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Andy Johnson,Editor-in-Chief

Garett Svensen,Production Editor

Closing Remarks: Post North

In her 1999 book, Don’t Think, Smile!, Ellen Willis, a New York feminist, says free speech has few friends today.

Sometimes to students it might ap-pear in this intellectual climate that “the only alternative to the Right is a politics of repression, self-abnegation and guilt,” she continues.

Willis wonders if the partisans of sexual correctness could eventu-ally identify with the authorities in Orwell’s 1984 in seeking to abolish orgasm.

The anti-pornography movement inspired by legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon defines as violence “not only heterosexual acts but sexual desire, fantasy and representation,” Willis observes.

Graham Pearce and people who un-derstand his approach will help return desire from exile.

Thank you, and good night.

Paul Strickland, Contributor

Taren Johnson,Web Manager

Paul Strickland is a regular contributor to The Confluence. A local writer with a lot on his mind, he read these closing remarks at the recent Post North V: Exile and Desire

Available at the CNCSU Office

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Environment Canada 7-Day Weather Forecast:For Prince George, BC. 1-7 March 2013Friday, March 1: 4°C, Cloudy, Chance of Showers.Saturday, March 2: 3°C, -1°C, Snow.Sunday, March 3: 1°C, -6°C, Sunny.Monday, March 4: -1°C, -9°C, SunnyTuesday, March 5: -1°C, -12°C, Sunny.Wednesday, March 6: 0°C, -13°C, Sunny.Thursday, March 7: 1°C, -12°C, Sunny.

March 2013

The Confluence is produced biweekly at the CNCSU office on CNC’s Prince George campus by Garett Svensen and Andy Johnson.

Submissions, inqueries and requests can be made to news.cncsu.ca, in person at the CNCSU office room 1-303, or mailed to “The Confluence c/o CNCSU 3330-22nd Ave. Prince George, BC. V2N 1P8”

All submissions are welcome, the authors of edited works used in the confluence receive a $20 cheque upon publication. Advertisement rates are availiable upon request.

Confluence Out

Ski Trip

CNCSU Elections

International Women’s Day

CNCSUNominationsOpen

Confluence Out

Farmer’s Market Good Friday

CNCSUClosed

CNC Trades Day

Gathering Place Opening-Atrium

SustainabilityShowcase

Cinema CNC

Weather

29 3031

CNCSU Nominations Close

Bottle Water Free Day

St. Patrick’s Day

World Water Day

JobFair10-3pm-Atrium Ski Trip

Payment Due

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Cinema CNCGarett Svensen,Production Editor

The 17th Cinema CNC film festival starts Friday, March 1st at 7pm. The annual event is put on by Peter Maides, who teaches English, Film Studies and New Media at CNC.

This year, the festival features the best of Canadian film with a solid lineup of 7 Canadian films ranging from comedies to dramas to documentaries.

Here’s this year’s lineup (from the Cinema CNC Blog):

InescapableFriday, 7pm

My Awkward Sexual AdventureFriday, 9:30pm

Picture DaySaturday, 1pm

Successful Syrian-Canadian businessman Adib lives a comfortable life in Toronto with his loving wife and two college-aged daughters. On a typical afternoon at work, he receives a devastating piece of news: while vacationing in Greece, his eldest daughter secretly took a detour to Damascus — and vanished. Frantic, Adib immediately makes plans to return to Syria after more than thirty years. As Adib places a series of covert phone calls and makes secret rendezvous with former contacts, it gradually becomes clear that he was once a major player in the Syrian resistance movement. Aided by the ex-fiancee he left behind, and a dubious Canadian embassy official, Adib wades through vague clues, government subterfuge, and a web of conspiracies that stand between him and his daughter. When the regime discovers his former identity and accuses his daughter of being a spy, Adib must once again take up arms and fight for what he holds most dear.

