Niobe thompson biography sample

It should be an easy story to tell: the world’s biggest industrial project, the richest oil companies in the world, the largest toxic quagmires ever formed, and the denial of any link to cancer deaths nearby. Destruction and death, power and wealth, wrapped up in a government conspiracy—plus aerial shots of an unprecedented man-made moonscape so sublime they border on beautiful.

But director Niobe Thompson’s documentary Tipping Point: The End of Oil has taken on more than the standard hand-wringing anti-big-business stance of other non-fiction features about the Alberta tar sands. In environmental contexts, the phrase “tipping point” usually refers to ecological thresholds beyond which there is no return—such as the potential for “runaway climate change.” But the film’s title goes further: it refers instead to a turning point for civilization.

“We want the audience to understand: we are at the end of the age of oil, and this is what it looks like,” says Thompson. “The subtitle ‘The End of Oil’ may make one think our film is about solar panels and electric cars, but really this is about what our oil-driven society is doing.”

“Oil invades every part of our lives. We go to enormous lengths to extract it, and we will go to war to get it,” writes David Suzuki, the film’s narrator, in an e-mail interview. “Then when people say we have to shift our energy sources, the immediate response is to say that is crazy. Of course, it’s easy to say it’s crazy when you look at the world through the perceptual lenses of our vested interests.”

But through the lens of a camera, the sheer scale of the tar sands project never fails to impress. It’s a “provincial sacrifice zone,” as Thompson puts it, created through “a Faustian pact” Canada has made in the pursuit of economic growth. Deep toxic tailing ponds, larger than any man-made structure on earth. Vast scourges in the earth, forged by what Stephen Harper once aptly described

EQUUS in Latin means a horse. The horse in the Kazakh tradition holds a special honorable place. The Kazakhs were nomadic people. They always appreciated and cherished horses, respectfully called them "esti zhanuar" which means "wise animal". This attitude to the horse, exaltation and reverence of the horse is associated with the leading role of this noble animal in the nomadic life of the Kazakhs.

Modern studies prove that the first horse was tamed in the territory of modern Kazakhstan. Scientists found the remnants of koumiss on the crocks of clay vessels found on the site of the ancient settlement Botay. They date back to the IV century BC.

The well-known archaeologist Victor Zaibert noted that the first who began to drink koumiss were the Botays. It was 6 thousand years ago (Botay was the territory of modern Northern Kazakhstan). A wild horse can not be milked.

And it was they who first saddled a horse. It was a thousand years earlier than it is written now in textbooks on ancient history.

Having such weighty facts we can not neglect our cultural heritage.

A joint project of Canada, the USA, Germany, France and Kazakhstan was presented to the Kazakh public - the documentary series "Equus", which tells the story of the horse's domestication in the Great Steppe.

This was told by D. Abayev in his Facebook account.

The project will be headed by the famous director, researcher Niobe Thompson. Thompson's movies are subject to a logical structure: the author of the movie chooses the most common, basic, most global moments that influenced on everything else.

The details are immaterial - there are many of them, they tend to expand in a polygeometric progression, so the main thing is to understand the principle and follow the peculiar "middle way" between the accumulation of data, building the theory and seeking confirmation of it.

Director Niobe Thompson

In the film, based on a large-scale archaeological