Face2Face with David Peck

Pamela and I talk about volunteerism, “your story”, social entrepreneurship, Universal Giving and why she’s not a pessimist.

Biography

Pamela Hawley is the founder and CEO of UniversalGiving™ an award-winning nonprofit that helps people give and volunteer with vetted, quality opportunities all over the world. Opportunities range from giving $25 to provide a month of meals to a child in Haiti, to volunteering with migrant children in Beijing, China.

Pamela started in community service at age twelve, after experiencing life-changing poverty on a family vacation. She and her father were in a marketplace and looked down a side cul-de-sac where she saw a whole line of half-clothed, begging, unwashed, starving children. The word UNACCEPTABLE came across her mind, and led her to volunteer all over the world (Read more here). Some of Pamela’s many volunteer experiences include working with microfinance in rural India, sustainable farming in Guatemala, earthquake relief work in El Salvador, and computer training in Cambodia.

She has a Political Science degree cum laude from Duke University and a Masters in International Communication from the Annenberg School of Communications, USC. Pamela is on the Duke Northern California Board and Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship; part of Duke Angel Network (DAN); and most recently received the Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award for the Political Science Department at Duke University. She is a guest lecturer at Stanford, Harvard, Berkeley and USC. Pamela speaks on leadership, Corporate Social Responsibility, social entrepreneurship, volunteerism, world economics/cultures, and how these affect business and global philanthropy.   

Pamela is a winner of the Jefferson Award (the Nobel Prize in Community Service), and has been invited to three events at the White House. UniversalGiving has been featured on the homepage of BusinessWeek, Oprah.com, CBS, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Pamela was a finalist for Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award and is an Expert Blogger for Fast Company and CSRWire. She also writes Living and Giving, a daily blog with the mission of “Inspiring Leaders to Live with Excellence and Love.”

Pamela is an actress, improviser, dancer and singer with over 100 performances in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles. She is and improviser trained by The Groundlings and Second City Chicago, a graduate of the Upright Citizens Brigade, and a BATS improv player. Her experience includes solo and group singing, voiceovers, sketch, theatre and television. 

In 2015, she opened at the San Francisco Improv Festival with Leela’s Armando Company and its founder, Armando Diaz. Also, in 2015, she performed with Leela’s Armando Company at the SF Sketchfest. Pamela has created two improv groups: The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Improv!, a fully improvised musical inspired by The Sound of Music; and Jackson Soup, a dynamic duo improv team. Pamela performed with Opening People's Minds (OPM), which won the award for Best Sketch Comedy in 2009 at the San Francisco Fringe Fest and garnered praise from reviewers such as LA Weekly. As part of the improv group Fosse Posse (based on choreographer Bob Fosse), she performed 40-minute improvised musicals, winning 9 out of 10 competitive shows (Watch a video here). Pamela donates a portion of every show’s proceeds to UniversalGiving™.

Most important to Pamela Hawley is her family. Her parents Wally and Alex have been married more than 50 years; they are two of her best friends. She also loves being an aunt to Will, Connor, and Lindsey.  Every Sunday is family day.

Read more about the foundation here.

For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site here.

With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Erin and I talk about gender disparity, her new film Girl Unbound, honesty, inspiration and where our perspective comes from.

 For more information about TIFF go here.

IMDB

Trailer

More info about the film here.

Synopsis

Maria Toorpakai Wazir has spent her young life defying expectations. At age 25, she is an internationally competitive squash player. But in her home country, Pakistan, she remains controversial. In her family's region of Waziristan, women are forbidden by the Taliban from playing sports. In Girl Unbound, we follow Maria over several months as she represents Pakistan on the national team and carves her own identity, despite threats to her family.

Filmmaker Erin Heidenreich makes her feature directorial debut with the same self-assurance behind the camera that Maria possesses on the squash court. The film takes us from Toronto, where Maria practices with squash champion Jonathon Power, to Pakistan, where her family is forced to relocate to Islamabad for safety. Defying fundamentalist threats, Maria takes a harrowing road trip through Pakistan with her sister Ayesha Gulalai, a local politician.

We get to know Maria's large family, including her father, Shamsul, and mother, Yasrab, who rejected restrictive customary gender roles when raising their sons and daughters. Growing up with an athletic physique, Maria dressed as a boy in order to compete in sports and weightlifting. She describes her identity as a mix of feminine and masculine qualities. Whatever confusion that might cause others, she conveys a remarkable self-confidence in being her own person.