Nadda spent four years as a teenager living in Damascus, which surely informs her convincing evocation of the climate of paranoia that is cultivated by totalitarian regimes. Along with its chillingly authentic atmosphere, Inescapable poses a series of vital, ethically charged questions. What happens if the past won’t stay in the past? What desperate lengths could someone go to if their

former life threatens the new life they’ve spent decades painstakingly building? Expertly building the tension to a fever pitch, Nadda withholds her answers until the final, nail-biting minutes.

A hyper-repressed and schlubby accountant (Jonas Chernick) strikes a deal with a worldly but disorganized stripper (Emily Hampshire): he’ll help her with her crushing debt if she helps him become a better lover. Sharp direction by the versatile Sean Garrity and a very funny script by Chernick ensure for an uproarious — and surprisingly educational — sex comedy.

After an almost perfunctory montage of Winnipeg night scenes, Sean Garrity’s My Awkward Sexual Adventure cuts to the chase: Accountant Jordan Abrams is having sex with his longtime girlfriend, Rachel. It’s not going well... Rachel — the woman Jordan plans to propose to on the weekend during a romantic getaway to Niagara Falls — has in fact dozed off. When she finally wakes up, she tells Jordan she’s had enough of his bedroom inadequacies and promptly dumps him. Decimated, he heads off to Toronto to stay with his best friend Dandak, a notorious player who throws Jordan an impromptu party packed with available women.

Unfortunately, our heartbroken hero can’t talk about anything else but Rachel. Kicked out of his own party, Jordan stumbles into a strip joint. There he continues to bemoan his fate until, after far too many drinks, he’s tossed into the alleyway where he’s rescued by one of the dancers, Julia. The next morning in Julie’s apartment, which is littered with unpaid bills, she and a somehow pantless Jordan strike a bargain. She’ll teach him how to be a better lover; he’ll help her deal with her crushing debt.

Raucous, sexy, and frenetic, My Awkward Sexual Adventure charts

two different quests: Jordan’s drive to become less of a hyper-repressed schlub and win back Rachel, and Julia’s struggle to gain control of her life. They aren’t mutually exclusive journeys, and neither plays out exactly how the characters envision. Ultimately, they are left with opposing choices: Jordan must give up his fantasy while Julia has to embrace hers. It’s hardly certain that either will have the courage necessary to do so. My Awkward Sexual Adventure is sharply directed by the versatile Garrity, with a very funny script by Chernick, who leads the exceptional cast while racing from one catastrophe to the next as if his hair’s about to catch fire. And, perhaps unusually for a sex comedy, it’s surprisingly educational.

One of the most charming and vibrant debut features by a Canadian filmmaker in recent memory, Kate Melville’s Picture Day features rising star Tatiana Maslany as Claire Paxton, a teenage girl who has all the freedoms of adulthood but none of the responsibilities. Forced to repeat her last year of high school due to bad grades and absenteeism, Claire still prefers to cut class whenever feasible and spends her nights clubbing, living on the fringes of the adult world she’s almost part of.

When two men enter Claire’s life, things begin to change radically. Jame, the singer in a popular Toronto faux-funk band, is intrigued enough by Claire to pick her up from school the night after they sleep together. Claire is soon confronted by someone from her past: her former babysitting charge, Henry, a shy, geeky science whiz who keeps shoeboxes full of mementoes — most of them relating to Claire. After a chance meeting and a shared blunt, Claire is determined to help Henry get noticed at school — hardly difficult, since she’s already infamous.

As Claire bounces back and forth between the teenage and adult worlds, the flaws of both become increasingly apparent. If her teenage friends judge her too much for her past, the adult world doesn’t guarantee

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Midnight’s ChildrenSaturday ,7pm

The End of TimeSaturday, 9:30pm

Rebelle [War Witch]Sunday, 2pm

more maturity or understanding. The taunting and backstabbing at school are nothing compared to the casual insensitivity of James or her mother, who is too obsessed with her own tragedies — mostly involving her errant boyfriend — to worry about what Claire is going through. Rarely have the dynamics of a presented so honestly, as in a cutting scene when Claire finds her weeping mother on the phone, bemoaning her boyfriend’s departure once again. Looking Claire in the eye, she sobs, “What else have I got left in my life?”

