Nishat Kurwa is a Senior Producer for Turnstyle and AllDayPlay.fm.
Jennifer Pahlka loves bureaucrats. While that proclamation got her some laughs at a recent Google/MTV Big Tent event at Mountain View’s Computer History Museum, Pahlka, who founded Code for America in 2010, followed up with an earnest statement about the work that CFA’s fellowships support in collaboration with local governments. ”We think bureaucrats get things done. [...]
Federal authorities armed with a search warrant raided several medicinal marijuana-related businesses in Oakland, California yesterday.
It was a long road to this year’s Sundance Film Festival for the independent feature “Mosquita y Mari,” about the friendship between two Latina, bilingual teenagers. The director couldn’t find enough support to get the film made…until she decided to leave the traditional Hollywood system. That’s when she broke a record for audience participation before she had even shot a single scene.
Turnstyle has been closely following first-time filmmaker Aurora Guerrero’s journey to Sundance with her film Mosquita y Mari, beginning with her standout Kickstarter campaign to meet a daunting funding goal to produce the film.
When Guerrero launched the campaign, she had a script, a crew, and not much else. Not a single scene had been shot; for the promotional video on Kickstarter, Guerrero even had to stage a scene from the love story between two L.A. teenagers without showing the actors’ faces, since the film hadn’t even been cast yet.
Much of the alarm over the National Defense Authorization Act has focused on its potential to undermine the rights of American citizens, but many undocumented citizens, already under scrutiny, are also worried about the bill’s implications for their sense of freedom. As reported in the Huffington Post, the bill had “initially opened what opponents saw [...]
An eco-exposition couched in a Kashmiri love story is now an official selection at Sundance 2012. It’s just been announced that Director Musa Syeed’s “Valley of Saints” will compete in the World Cinema Dramatic category. Turnstyle covered the film earlier this year: Making a feature film with a war zone as its setting, but not [...]
Miss America. Like the breathing, ambulatory Barbie dolls that compete for its crown, the pageant is still mostly a bastion for a cliched standard of American beauty; its token segment evaluating contestants’ “character” is, for those who still watch the TV broadcast, a time to refill the ice.
The Veterans Alliance at the City College of San Francisco is bustling most days of the week soon after it opens around 11 a.m. One morning this week, more than a dozen student vets gathered around small tables, chatting over coffee, or hunched over one of the 10 computers lining the walls. A flat screen [...]
More than half a million people have joined credit unions over the last month, and nearly 100 thousand more have planned to transfer their money into financial co-ops on tomorrow’s Bank Transfer Day, in a mass action that could serve as a rejoinder to critics who say the Occupy movement has not accomplished meaningful blows against the financial system that it emerged in opposition to.
More than half of the children in British Columbia’s foster system are Aboriginal. Of that number, at least 40 percent are in non-indigenous foster homes. Within this context, photographer Jonathan Taggart documented one Aboriginal family separated by the foster care system, and on the path to reunification. Turnstyle asked him to discuss what he learned.