This year, Maria published her memoir, A Different Kind of Daughter. That book, along with this film, demonstrates that she is a vital voice of resistance, standing up to forces that want to dictate what a woman's role should be.

Biography

Director-Writer-Producer of award-winning documentaries, short films, commercials and branded content.

Erin's voice has been shaped by the cultures she has immersed herself in across the globe and uses the camera to see the unseen.

Her passion for stories showing alternative perspectives flows into many forms: Directing a documentary in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan for GIRL UNBOUND (World Premiere 2016 Toronto International Film Festival), directing a short documentary in The Democratic Republic of the Congo for RISING SONS, and narrative work including THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES.

Erin 2nd Unit directed for Emmy-Award winning Doug Pray's latest documentary LEVITATED MASS (Los Angeles Film Festival), Executive Produced THE OTHER SHORE (SXSW Film Festival), Produced MISSION CONGO (Toronto International Film Festival), and Executive Produced MADE IN INDIA (Hot Docs).

More about her here.

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For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site here.

With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul and I talk about his new film Dog Eat Dog, living in the “sweet spot” of history, why humans have run their course and the recidivist nature of crime.

For more information about TIFF go here.

IMDB

Trailer

Synopsis

DOG EAT DOG is a gritty contemporary crime thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe about a trio of excons, deep in the underbelly of Cleveland, who are hired for a kidnapping.

When the botched abduction goes awry and gets completely out of control, the cons find themselves on the run, vowing to stay out of prison at all costs.

Biography

Paul Schrader is an award-winning screenwriter and film director. Schrader wrote or co-wrote screenplays for four Martin Scorsese films: Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999). Schrader has also directed 18 feature films, including his 1982 remake of the horror classic Cat People, the crime drama American Gigolo (1980), the biographical drama Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), the cult film Light Sleeper (1992), the drama Affliction (1997), the biographical film Auto Focus (2002), and the erotic dramatic thriller The Canyons (2013).

Schrader began his career at UCLA Film school and the AFI. He was the film critic for the Los Angeles Free Press, edited Cinema magazine and in 1972 published Transcendental Style in Film, a study of Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer which will be reissued next year in a revised edition of University of California Press.

He teaches occasionally at Columbia university and continues to contribute to Film Comment magazine in New York In 1974, Schrader and his brother Leonard cowrote The Yakuza, a film set in the Japanese crime world. The film was directed by Sydney Pollack and starred Robert Mitchum. The Yakuza brought Schrader to the attention of the new generation of Hollywood directors. In 1975, he wrote the script for Obsession for Brian De Palma.

Schrader also wrote an early draft of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One of Schrader's most famous scripts about an obsessed New York City taxi driver was turned into Martin Scorsese's film Taxi Driver, which was nominated for a 1976 Best Picture Academy Award and won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Besides Taxi Driver (1976), Scorsese also drew on scripts by Schrader for boxing tale Raging Bull (1980), co-written with Mardik Martin, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Bringing Out the Dead (1999).

In 1999, Schrader received the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement from the Writers Guild of America.

Schrader headed the International Jury of the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival. On July 2, 2009, Schrader was awarded the inaugural Lifetime Achievement in Screenwriting award at the ScreenLit Festival in Nottingham, England. Several of his films were shown at the festival, including Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.

He has received lifetime achievement awards from various festivals, including Gent, Manila, Vallodolid, Stockholm, SXSW, Istanbul, Haifa, Goriza, Mill Valley, San Francisco, Guanajuato.

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For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site here.

With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mohanad and I talk about Palestine, history, peaceful revolution, looking for shadows and finding the bridge between all of us.

For more information about TIFF go here.

IMDB

Trailer

More info about the film here.

Synopsis

In his remarkably assured debut documentary, Ramallah-based director Mohanad Yaqubi untangles the fraught history of his homeland, long at the centre of one of the world's most painful conflicts. With the precision and grace of the best essay films, Yaqubi uses found footage, much of it newly discovered, to trace his country's quest for self-determination, dignity, and, ultimately, peace.

