The film has finished its festival run and will be released online on 13th June.  Here’s a short video of the cast and crew, talking about the making of the film.

Director Ian Baigent has also created a lovely montage of all the clapper boards from the film shoot. I think all films should have one of these.

Here are the quotes:

Hos den engelske afdeling af PEN, der kæmper for ytringsfrihed over hele verden, siger kampagneleder Robert Sharp, at han finder forbuddet direkte latterligt. “Det er bizart og man kan spekulere over hvilket signal OL sender ud ved netop at lægge så meget vægt på deres sponsorers interesser. Det efterlader en med en dårlig smag i munden og det strider for mig at se imod hele den olympiske ånd, der går ud på åbenhed og at dele”,  siger han.

and

Robert Sharp tvivler alvorligt på, at de den Olympiske Komite kan håndhæve nogen form for censur. “Vi har tidligere set i forbindelse med retssager her i Storbritannien, at selv ikke et forbud fra Højesteret har kunnet stillet meget op overfor twitter. Tværtimod tror jeg ethvert forsøg på at stoppe en twitterpost eller et opslag på Facebook vil have den modsatte effekt. Det vil sprede sig på nettet med lynets hast”, mener han.

What stood out for me was Lowrey’s respect for _why’s privacy.  She does discover who he is and where he works, but chooses not to pester the guy when he makes it clear he wants to be left alone.

I’m sure there are many decent journalists who would have behaved in the same way, but as the #Leveson Inquiry unfolds and puts journalism in its worst light, such acts of respect draw the attention.

I was reminded of the actions of blogger LinkMachineGo, who discovered the identity of blogger Belle De Jour in 2003 and kept it secret:

I waited five years for somebody to hit that page (I’m patient). Two weeks ago I started getting a couple of search requests a day from an IP address at Associated Newspapers (who publish the Daily Mail) searching for “brooke magnanti” and realised that Belle’s pseudonymity might be coming to an end. I contacted Belle via Twitter and let her know what was happening. I didn’t expect to hear anything back.

And then early last weekend I received an email signed by Brooke that confirmed that she was outing herself in the Sunday Times because the Daily Mail had discovered her identity via an ex-boyfriend.

This in turn reminds us of outing of Girl With A One Track Mind in 2006, who was outed by the Sunday Times itself, and Nightjack, the police blogger who was outed by the The Times (illegally, so it turned out) in 2009. When the identities of these writers were revealed, their writing stopped and something important was lost from the writing ecosystem.

In all these cases, the print journalist’s desperation for a scoop (revelations that score quite low on Jay Rosen’s taxonomy of scoops) outweighed concerns about the value of the writing that was being produced by the blogger, a fellow person-of-letters.  A writer-on-writer attack.

Its odd that the more mature approach to pseudonomity is being manifested at Slate, an online magazine that is only sixteen years old, and by bloggers who have been writing for only a few years.  Meanwhile the harmful short-term thinking is happening at The Times, an institution established for a couple of centuries.  It points to an arrogance within the mainstream media, a belief that the masthead confers a priority of one’s writing, opinion, and needs.  Bloggers have long understood this culture.  I wonder if Lord Leveson will challenge it?

It feels like a distillation of comedy down to its purest elements. The punchline is all, illustrated in 2-dimensional simplicity. Its like tweeting on video. Very much of the internet age.

Hurrah!  A Defamation Bill was announced today as part of the Queen’s Speech at the State Opening of Parliament.

The Government will introduce a Bill in the next few days/weeks, not unlike the draft they consulted on last year.  This means it still needs work.  Specifically: stronger provisions for public interest reporting; a tougher ‘harm’ threshold to weed out the trivial claims and stop wealthy people using the High Court as a branch of their PR teams; protections for ISPs and hosts who currently have to field spurrious takedown notices; and a ban on companies suing for libel.

In March I produced a series of short videos for the Libel Reform Campaign, explaining each of these points.

You should join the Libel Reform Campaign bandwagon here.

I know I should be glued to #Leveson analysis, just have the feeling that it will all play out as it should without me. Passive politics.

A few people asked me about this, and suggested I should care more about this most important of issues.

To be clear, I was not doubting how important the Leveson Inquiry is, or the significance of the scandal(s) he is investigating. Rather, I just have a sense that the issue has reached something of an apotheosis, and that a better order of things will now inevitably result. Henry Porter’s column today captures my thinking:

We can take heart that Murdoch is already finished as a political force here, that the record of his morbid influence is being settled and serious crimes will be prosecuted. What we have to focus on now is protecting our democracy from the influence of such a character again.

Porter goes on to say that there are still questions left unanswered – for Alex Salmond and for Jeremey Hunt, in particular – but I think we can now be confident that those charged with getting to the bottom of this now have the political and moral clout to pursue these issues to their conclusion. A far cry from the days when Tom Watson MP was mocked for his obsession with phone-hacking at News of the World.

