AI Scraping My Blog?

My Stat-Counter account has been showing this frequent Hong Kong visitor:

Total Sessions usually records how many times the computer has visited, but it says only 1, even though there are five total hits on this one page (of 20 hits) on the Stat Counter report.  It's been showing up frequently for weeks now.

I know, I said five, but they are scattered.  The one on top is one.  Here are three more and there was one more.  

I've had this sort of thing before, but it's been awhile.  In the past, the assumption was they were scraping content.  Now, I'm wondering if it isn't an AI bot gathering stuff for training.  If so, what should I do and how?  From Duda.

"How to Block AI Crawlers from Crawling your Site

Some site owners are choosing to block AI crawlers, such as ChatGPT and Bard from crawling their site in order to prevent it from learning from or using their website content. You can block these AI user-agents in a similar manner as you would block Google crawlers; by replacing the default robots.txt file with a new file that specifies disallow rules for specific AI user-agents."

When I first started blogging, I spent a lot of time learning about (and blogging about) technical aspects of blogging - how to:find out if anyone is reading the blog; to embed photos and videos; how to change the format; how to add an email address; etc.  

Now AI is raising other issues.  Such as how to block AI crawlers from using your site to train its bots.  

This is not what I want to spend my time on.  First the internet is telling me I have to block each crawler separately by adding code to the robot.txt file.  

Should You Block AI Tools From Accessing Your Website?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to block all AI bots from accessing your website, and manually blocking each individual bot is almost impossible. Even if you keep up with the latest AI bots roaming the web, there’s no guarantee they’ll all adhere to the commands in your robots.txt file. 

 From Google Search Central:

"You can control which files crawlers may access on your site with a robots.txt file.

A robots.txt file lives at the root of your site. So, for site www.example.com, the robots.txt file lives at www.example.com/robots.txt. robots.txt is a plain text file that follows the Robots Exclusion Standard. A robots.txt file consists of one or more rules. Each rule blocks or allows access for all or a specific crawler to a specified file path on the domain or subdomain where the robots.txt file is hosted. Unless you specify otherwise in your robots.txt file, all files are implicitly allowed for crawling."

That means I have to find the robots.text file and add stuff and hope I do it just right so I don't screw something else up.  But this site also warns:

"If you use a site hosting service, such as Wix or Blogger [That's me], you might not need to (or be able to) edit your robots.txt file directly. Instead, your provider might expose a search settings page or some other mechanism to tell search engines whether or not to crawl your page."

Of course I don't want to block search engines for browsers or only subscribers will ever see my posts.  

So I'm asking myself, is this worth the time it's going to take to figure this out.  Well, someone else asked that too.

"The real question here is whether the results are worth the effort, and the short answer is (almost certainly) no."

Here's another one saying the same thing:

"At the end of the day blocking ChatGPT and other generative AI crawlers is really a matter of choice. Depending on your website’s purpose and/or your business model it may make sense to. But in my opinion the vast majority of sites have nothing to fear from allowing AI crawlers to crawl their site."

For now, I want to agree with this advice.  But then I start thinking that this was written by an AI firm that wants to steal your content.   

And I don't even know if that Hong Kong visitor is scraping material for some AI enterprise.  Maybe it's just stealing content.  

Like your car, your house, your garden, your teeth, everything needs some maintenance to keep it functioning.  Clearly my phone and computer do, and this blog does as well, though I've avoided that for some time on the blog.  

I'm now officially putting myself on notice to pay more attention to AI.  

Blog maintenance takes up a certain amount of time and is generally not visible to most readers.  Most technical things are pretty static now.  Every now and then I try something new - like I have a post with a gif I made on my iPhone ready to be posted, except I'm not sure it it's working right and it appears I'll have to actually post it to find out.  I also had a lot of issues trying to post from my new iPad while in Argentina this summer.  It didn't get along with Blogger at all.  I thought about post for others with similar problems - tricks I learned to make it better, but my basic advice is don't even try if you can help it.  It's a pain.

