The Stray World

The Yes Men pro­duced what is prob­ably my most favour­ite video on act­iv­ism to date. Employ­ing net­works of fake web­sites and cam­paigns The Yes Men have man­aged to prank their way into high­light­ing issues of con­cern that would never have oth­er­wise seen the day of light.

They have even released their latest film, The Yes Men Fix the World on the legally-free video shar­ing site VODO — which is well worth the USD 0 you will spend watch­ing it.

For their next pro­ject, The Yes Men Are Revolt­ing, the film pro­du­cers explain that funds by stu­dios for inde­pend­ent films have dried up — thus the neces­sity for crowd funding.

But to get there, we need money. When our first movie came out, stu­dios and tele­vi­sion net­works were pay­ing pretty well—but then the the mar­ket for indie films went into freefall.

Today, we’re really in a pinch. Cor­por­ate spon­sor­ship, of course, is right out. (Duh.) So we’re turn­ing to you. The money we raise will go towards pay­ing for a few more shoots and a couple more actions around the globe. We also need money to pay for edit­ors, equip­ment, archival foot­age, legal coun­sel, and all the tech­nical work it takes to get a movie fin­ished and into the world. Finally, we’ll need funds for “out­reach,” mainly the cre­ation and staff­ing of the Action Switch­board, a way to plug inspired view­ers into ongo­ing pro­jects and help gen­er­ate new ones. It’ll come out at the same time as the film.

If you kick in now, you can join in this steamy syn­ergy. Hurry!

I don’t doubt a great major­ity of people out there would not hes­it­ate to drop off more than RM 100 per year in going to the cinemas for another big-budget pro­duc­tion. If how­ever you would like to sup­port pro­gress­ive social change while enjoy­ing a film that will def­in­itely elev­ate your status to rebel-hoodlum, find the spare change in your wal­let and kick in a few bucks to their Kick­starter cam­paign.

Social change doesn’t come about unless we all work together for pro­gress­ive goals. This is not the par­al­lel uni­verse where Bat­man or Super­man exists.

And if a cur­rently unemployed/self-employed graduate-student-to-be in a 3rd world coun­try can spare USD 10, I am sure you can too.