Smoothly directed by Melville, Picture Day sketches a scruffier, less upscale version of the world inhabited by Noah Baumbach’s lost adolescents. The film is anchored by an extraordinary performance by Maslany, who more than delivers on the promise evident in Grown Up Movie Star. Together, Maslany and Melville have created a protagonist as unique, infuriating, complex and memorable as the heroines of New Waterford Girl, Emporte-moi or Double Happiness.

Rushdie’s inspired adaptation of his own Booker Prize–winning novel follows the destinies of a pair of children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very instant that India claimed its independence from Great Britain—and which, in Rushdie’s brilliant magic realist conceit, endows the children born on the same night as their country’s liberation with supernatural abilities ranging from flight to invisibility, with those born closest to midnight possessing the most powerful gift.

“Handcuffed to history,” and switched at birth by a nurse in a Bombay hospital, Saleem Sinai (Satya Bhabha), the son of a poor single mother, and Shiva (Siddharth), scion of a wealthy family, are condemned to live out the fate intended for the other. Imbued with mysterious telepathic powers, their lives become strangely intertwined and inextricably linked to their country’s careening journey through the tumultuous twentieth century.

An irreverent epic of Shakespearean proportions, shot through with moments of arresting intimacy, Midnight’s Children is a production of truly impressive scope, featuring state-of-the-art computer graphics, impressive production design by the director’s brother Dilip Mehta, and sixty-two locations. A luxurious feast of a film brimming with romance, spectacle, intrigue, sly social commentary and uplifting optimism, Midnight’s Children is as vast and beguiling as the great country to which it pays homage.

Peter Mettler’s The End of Time is a visually stunning tour de force, as one might expect from one of Canada’s greatest cinematographers. It’s also a rich, deeply rewarding and rigor-ous meditation on the nature of time. Mettler begins the film with archival footage of US Air Force pilot Joe Kit-tiger, who flew a balloon to the unpre-cendented height of 102,800 feet, then parachutes out. Watching these images of Kittinger in free fall suspends our notion of time.

The film argues that time itself is, in part, a notion we impose on ourselves — and that there may be other ways to view, measure and experience time than the Western artifices of the clock and the stock market bell. Travelling the globe, Mettler explores a dizzy-ing range of perspectives on time: from scientists working with a particle accelerator, who try to examine time by smashing protons together in an immense, twenty-seven-kilometre long concrete structure miles beneath the surface; from Buddhists visiting the tree where Buddha was enlight-ened; from DJ and electronic musician Richie Hawtin, who locates a new frontier in his work with machines; from squatters in an abandoned area of Detroit near where Henry Ford built his first factory, now a derelict behemoth that evokes the broken statue of Shelley’s "Ozymandias"; from the lone remaining resident in an area being consumed by lava pouring forth from an active volcano.

En route, Mettler draws eerie con-nections between the most disparate places and events (the patterns on the ceiling of a Buddhist temple echo the

multi-coloured circles in the tunnels of the particle accelerator) and locates parables of renewal and destruction in an astonishing sequence where a grasshopper is transported by an army of ants. Establishing a mood which oscillates between rumination and trance, Mettler relentlessly pushes at the limits of our understanding of time, and the ultimate fragility of the structures we have constructed atop it.

Charting the links between primordi-al mysticism and the furthest concep-tual reaches of modern science, The End of Time is both mind-expanding and oddly familiar, as if reminding us of truths we forgot long ago.

The film is narrated by fourteen-year-old Komona, who recounts the past two years of her life to her un-born child. Abducted by a rebel army that invades her small village, Ko-mona is forced to commit an unthink-able act — shooting her own parents — before being dragged off into the jungle. Over the next several months, she is inducted into the brutal lifestyle of the child soldier: she is beaten re-peatedly, taught to fire an AK-47, and kept in a drugged state by the admin-istration of “magic milk.” One day, Komona has a vision of her parents, who warn her of danger ahead; heed-ing the apparitions’ advice, she is the only person to escape unscathed from a ferocious firefight.