Then there are updates to old posts.  I can't do this all the time and I really hope that people look at the dates of posts they read online and realize something six years old might be out of date.  But some things seem worth updating.  Here are a couple of recent updates.


Juries  - The LATimes had an article today about a US supreme court case challenging Louisiana's former majority rule for juries.  (The voters overturned that in favor of unanimous decisions in 2018, but the case was 2016.)  I updated a 2017 post on whether hung juries reflect the US cultural divide, which mentioned that Louisiana and Oregon both had majority rule juries.  So I've updated that post.

Hong Kong - I also added a link to an article by a Chinese Human Rights worker to my recent post on Hong Kong.    I also got messages from one former Hong Kong student and one former Beijing student saying my post on Hong Kong was generally accurate, but they didn't want me to quote them.

And then there is following up on comments by readers.  Often there really isn't anything for me to add.  Do the commenters want me to acknowledge their comments?  Or do they look at my follow up comments as my trying to have the last word on something?  If I don't have more to add, I just leave it, especially if I'm particularly busy.

But some comments are particularly welcome because they add information I didn't know about.
For example, a comment by Dennis on my post the other day about whether the airport couldn't get the runway finished faster, gave details about how the grooves in runways have to be 3mm wide and spaced about 25mm apart.  But then he was vague about how long it would take - "a long time."  My comment asked for specifics of 'a long time.'  

And I realize now, as I'm writing this, that I probably should have put a link in that post to one I did last year about the widening and repairing the north-south runway.  So I'll do that now.

Thoughts On Hong Kong [Updated]

I'd been to Hong Kong various times for short visits, but in July 1989 I arrived for a year long stay. As a Fulbright Scholar, I would be teaching public administration at Chinese University of Hong Kong.  July 1989 was barely a month after Tiananmen Square crackdown ended the student and worker demonstrations for democracy in Beijing.

The Chinese government has done its best to erase that event from Chinese consciousness.  The median age in China is 37.3 years.  That means half the population today was seven years old or younger, or not yet born.  And of those who were around, never knew much about what actually happened.  And prosperity has meant that many people would rather spend their time pursuing consumer goods than dwelling on Tiananmen.

1989 was eight years before the British lease on Hong Kong was about to end and Tiananmen really shook up the residents of the British colony.  Another disturbing thing that happened around that time was people's discovery that the words "right to abode" were not in their renewed British passports.  That meant that although Hong Kong residents were technically British subjects the right to move to Britain had evaporated.

A giant liberty statue had been created and was featured in demonstrations at that time.

The truth of the matter was that Hong Kong was not really much of a democracy.  My university students knew very little about how the Hong Kong government worked or what their rights were. When I asked them to contact government agencies, you'd have thought I'd asked them to jump from the tenth floor.  There was no democracy, not even the semblance until after Tiananmen.  From a 2010 article called "Hong Kong's Elite Structure, Legislature and the Bleak Future of Democracy under Chinese Sovereignty"  (this will get you to an abstract, you need access through a library to get the article free.)

Since Hong Kong was ruled by Britain's designated governor during the colonial period (1841‐1997), the government has been commonly described as executive-led. This means that the colonial governor had all the power and authority to exercise policies and legislations in the territory. Appointed by the governor, the Executive Council (ExCo) merely gave advice to the governor. Established in 1843 under British rule, the LegCo had contained no democratic seats until 1991 when 18 out of 57 members were directly elected. Before that, the LegCo was, to quote Sing (2003 Sing, Ming. 2003 29), “a place for mild politics and perceived simply as a ‘rubber stamp’.”. 

There were dozens of periodicals on sale whose key purpose was to help people find ways to emigrate from Hong Kong.  Botswana had full page ads in the South China Morning Post enticing people with $250,000 I believe, to get citizenship in Africa.  There were any number of scandals revolving around diplomats from different countries selling citizenships.  Vancouver was known as Hongcouver.

