DCist’s daily roundup of a number of films playing tomorrow at the AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs festival.
Georgia Sugimura Archer’s ‘Barbershop Punk’Most savvy internet users and avid music consumers have probably heard the term “net neutrality” thrown around. They might even follow the locally based Future of Music Coalition on their RSS feeds and understand the issue’s meat and potatoes. Net neutrality, or the freedom to access and disseminate legal content via the internet without discrimination, is a surprisingly heated topic with an even more surprising origin. Two years ago, when a small town family man and software tester named Robb Todolski noticed that he was having a hard time sharing old Barbershop Quartet recordings over peer-to-peer networking, he ran some tests and realized that his ISP, Comcast, was actually blocking those file transfers. His blog posts on these findings led to an explosive First Amendment debate and a widely publicized FCC investigation.
The filmmakers interview everyone from the former Clinton press secretary to Ian MacKaye on the importance of net neutrality and some of the more sinister implications of a private company blocking the flow of information. They also show via testimony footage from FCC hearings that this issue of net neutrality brings together usual rivals like NARAL and the Christian Coalition. However, the focus on Todolski, a little guy with a big revelation, humanizes a very technical issue and keeps the film from getting overly preachy. It’s Todolski’s unassuming nature that drives the message home and the message of free speech = good, corporate information control = bad is crystal clear.
View the trailer
Premieres tomorrow at 4:30 p.m. in the AFI Silver 2, and screens again on Friday at 8:30 p.m. in the same theater.