Impressed by her premonitory pow-ers, the warlord Great Tiger bestows Komona with the title of “War Witch,” which earns her both privileges in the camp and the threat of harsh punish-ment if her powers fail. When Komo-na befriends fellow soldier Magicien, she seems to have found an escape. The two soon run away together and eventually fall in love — but the war is never far away, and their romantic idyll is cut short when they are recap-tured by the rebels. Returned to the tyranny of her former life and still haunted by the ghosts of her parents, Komona soon becomes pregnant and struggles to find a ray of hope in her desperate situation.

This is undeniably grim material, but Nguyen leavens it with delicacy and tact, conveying violence by impli-

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Stories We TellSunday, 7pm

Lunarcy!Sunday, 9:30pm

cation and atmosphere rather than through direct depiction. The perfor-mances from the mostly non-profes-sional cast are vivid and authentic, particularly the extraordinary Mwan-za’s portrayal of Komona, which won her the Best Actress prize at both the Berlin and Tribeca film festivals.

Heartfelt and helplessly moving, Rebelle guides us through the harsh world of a young girl whose circum-stances are tragic, yet whose story is one of formidable courage and un-quenchable hope.

Stories We Tell is the acclaimed feature documentary debut from award-winning Canadian actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley. In the few short years since Polley first revealed her remarkable talents as a writer and director, audiences have already come to expect the aesthetic rigour and reserved yet deeply felt emotion she brings to her studies of human rela-tionships.

In her first two features, Away From Her and Take This Waltz, she rendered the complexities of intimacy and de-sire with the eloquence and control of filmmakers with far more experience. Away From Her in particular asked questions about how we can know ourselves or assess our lives if we can’t agree on the events of the past. Memory is truth — at least emotional truth. And nowhere in life are shared memories more fiercely contested than in the family.

Stories We Tell is at heart a personal essay on the intractable subjects of truth and memory. Using a combina-tion of archival footage, still photos and testimonials in a captivating vi-sual assemblage, Polley examines the disagreements and varying narratives of a single family as they look back on decades-old events.

The responses from the “storytell-ers” chosen to share their version of things are heartfelt, revealing and even charmingly funny. The result is a lively and richly textured documen-tary that seamlessly blends past and present, the real and the imagined.

Devoid of sensationalism and filled

with tender and powerful moments, the film also serves as a loving hom-age to one key player who is no longer here to share her version.

Sarah Polley’s portrait of her par-ents’ marriage is a gripping tale, full of richness, tenderness and emotional complexity. It’s difficult to tell what making this movie must have entailed, and with what diplomacy and skill she must have marshalled its participants — but the result is a great pleasure to watch.

From the late 1950s to the end of the 1960s, the thrill of space exploration captivated a world witnessing truly cosmic achievements. It was a time when anything seemed possible — Pan Am Airlines even began to take reservations from regular citizens for the first prospective commercial flight to the lunar surface. By the time the 1986 Challenger disaster and the close of the Cold War ended the Space Race, the utopian dreams that had fu-elled the Space Age had already faded from the public's imagination — but for a few true believers, those dreams only intensified. This irresistibly zany, sharp-witted documentary from direc-tor Simon Ennis shuttles entertaining-ly from the ridiculous to the sublime as it introduces us to an unforgettable group of characters whose years-long obsession with the moon has reached truly galactic proportions.

Among the lunar-fixated interview-ees is Peter Kokh, who has been publishing The Moon Miners' Mani-festo since 1986, which speculates

on what homes, gardens, malls, even musical instruments will look like once we live on the moon. Then there is Dennis Hope, who in 1980 found a loophole in the United Nations Outer Space Treaty which prohibits nations from owning the moon, but not indi-viduals — which led him to declare himself the owner of the moon and to make a fortune selling plots of land to hopeful future lunar colonizers (in-cluding some former U.S. presidents). At the heart of the film, however, is an eccentric young man named Christo-pher Carson, who is determined to be the first person to live on the moon. With humour and more than a little sympathy, Ennis follows Carson's often misfired efforts as he travels from place to place trying to convince people to help him reach his goal.