Here to give you a sense of how opaque the bureaucracy was, is a sample of questioning about such emigration hustlers in the Legislative Council about the time I got there in July 1989:

"Oral answers to questions     -   Consumer protection against emigration counsellors
1. MR. PETER WONG asked: Sir, will Government inform this Council what consumer protection measures, if any, are taken to protect Hong Kong people who wish to seek assistance from emigration specialists who hawk their skills and wares for reward in Hong Kong?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, this is an area of consumer affairs where the guiding principle must be Caveat Emptor, that is, buyers beware.
The Hong Kong Government neither encourages nor discourages emigration consultants setting up business in Hong Kong, nor does it encourage or discourage Hong Kong people from using their services. The services available vary from filling forms outside consulates to mapping out an investment strategy to qualify as an investor. The decision on whether to consult, on what to consult, and how much it is reasonable to pay for the services provided, must be one for the individual to make.
    Sir, I can only suggest that the best advice can probably be provided by the
consulate of the country concerned.
Of course, if there is any evidence of a criminal act such as fraud or deception, then a report should be made to the police.
MR. PETER WONG: Sir, the "caveat emptor" answer given by the Secretary suggests that the Government does nothing to protect Hong Kong people in this hour of their need. Does this mean that the Securities and Futures Commission, the Registrar General's Department, amongst others, allow the flood of advertisements in the newspapers to go completely unchecked?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, in the famous words of one of our illustrious former Financial Secretaries, "the Hong Kong Government believes that if something is not broken, do not try to fix it"; and this is an area falling into that classification. From 1 January 1987 to date, the Consumer Council has only received 11 complaints and this shows the size of the problem.
MRS. LAM:  Do consulates in Hong Kong accept responsibility for the actions of
immigration specialists from the countries they represent?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, I have no knowledge of what the consulates do with respect to particular immigration consultants.
MR. DAVID CHEUNG: Sir, many of these immigration specialists are lawyers specializing in the immigration laws of their own countries. What measure of supervision, if any, does the Law Society or the Government of Hong Kong exercise over their activities?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, I believe we are now wading in the area of foreign lawyers. I wonder whether I should not defer to the Attorney General?

After Tiananmen, with less than ten years to go before Hong Kong would officially be given back to China, things got really tense.  Negotiations between England and China to establish an agreement about the handover was a major concern for Hong Kong residents.  The Joint Declaration came out in 1984, but then the Chinese came up with "The Basic Law" in 1990, a pretty touchy time.  Hong Kong might not have had much democracy under the British, but China's legal protections, punctuated by Tiananmen,  augured even worse under the Chinese.  

From a Hong Kong government site in 2008:

"The Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong (The Joint Declaration) was signed between the Chinese and British Governments on 19 December 1984. The Joint Declaration sets out, among other things, the basic policies of the People's Republic of China (PRC) regarding Hong Kong. Under the principle of "One Country, Two Systems", the socialist system and policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and Hong Kong's previous capitalist system and life-style shall remain unchanged for 50 years. The Joint Declaration provides that these basic policies shall be stipulated in a Basic Law of the HKSAR.
The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (The Basic Law) was adopted on 4 April 1990 by the Seventh National People's Congress (NPC) of the PRC. It came into effect on 1 July 1997.

The Document
The Basic Law is the constitutional document for the HKSAR. It enshrines within a legal document the important concepts of "One Country, Two Systems", "a high degree of autonomy" and "Hong Kong People administering Hong Kong". It also prescribes the various systems to be practised in the HKSAR.
The Basic Law consists of the following sections -
a. The full text of the Basic Law which comprises a total of nine chapters with 160 articles;
b. Annex I, which sets out the method for the selection of the Chief Executive of the HKSAR;
c. Annex II, which sets out the method for the formation of the Legislative Council of the HKSAR and its voting procedures; and
d. Annex III, which sets out the national laws to be applied in the HKSAR."

