Welcome to the future neighborhood. As we hear a “Beautiful Day” serenade, we see a succession of people seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are in the midst of natural disasters.
A couple pushes a baby stroller along the sidewalk in the face of a powerful wind storm. Next, we see campers enjoying the great outdoors with a bonfire next to their tent–while the countryside behind them is ablaze, almost fully engulfed in flames. And finally we see a flooded neighborhood in which we see a man, waist deep in water, washing his car which itself is about two-third submerged. Also in the flood scenario, two guys are tossing a football back and forth, and further in the background it appears yet another man is cooking a meal on his barbecue.
A supered message than appears which simply reads, “Ignoring global warming won’t make it go away,” followed by an end tag carrying the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) logo.
“Beautiful Day” was directed and shot by Chris Sargent via Untitled, Toronto, for FCB, Toronto.
Peter Davis executive produced for Untitled, with Tom Evelyn serving as producer.
The FCB team consisted of executive VP/creative director Robin Heisey, VP/group creative director/art director Joe Piccolo, associate creative director/copywriter Chris Taciuk and co-head of production Judy Hamilton.
Editor was Pete McAuley of AXYZ, Toronto. Irene Payne produced for AXYZ with Dave Giles and Joel Saunders the Inferno artists from that studio. Audio post mixer was Toronto-based freelancer Paul Seeley.
Contributors from Rosnick Mackinnon Webster (RMW), Toronto, were music arranger Mark Hukezlie, sound designer Vlad Nikolic and producer Ted Rosnick.
Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.
Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.
But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.
"Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."
"Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More