Energetic, illuminating and often hi-larious, Lunarcy! achieves the difficult feat of pointedly depicting the humour inherent in its subjects' endeavours without condescending to them — and it also raises larger questions about the human capacity to make dreams a reality. Are Carson's ambitions any more outrageous than explorers setting sail to discover new lands, amateur inventors trying to take to the skies, or two mighty nations racing to put the first human being in space?

As Lunarcy! reminds us, some of the most startling achievements in hu-man history began with a seemingly impossible dream.

Lunarcy!

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The cashier treats me -condescendinglyThinking I can’t afford anythingThinking I’m under aged,that I’m going to pass her fake ID or one borrowed from a friend.She shifts onto one leg, flicks her hair,remnants of an old mane, back. “Cash or debit?” “Neither”she sneers at my card, sneers,at the package on the countergesturing with garnished nails “For tonight?” “No” “That’s what they all say”She chuckles hoarsely, but stopsAs the bill rings up as I sign one bottle one aged, double wood whisky.

ConfrontationKatherine Douglas,Contributor

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CNC Faculty Association: Status of Women Committee presents

Visit the CNC Library for more info or check outhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n91IC9m5YU

Submissions will be displayed in the Library for public viewing from MARCH 6TH - 8TH

“I hope my daughter won’t have to protest for her rights, but that she will be

strong enough to if she must.”

A creative opportunity for women and men to sharetheir stories, thoughts and experiences about women.Pick up a blank postcard at the CNC Library,Aboriginal Resource Centre (ARC), or InternationalEducation (IE). Create an anonymous postcardcelebrating an achievement or challenge, hope for thefuture, or a personal story or experience. Add someart. Submit completed postcards by March 5th at4:00pm in a drop-box at: the Library, the Center forStudent Success (CSS), ARC, IE, or the AssignmentDrop-box outside the Mailroom.

POSTSECRETCNCMarch 8th 2013

International Women’s Day

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CNC Faculty Association: Status of Women Committee presents

Visit the CNC Library for more info or check outhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n91IC9m5YU

Submissions will be displayed in the Library for public viewing from MARCH 6TH - 8TH

“I hope my daughter won’t have to protest for her rights, but that she will be

strong enough to if she must.”

A creative opportunity for women and men to sharetheir stories, thoughts and experiences about women.Pick up a blank postcard at the CNC Library,Aboriginal Resource Centre (ARC), or InternationalEducation (IE). Create an anonymous postcardcelebrating an achievement or challenge, hope for thefuture, or a personal story or experience. Add someart. Submit completed postcards by March 5th at4:00pm in a drop-box at: the Library, the Center forStudent Success (CSS), ARC, IE, or the AssignmentDrop-box outside the Mailroom.

POSTSECRETCNCMarch 8th 2013

International Women’s Day

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JOB FAIRTuesday, March 5th, 2013

10:00am – 3:00pm in the CNC Atrium

For more information please contact:Kris Dittman

Room: 1-753 Counselling & Advising CentrePhone 250.561.5806

employment@cnc.bc.ca

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Election Notice2013/2014 Executive Committee

Election Schedule:

Nominations Open: Monday March 4, 2013 9:00amNominations Close: Friday March 15, 2013 4:00pm

Campaigning Open: Monday March 18, 2013 9:00amCampaigning Close: Friday March 22, 2013 4:00pm

Voting in the CNC Atrium:

Monday March 25, 2013 Tuesday March 26, 2013 Wednesday March 27, 2013

7 Student Representative Positions available:

ChairpersonSecretaryTreasurerAboriginal Students’ RepresentativeWomen Students’ RepresentativeInternational Students’ RepresentativePrince George Campus Representative

For more information on this election or for a nomination form please stop by the Prince George Campus Office (Room 1-303) or email info@cncsu.ca

Please drop off completed nomination forms in Room 1-303