The current demonstrations were sparked by a new law that allows extradition to China for trial for Hong Kong residents.  Just imagine Trump allowing extradition for trial in Russia in the United States.  When the extradition law was withdrawn temporarily, the demonstrators were not satisfied.  The people of Hong Kong have come a long way since my students' shyness.  (But also consider that to get into Chinese University of Hong Kong, my students had had to toe the line and not ever cause any trouble.  They were not representative of their peers in Hong Kong.)

China does, of course, hold most of the cards.  When the British left, the removal of 'the right to abode' from people's passports was an indicator that Britain had no real concern for the people of Hong Kong.  They were principally concerned about British held property, 'real' British citizens, and appearances.  Fighting China over Hong Kong was never an option.  While they won that fight a century earlier with in part by addicting the country to opium, China now had the upper hand.  

And there is no way the US is going to fight to protect the rights of Hong Kong residents.  Even if Clinton were now president, the US simply has no way to got to war against China over 400 square miles in the south of China.  And Trump doesn't seem to even want to use it as a bargaining chip in this trade discussions.  

So I don't see this ending well.    The only danger to China is that its own population might see Hong Kong demonstrations as a model for more freedoms in China.  China appears to be doing a massive propaganda campaign to its own mainland population,  making the demonstrators appear to be criminals and thugs and American backed haters of China.  I suspect they'll succeed.  I know when I was teaching in Beijing in 2004, there were three things that my students believed religiously - Tibet was better off under China, that it's population had been slaves to the monks before China took over;  the Japanese were evil; and Taiwan was part of China.  But that said, they were great students, and once the trusted me not to punish their active participation in class, they had lots to say and were very curious and creative.

I suspect the government is working hard now to make sure their views on Hong Kong are similarly loyal and unmovable. But the size of Hong Kong's demonstrations should give China reason to pause and reconsider how much it changes the Basic Law.  China has blindspots when it comes to challenges to its control.  China's way of handling this in Tibet has been to simply ship enough Han Chinese there that the native Tibetan population becomes a minority.  They could try something similar in Hong Kong.  In fact there already are a lot of mainland Chinese in Hong Kong.  

But with that said, let's remember that the US has serious ideological blinders when it comes to China too.  And that China has 1.4 billion people.  

That means that the smartest 10% is 140 million people.  The same is true for the richest 10%.  And the most athletic 10%.  And while those groups will overlap somewhat, they make up more than 50% of the US population.  Ten percent of the US population is 3 million.  

If China unleashes the potential of its top 10% there's no way anyone else can beat them.  Especially now with Trump destroying the potential of the US through ethnic and cultural war.  

I'm not a China expert.  My serious interest in China is about 25 years old now, and even then it was limited to a very narrow focus.  So consider these musings based on experience and some serious research once upon a time.  

[UPDATED August 21, 2019 - Here's an opinion piece in the LATimes today by a Chinese researcher at Human Rights Watch, using his own experience as a student in the US to  explain why overseas Chinese students are anti-Hong Kong protesters.  It's consistent with what I wrote yesterday, but adds more detail.  It also causes me to see Americans in the same pattern - unable to give up their ingrained beliefs, even in the face of the obvious.  One's identity is caught up in these beliefs.]

Time And Space - Looking at the Big Picture And Taking The Long Term View

As I said the other day (actually it was just yesterday) news stories fly by so fast and superficially, that there's hardly time to put all the pieces together.  We get random puzzle pieces, bits of news, then they either disappear or get thrown into a big messy pile.  So no wonder people don't understand much.  Any story that requires remembering sixteen other stories that whizzed past, won't have any more meaning than the headline or talking point used to frame it by whatever news outlet one attends to.