Off Frame AKA Revolution until Victory builds off Yaqubi's discovery of film shot by the Palestine Film Unit, a group founded in the 1960s that saw itself as the cinematic front of the Palestinian movement. He connects their work in this tumultuous historic moment with wider trends, bringing his documentary into dialogue with the larger film world. There are parallels with Third Cinema and social realism, and Yaqubi includes footage of Jean-Luc Godard's famous visit to Palestine in the 1970s to make Here and Elsewhere (also borrowing the original title of Godard's documentary for his own: Until Victory).

Despite this rear-facing reflection, Off Frame isn't stuck in the past. Yaqubi brings the film full circle with contemporary footage shot in Palestine. The result is an alternate and rarely seen history, framed from Yaqubi's distinctly Palestinian perspective.

On the eve of 2017, a year that marks several painful anniversaries for Palestine, this documentary is all the more urgent. It compels audiences to look beyond easy headlines or stereotypes and to contemplate how the present moment itself has been built out of images of the past.

Biography

Mohanad Yaqubi was born in Kuwait.

He directed the shorts Rico in the Night, Exit, and No Exit, and the feature documentary Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory.

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For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site here.

With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Maria-Jose and Olga and I talk about show-women, reinventing yourself, living for and with your dreams and gender issues of all kinds.

For more information about TIFF go here.

IMDB

Trailer

Synopsis

The disco-era heyday of Mexico's burlesque culture may have long passed, but many of the sequined stars of those cabarets are still with us. Their stories speak volumes about what it means to be a no-longer-young woman in a career grounded in physical beauty and erotic appeal. Eight years in the making, María José Cuevas' Beauties of the Night is a captivating group portrait of iconic Mexican showgirls, still thriving with grace and style in their ostensible golden years.

Shifting elegantly between eye-popping archival materials and endearingly frank new interviews, Cuevas introduces us to Olga Breeskin, who actually began her performing career playing classical violin with her father; to Lyn May, who, now in her sixties, happily maintains a rigorous daily regimen of exercise and intercourse and extols the virtues of having sex in trees; to Rossy Mendoza, who to this day dances in elaborate headdresses with seductive dexterity; to Princesa Yamal, who speaks of the spiritual strength required to hold a large audience transfixed, but who also had her career stalled when she was wrongly convicted for robbery.

Beauties of the Night presents us a trove of extraordinary women living long and eventful lives, learning to make the most of the inevitable realities of aging in an unforgiving culture. Cuevas presents their fascinating stories with tremendous affection, humour, curiosity, and, above all, dignity.

Biography

María José Cuevas is a documentary and experimental video director, designer, and photographer.

Her work has been featured at the Chelsea Center for the Arts in New York, the International Biennial of Video Art in Israel, and the Institute Valencia d’Art Modern in Spain. 

Beauties of the Night is her first feature documentary.

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For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site here.

With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ilan and I talk about his new film An Eye for An Eye, hate, racism, and forgiveness, why the future may not be so bright, where hope fits in and why developing a positive narrative is essential. 

IMDB

Trailer

More info about the film and Ilan here.

Synopsis

The subject of a new documentary out in theatres beginning October 28th, "An Eye For An Eye" by Israeli director Ilan Ziv, tells the story of shooting victim Rais Bhuiyan , the only survivor of a post 9-11 hate crime by Texas native Mark Stroman who would became known as the "Arab Slayer" and whose life Ziv and Bhuiyan worked tirelessly to save. 

Ilan Ziv's 8-year journey and friendship with Stroman helped guide him to his final revelation: to seek forgiveness and a deeper understanding of the origin of his hate and racism, providing a unique and provocative insight into the mind of a racist turned serial killer.

Ziv and Bhuiyan came together on this project to open hearts and minds around the culture of hate and the politics of revenge post 9-11, a rhetoric actively revisited in the current presidential election campaign being presented by Donald Trump.

Ziv and Bhuiyan are available to speak in-person about lone-wolf terrorist attacks and the climate of hate that created the conditions for Mark Stroman to do what he did. The lone-wolf terrorist is a concept that we have now associated with Jihadist extremists, and yet the climate of hate created one in the white supremacist Mark Stroman.

The current divisive rhetoric can and will inevitably lead to more hate and distrust, and can create the perfect storm for the kind of lone-wolf attacks we have seen.

They witnessed in Mark Stroman the ways in which such a transformation is needed on a global scale now.

