smoking as part of the industry’s campaign to expand the pool of women smokers.

source: Stanford Research Into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA)

The Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA) collection currently contains 62,547 tobacco advertisements.

Era uma vez uma espécie que engendrou uma forma de guardar imagens da realidade onde vivia, transformando a forma como comunicava e se percepcionava e, por arrasto, transformando-se a si própria. Possuindo hoje milhões de dispositivos capazes de fazer esse registo, os seus elementos vivem obcecados por tal mister, desconhecendo ainda na totalidade as implicações para a sua vida e convivência em comunidade.

O visionamento do filme/documentário trará momentos de História, humor, mas também de reflexão. Ficou prometida uma sequela, envolvendo redes sociais e "inteligência" artificial. Trailer