This LA Times opinion piece addresses Time Denial, Most of us are clueless about humanity’s place in the planet's long history. We need to learn 'timefulness'.  The author is Marcia Bjornerud, a professor of geosciences at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Antipathy toward time rooted in the very human combination of vanity and existential dread is perhaps the most forgivable type of chronophobia. But more dangerous forms of time denial pervade our society. Fiscal years and congressional terms enforce a blinkered view of the future. Short-term thinkers are rewarded with bonuses and reelection, while those who dare to take seriously our responsibility to future generations find themselves out of office. Even two years of forethought seem beyond the capacity of legislators these days, when stop-gap spending measures have become the norm. Institutions that do aspire to the long view — state and national parks, public libraries and universities — are increasingly seen as taxpayer burdens. . . 

. . . We lack a sense of temporal proportion — the durations of the great chapters in Earth’s history, the rates of change during previous intervals of climate instability, the intrinsic time-scales of “natural capital” like groundwater systems.
We are, in effect, time illiterate, and this ignorance of planetary time undermines any claims we may make to modernity. We are navigating recklessly toward our future using conceptions of time as primitive as the pre-Copernican view of the universe. We think we’re the center of it all, unable to see either the past or future in proper perspective.

Another LA Times story, by Susanne Rust, tries to be timeful, after this year of horrific California fires,  to look at the history of fires and other catastrophic events in California:

In 1860, a young botanist raised in New York and schooled in Connecticut found himself on the payroll of the newly formed California Division of Mines and Geology. His job: Roam the vast, new state, taking samples and observations of plants and animals.
Over four years journeying across California, William Brewer witnessed torrential rains that turned the Central Valley into a vast, white-capped lake; intolerable heat waves that made the “fats of our meats run away in spontaneous gravy;” violent earthquakes; and fires he described as “great sheets of flame, extending over acres.”
He, like explorers, journalists and settlers before him, wondered whether people could permanently settle in California, said David Igler, a professor of history at UC Irvine.
“People were flabbergasted by what was happening,” said Igler, referring to the droughts, floods and quakes of the mid-1800s. “They wondered whether this was a place where we could even really settle and where agriculture could be maintained.”

She writes about how the Indians who inhabited California lived in small groups that moved around and practiced controlled burns until the Spanish outlawed them.  The Spanish.  They were the landlords of California for a while before the US kicked them out through force and violence.  But that's another historical amnesia when we talk about immigration.   

And I began this morning working my way through another chapter of Seth Abramson's Proof of Collusion.  That's a book that tries to put all the pieces together in the Trump-Russia collusion story.  I've posted about that book already. It's an example of taking years of news stories and organizing them into sensible, in depth, cohesive organization of the facts.   In the chapter today he writes about how Michael Cohen was a school boy friend of Felix Sater, who immigrated with his family from the Soviet Union when he was eight.  

Abramson's book averages about five or six footnotes per page, so even Abramson is only telling us part of the story, but surely a lot more than most of us know despite the non-stop reports interspersed with click-bait and stories about the homeless, immigrants, murders, football players, weekly movie box-office earnings, and other relatively random bits of infotainment.  So I checked footnote 78 from that chapter - a September 2017 article in the Nation on Felix Sater, by Bob Dreyfuss.

"Of all the characters caught up in Russiagate, none come close to Sater for having a decades-long record as a larger-than-life, outside-the-law, spy agency-linked wheeler-dealer from the pages of a John le Carré novel. His past record includes a conviction for lacerating a man’s face with a broken margarita glass in a bar brawl and his involvement in a multimillion-dollar stock fraud and money-laundering scheme. Despite that record, which came before he worked with Trump, Sater spent nearly a decade working with the Trump Organization in search of deals in Russia and other former Soviet republics. But on August 28, Sater made the front pages of the Times and The Washington Post, thanks to leaked copies of e-mails that he sent in late 2015 and early 2016 to Cohen, concerning Sater’s efforts to work with a group of Russian investors to set up a flagship Trump property in the Russian capital.
In language that Cohen himself described to the Times as “colorful,” Sater seemed nearly beside himself as he reported on his work in Moscow on behalf of Trump:

“'Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” wrote Sater. “I will get all of [Vladimir] Putins [sic] team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.… I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.” Echoing a line that would later become Trump’s own description of why he and Putin might get along, Sater wrote that the Russian leader “only wants to deal with a pragmatic leader, and a successful business man is a good candidate for someone who knows how to deal.'”