Rais Bhuiyan, a Hillary Clinton campaign surrogate, can speak directly to the ways in which the message of the film echoes the messaging of the Clinton campaign, that as Americans we are, "Stronger Together”.

Biography

Ilan Ziv was born in Israel in 1950 and came to the United States after fighting in the Yom Kippur (The October) War in 1973.

Ilan Ziv is a graduate of New York University film school, and in 1978 he co-produced New York's first Middle East Film Festival.

That same year he founded Icarus Films, a documentary film distribution company, which he left in 1980 in order to devote himself to making documentary films, and since then he has directed dozens of documentaries dealing broadly with issues of human rights and investigations of contemporary history.

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For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site here.

With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Lang and I talk about redundancies in the brain, the tendency towards addiction, bio-markers and neurological disorders and vaccines, neuro-plasticity and diagnosis.

Get a copy of his book: “Parkinson’s Disease: A Complete Guide for Patients and Families” here.

Biography

Dr. Lang directs a large multifaceted clinical research program in the field of Parkinson’s disease and related movement disorders. Dr. Lang’s research includes clinical studies of poorly recognized neurological disorders.

Dr. Lang is Director of the Edmond J. Safra Program in Parkinson’s Disease at the University Health Network and the University of Toronto and Director of the Movement Disorders Centre at the Krembil Neuroscience Centre. Lancet Neurology, the world's leading medical journal, has referred to Dr. Lang as “a master of movement disorders.”

In addition to leading Canada’s busiest Parkinson’s clinic, Dr. Lang is dedicated to advancing research, including studies of poorly recognized neurological disorders; clinical trials of new therapies; and basic and clinical studies involving molecular biology, neurophysiology, neuropsychology and imaging.

In 2010, Dr. Lang was appointed as an Officer of the Order of Canada and in 2011 he was elected a Fellow of both the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada. Also in 2011, he was recognized as the most highly cited investigator in the field of Parkinson’s disease in the world for the decade, 2001-2009.

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For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site here.

With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yesim and I talk about tradition, sexual politics in Turkey, harsh modernism, manipulation, control and patriarchal power.

For more information about TIFF go here.

Trailer

Synopsis

In her most politically charged film to date, Turkish writer-director Yesim Ustaoglu revisits her previous films' themes of alienation and the longing to escape, viewing them through a distinctly female lens. In Clair Obscur, a film about the lives of two women from opposing worlds, Ustaoglu explores the different possibilities and limitations that exist for women in Turkey today.

Chenaz thinks of herself as modern and liberal. Resident psychiatrist at a hospital on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, she lives with her long-time partner, Cem, in a stylishly appointed home. Valuing each other's independence, Chenaz and Cem appear to think of each other as equals, but as Chenaz spends more time with a work colleague, she begins to wonder if Cem's treatment of her is motivated by love or by a desire for control.

Elmas lives with her much-older husband in a conservative household where her place is better defined in terms of servitude than by familial bonds. Under her mother-in-law's watchful eye, Elmas is responsible for all of the household chores, made to play the role of nursemaid, and forced to submit to her husband's nightly sexual desires.

As Ustaoglu intercuts and eventually intersects Chenaz and Elmas' stories, we begin to understand that their lives may have more in common than it appears at first glance. Alternating close, confining camerawork with sweeping widescreen landscapes, Michael Hammon's exquisite photography simultaneously reflects the restrictions and boundless potential of Ustaoglu's female protagonists. By turns pensive and dramatic — even violent — Clair Obscur asks us to consider the true meaning of liberty.

Biography

Yesim Ustaoglu was born in Çaykara, Turkey. She directed several shorts before making her feature film debut with The Trace.

Her other features include Journey to the Sun, Waiting for the Clouds, Pandora's Box, which screened at the Festival, andAraf/Somewhere in Between. 

Clair Obscur is her latest film.

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For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site here.

With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jonathan and I talk about “blindness” and disability, assistive technology, crowd funding and why he roots for the underdog.

Biography

My name is Jonathan Nadeau and I'm a husband, a father of three, and a blind GNU/Linux user. I'm also the host of three podcasts about free software. I interview project leaders of free software and GNU/Linux distributions. This summer I'm interning with the FSF's campaigns team.

I was not born blind but was in a car accident when I was 14, which caused me to lose my sight — after my accident I was introduced to a world of accessible technology using proprietary and nonfree software. I came to free software from using Windows and used a program called Jaws — this software allows people who are blind or have low vision to access a computer and be productive, by reading text and actions on the screen.