Netflix and Prime and HBO should be doing these stories now, when they can make a difference.  These characters and their misbehavior are as colorful and bizarre as anything they have up now.  And learning about who all these people are now would help Congress members and voters understand how outrageous the Republic Congress' lack of integrity is.

All the President's Men - the Watergate tale - came out in June 1974 - not quite two months before Nixon resigned.  The movie didn't come out until 1976.

Proof of Collusion came out November 13, 2018.  But the Trump story is much less focused than the Watergate burglary.  Trump's tentacles go out long into the past.  His crimes and corruptions are myriad.  His ties to Russia, Ukraine, and other nations - through his obsessions with putting up giant phallic buildings with with his name on them - require much more patience and attention from readers and viewers.  And Bernstein and Woodward were better known as the two reporters who had been keeping the story alive.

But you can read Proof of Collusion online. There's an audio book.  Simon and Schuster is offering a free book if you sign up for their email list.  (The link takes you to the Proof of Collusion page.  I didn't follow the link to see if PoC is one of the books available free.)

Yes, long term, comprehensive knowledge packaged so that United States consumers of news can make sense of what is happening - in detail - is severely lacking.  Instead of presenting the United States viewers with the picture of the completed puzzle (like on the box of jigsaw puzzles), or even sections of the puzzle as the pieces get pieced together, we get shown on piece at a time and little or none of how it fits into the larger picture.

The optimistic view of all this would be that technology has been changing so fast we haven't yet figured out how to slow down and get decent journalism for most people.  Newspapers, trying to survive, are fighting for survival and clicks, and that eventually we'll figure this all out.  More pessimistically, that hacking and trolling is taking us down the path to a version of  Orwell's 1984. Just a few decades later than Orwell predicted.

You want more?  An obvious part of the problem of getting the big picture is follow up of stories.  So here's a video that was posted two days ago - a talk by Robert Tibbo, Edward Snowden's attorney in Hong Kong who is also the attorney for the refugees in Hong Kong who hid Snowden while he was there.  It seems the Hong Kong bar association has created trumped up charges against Tibbo and are trying to disbar him.  He tells us that they demand information from him, but the complaint against him is from an anonymous source and they refuse to give him any details.



I'd note that I lived in Hong Kong for a year when the British were still in charge.  While it was nominally a democracy, people didn't have a whole lot of power compared to many democracies.  Today  it is part of China and the special protections Hong Kong people thought they'd gotten before they were handed back by the British, have little meaning.  The fact that the bar association is doing what the government wants it to do is hardly surprising.  China doesn't treat lawyers or anyone opposing them with much respect.  Tibbo's arguments here are based on bar association standards in Western countries.  I didn't hear him citing any Hong Kong rules or laws (though I may have missed it.)  That's not to belittle his situation or his valiant efforts on behalf of his clients.  But it suggests this video is aimed at the West, particularly Canada (his home) whose government is also dragging its feet in accepting this refugees.

Here's a Montreal article about Tibbo.  It gives more background on Tibbo's life and legal career in Hong Kong.  I can't figure out the date, but it seems to be much closer to when Snowden was in Hong Kong.

AIFF 2015: Features In Competition From Turkey, UK, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand and Iran

"In competition" means these films were selected by the screeners to be eligible for awards at the festival.  "Features" are 'stories' that are full length. While there are always other features which different folks like better than those in competition, it's a good bet these are among the best features at the festival.  This year's picks are all from outside the US.

The point of this post isn't to tell you what each of the features in competition are about, but rather to just give you a glimpse of something about the film I found interesting.

I don't have the times and locations yet.  I'll add them later and I might make other changes as things come to my attention.  

Here's the whole list and below I look at each one. 

Film (all are in competition)	Director	Country	Length
And The Circus Leaves Town	Mete Sozer	Turkey	99 min
Creditors	Ben Cura	United Kingdom	81 min
Jasmine	Dax Phelan	Hong Kong	80 min
Magic Utopia	Shoji Toyama, Shuichi Tan	Japan	88 min
Orphans & Kingdoms	Paolo Rotondo	New Zealand	74 min
The Descendants	Yaser Talebi	Islamic Republic of Iran	80 min

And The Circus Leaves Town  
Mete Sozer 
Turkey √
99 min
l

And the Circus Leaves Town is the story of a village caught in between life and death. This is the story of the moment when the paths of the village which wants to forget its past and the “Stranger” who wants to grasp his past converge. The “Stranger” gets off the train with an old, wooden, red suitcase. His destination is a village where only a handful of people are left, where the young have left and the babies cease to be born, where each moment repeats a previous moment. The arrival of the “Stranger” is met with curiosity first, and suspicion later. The dark, covered memories of a bloodied wedding night are revived. Is the “Stranger” someone from the past, or a brand new hope... (From the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts iFKA)

Won for International Feature Film at the 5th Underground Film Festival in Cork City, Ireland this past August.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Creditors
Ben Cura   
United Kingdom √
81 min


Much of what I know about Ben Cura comes from a recent in-depth interview with Film Courage.    Cura wrote the screen play,  directed the film and acts in it.   But it also has some strong, established actors, like Christian McKay, Simon Callow, and Andrea Deck.

"At times disturbingly funny and cruelly bleak, "Creditors" deals with the most private aspects of human relationships. From questioning our concepts of marriage and fidelity, to trying to establish the role of the modern woman in a world still trapping her within the confines of old fashioned canons, the film's story stirs, moves and sometimes even angrily rebuts our very own personal definitions of each."

The interview covers a wide range of topics from Cura's background (his father is a major opera singer which meant as a child Cura traveled the world); adapting the film from August Strindberg's 1888 play; the challenges of being a first time director and of black and white;  budgeting, and more.

 The film's world premiere is October 31, 2015 in New York's Nordic International Film Festival.  Then, it appears, to Anchorage.  Those who seriously want to prepare for the festival can read the original Strindberg play here.  




---------------------------------------------------------------------

Jasmine  
Dax Phelan  
Hong Kong √ 
80 min

UPDATE Dec. 10:  Just opened an email from Dax Phelan who said the second review quoted here was of an unfinished version of the film.  So take it with a grain of salt.

TwitchFilm liked it:

"Dax Phelan, veteran screenwriter and producer based in Los Angeles got the Hong Kong bug on a writing research trip to the city in 2005. By his own tongue-in-cheek admission, it had become somewhat tedious being handsomely paid for writing screenplays that rarely if ever get made. Citing inspiration by such auteurs as Lodge Kerrigan (The Killing TV series, Keane) and the Dardenne brothers (Two Days, One Night) Phelan sensed that Hong Kong could be fertile ground for a psychological thriller that would be his directorial debut. He penned Jasmine based on a story that he had co-written with Jason Tobin. . .

For the first time ever, Hong Kong plays a characterful, if inhospitable backdrop to an english language film with artistic sensibilities, a restrained, rhythmical build, and a chilling and thought-provoking climax. It explores themes of loneliness amongst the masses, fear of postponed regret, and most poignantly our ability to invest everything in our own flawed narratives."

Screen Daily wasn't as kind:

"Writer-director Dax Phelan uses the trope of the unreliable narrator to mixed effect in Jasmine, a classically-executed slow-moving descent into paranoia set on the streets of Hong Kong. Working from an idea by Phelan and Tobin, Jasmine’s script is too thinly fleshed-out to be fully successful, and the production tends to drag through its final frames. This moody noir will find a slim audience locally, and works best as a calling card for its director and lead actor, who are clearly capable."

Guess we'll have to see for ourselves who's right.   As of Oct 26, Anchorage isn't mentioned on either the director's Twitter or Facebook pages. 