Jaws is nonfree software — users can't share it due to the terms of the license and as a result many people who would benefit from it, are unable to get a copy. In the United States, around 80% of vision impaired people are unemployed, and often people who need this software can request a copy from their local government, but this usually comes with many frustrating requirements, such as being a current student or requiring the software for a job. And of course, giving up important freedoms as a computer user.

Around 1999, I had a recording studio in my house and my business partner was telling me about GNU/Linux and the philosophy behind it. I also heard that some distributions came with a screen reader called speakup out of the box, and so if I could get the system installed, I'd have a screen reader right out of the box with no third-party software. I tried to install it, but failed miserably.

I tried several times to use free software over the years, with limited success until 2007, when I heard that distributions were now using a new screen reader, called Orca — I picked one of the popular distributions of the day, downloaded and installed it on my computer — I was surprised to find that everything just worked. Granted, at this time, the Orca screen reader was not as good as the proprietary software I was used to, but I didn't care — I was willing to put up with the lack of performance for the freedom it gave me.

Once I started using a free screen reader with a free operating system, I had freedom in my own computing, and realized the importance of free software for accessibility — it is important for people who depend on accessible software to understand the freedoms that come with using free software, and no longer be stuck in a world of relying on nonfree accessibility software.

So I'm now an advocate of promoting the use of free software in accessibility and want to help educate other people who depend on assistive technology and explain to them the freedoms they deserve.

One of my goals at the Free Software Foundation this summer is to start work on a completely free and fully accessible distribution of GNU/Linux based on Trisquel, which I'm using for my work at the Foundation.

A completely blind person will be able to install this software without assistance, and once they they put the CD into their computer it will boot into a live session, the Orca screen reader will start talking right away, and then they can start the install process. Once installed, the screen reader will be already running when you first log in. The majority of programs installed by default will have good accessibility and there will also be screen magnification features by default for low vision users.

This would be just the start of this accessible distribution. I want people to understand the power and flexibility of free software and not depend on proprietary companies to provide accessible software. This will result in giving the power and freedom to the people who depend on accessibility to ask for feature requests and make bug reports.

By working together as a community, we can make a big difference in the lives of people who rely on assistive technologies.

Read more about Jonathan here.

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For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site here.

With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Raja, Hiam and Sarra talk about their new film Foreign Body, refugees, identity, relational complexity and the present over the future.

For more information about TIFF go here.

IMDB

Trailer

Synopsis

Seeking refuge from her Islamist radical brother whom she informed on, a young woman arrives in France illegally following Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution and discovers a new world of both hope and danger, in the fourth feature from writer-director Raja Amari (Satin Rouge, Buried Secrets).

In the turbulent aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, young Samia (Sarra Hannachi) flees her homeland. She braves hostile seas in the crossing to France, but once there she finds that her struggles have only just begun. With no friends, no family, and — most crucially — no immigration papers, Samia has to figure out how to make a life and a living in a foreign land.

She meets a young man, Imed (Salim Kechiouche, Blue is the Warmest Color), and soon finds work in the employ of the elegant Leila (the inimitable Hiam Abbass, subject of an In Conversation With event at the Festival this year). But her presence in Leila's middle-class household triggers a shift in its dynamics, and soon Samia is enmeshed in a web of sexual tension.

Timely as it is, Foreign Body seems to typify a media narrative of forced mass migration: desperate, distressing, impossible. The film transcends this sweeping, reductive thinking due to the way director Raja Amari immerses her camera in Samia's new reality. She shoots with a close, handheld aesthetic that makes abstraction and generalization all but impossible, bringing us the story of a unique young woman.

Hannachi portrays her character's inner turmoil brilliantly. Samia is sometimes ragged and sometimes refined, ranging from stoic to sensual, but this is not because she's unstable. Rather, it's because of her ability to change in response to different situations and environments — an ability born of necessity. This is a woman determined to survive at all costs.

Biography

Raja Amari was born in Tunis. She completed a Master's degree in French literature at the University of Tunis and studied cinema at La Fémis.

Her features include Satin Rouge, Buried Secrets, and Foreign Body.

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For more information about my podcasting, writing and public speaking please visit my site here.

With thanks to producer Josh Snethlage and Mixed Media Sound.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.