------------------------------------------------------------

From Keiko Shiga's Tumblr page

Magic Utopia
Shoji Toyama 
Japan √
88 min


Finding out about this film isn't easy.  There this from

"A young girl who lost her mother suddenly begins to float in midair when she meets a man trapped in a past of painful memories. At the same time, an old man receives a message on his answering machine from his long dead daughter."

 And this from what seems to be the film's website:

1. 思い出せない秘密
2. 抑えられない衝動
3. 真実しかない孤独

ひとりの少女の体が宙に浮いたことによって動き出す
３人の男女の《マジックユートピア》へと向かう魂の物語。

 But this picture on their website suggests this could be good. 

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Image from Orphansandkingdoms website gallery

Orphans & Kingdoms
Paolo Rotondo 
New Zealand √
74 min



From an interview with Director Paolo Rotondo in the New Zealand site Flicks:

How did you discover the three young leads?

They all auditioned. Calae who plays Kenae was the only kid who could really stand up to an adult actor in the audition and hold his own. Hanelle (Tibs) had auditioned for me when I was helping to cast a US TV film, she was so strong I wanted her for Orphans. Jesse auditioned and proceeded to teach me about the real world of the characters I was exploring, he didn’t need a script – he knew the story.

Director bio from a story generator workshop he ran:

I am a passionate and accomplished Artist who has worked in New Zealand’s Film, Theatre and Television industries for twenty years. My need to tell stories began as an Actor and inspired me to develop my skills as a Playwright and consequently Filmmaker. I offer a depth of experience in Film and Theatre, ranging from acting, to producing, to writing and directing.
The short films I have written have won awards and garnered international acclaim. This year I will be releasing my first full-length feature film ‘Orphans & Kingdoms’ which I wrote and directed, funded by The New Zealand Film Commission.
As a Playwright my works have been published and have toured nationally and internationally to universal critical and audience acclaim. “In 2014 my Play “Strange Resting Places” was invited in the New Zealand showcase at Edinburgh Festival.

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The Descendants

Yaser Talebi 
Islamic Republic of Iran √
80 min



From the Youtube description:

"Jacob's family worries about Farrokh, the son of the family. Farrokh left Iran to continue his studies but he has not been in touch with them for a long time. Jacob travels to Sweden to look for his son..."

Hong Kong Democracy Movement Heats Up

It seems like the whole world is full of governments trying to control their people and people taking to the streets in protest.  It's hard to keep track of them all.

But I spent a year in Hong Kong, just after Tiananmen, when everyone was jittery because the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong coming in 1997, looked a lot more ominous after June 4, 1989. 

A recent white paper from the Beijing government on Hong Kong sent the notice that elections the people of Hong Kong had been expecting soon, would have Beijing approved candidates only.

This has pushed democracy advocates into action.

(Reuters) - Violent clashes between Hong Kong riot police and students galvanized tens of thousands of supporters for the city's pro-democracy movement and kick-started a plan to lock down the heart of the Asian financial center early on Sunday.
Leaders and supporters of Occupy Central with Love and Peace rallied to support students who were doused with pepper spray early on Saturday after they broke through police barriers and stormed the city's government headquarters.  [For the whole article, click here.]

Part of Hong Kong is attached to mainland China.  Then there's Hong Kong Island, the heart of the business district.  Central - as in "Occupy Central" above - is where many of  the modern office buildings and the main government offices are located.  I don't have a good feeling about how this is going to end.

One of those arrested, according to the Reuters piece, is 17 year old student leader Joshua
Wong. 

Wong has already won one major victory against Beijing. In 2012, he forced the Hong Kong government to shelve plans to roll out a pro-China national education scheme in the city's schools when the then 15-year-old rallied 120,000 protesters.

 Here's a BBC article
And China Daily's take on this.
It says China's deployed 7000 police to keep order.  If there were 70,000 protesters, that would mean one cop for every 10 protesters.  Even if there were 700,000 it would still one cop for every hundred protesters.  Now do you understand why I don't feel good about this.