During the fair, I spent much of the time in the ‘Market Focus’ section of Earls Court, and I found the atmosphere very odd. Dissidents from the Independent Chinese PEN Centre and the Tibet Society would periodically enter the space and stand with placards, silently demanding an end to Literary Censorship in China. Whenever they did so, GAPP employees would muster their pull-up conference banners and place them between the protesters and the events space, presumably to ensure no stray slogans found their way into official photographs. Unfortunately, these banners carried the offical market focus branding, with slogans about new ideas and cultural exchange. It was not a good look.

At one point, while reading aloud the work of imprisoned poets Zhu Yufu and Shi Tao, I was scolded by the security guards for standing on carpet that had been paid for by the GAPP delegation. The blue aisle carpet was fine, but we would be asked to leave if we persisted with standing on the red carpet. Suddenly, the Book Fair felt like a Fred Sandback installation, where subtle coloured threads demarcate a space. Who knew the Chinese government did conceptual art? (Video here)

A fact went unreported by the trade press was that Liu Binjie, the President of GAPP, failed to turn up for his keynote speech. Earlier that morning, he had come face to face with the exiled novelist Ma Jian, who had attempted to hand Binjie a copy of his celebrated novel Beijing Coma. Security guards hustled the author away, but clearly communist party officials feared that Lui Binjie would be embarrassed by further displays of literary freedom during his scheduled address. At the plenary session, The lackey who replaced him claimed that he had been called away on urgent business, but this was clearly nonsense – what could be more important than the speech he had travelled half way round the world to deliver? The substitute then proceeded to announce that for the next few minutes he would be a ‘puppet’ and, as activists silently held aloft more signs demanding free expression, he proceeded to read Binjie’s speech aloud… including the punctuation. It seems the Chinese government can do performance art as well. (Video here)

Contrast the dour and humourless approach of the official delegation with the rest of their compatriots. When excluded authors like Ma Jian and his fellow exiled author Jung Chang (author of Wild Swans) visited the English PEN Literary Café, it was pleasing to see the number of Chinese delegates who stopped to listen to them speak and take photographs. Chinese publishers and journalists also paused by our stand to talk about imprisoned writers like Lui Xiaobo and Shi Tao. The most fascinating conversation I had during the three days at Earls Court was with a correspondent for a Chinese media outlet, who described in detail the exasperating self-censorship she practices every day. It was depressing to learn the extent to which the Chinese censorship system works on a kind of auto-pilot, with individual writers making decisions about what not to write, rather than a formal censor moderating everything (although that kind of censorship happens too). However, it was also interesting to hear the distain that she felt for the system under which she operates, and her own frustration with others who enable the state to operate as it does. She was not a revolutionary, but her words exposed the made me hopeful that the current system is untenable, and will reform. Like the carpet borders and the wafer-thin pull-up banners, the foundations under which oppressive regimes operate are flimsy, and exist largely in the human mind.

Discussing Günter Grass on BBC World Have Your Say:

Discussing China at the London Book Fair on Monocle 24:

I also spoke to 2ser Radio in Sydney but haven’t heard the audio yet.

Its excruciating to hear all the “ahs” and “ums” and “you know” and “sort of” that pepper what feels, at the time, like normal fluent speech. The second clip is better than the first, which is because I had longer to prepare.

The audio is hosted on PodOmatic, which I’ve only just discovered. It is free to sign-up and has easy integration with iTunes. I would use AudioBoo but it limits the length of the audio clips to 3 minutes.

Over the past few days, a “free speech moment” has been unfolding. These are the controversies where we get to discuss the first principles of free expression, and they usually begin when someone does something extremely offensive. Think of the public trolling of Anjem Choudry, or the English Defence League. Think of Liam Stacey, charged with a criminal offence for tweeting. Think of every controversial columnist, paid by the newspapers to be politically incorrect. These moments are frustrating, but at least campaigners like me are asked to make the case for free expression afresh, on sites such as this one.

This week, the “free speech moment” has had both an historical and international flavour. Günter Grass, the Nobel Prize Winning German author, angered the Israeli government after he wrote a poem about their militarism. Israel, incensed that a former conscript in the Waffen-SS should write such a criticism, responded by placing a travel ban on the author. In the most recent twist, Grass has escalated the controversy by likening the Israeli government’s actions to those of the East German Stasi.

There are two unresolved issues here. The first is whether a travel ban (declaring Grass a persona non grata, unwelcome should he wish to visit Israel again) is censorship. Clearly, such a move is less severe than the formal banning of Grass’s books; and many authors around the world (for example, in Iran, which was cited in the poem) suffer imprisonment for their transgressions. Nevertheless, placing this restriction on a person, purely because of what they have written, is a form of censorship.

It prevents any Israeli citizens who happen to agree with Grass’s poem (and I am sure there are many, from every religion) from inviting him to speak. It precludes the possibility that those in Israel who enjoy Günter Grass’s oeuvre would ever have the chance to meet him at a literary event. A voice is suppressed. Until recently, the UK Border Agency were in the habit of denying authors and artists entry to the UK because a gallery opening or a book tour was considered a form of “work”. English PEN campaigned for reform of the system on the basis that freedom of expression also includes freedom of information, the right to hear dissenting voices. A travel restriction on an author denies this freedom, which makes it undemocratic.

Such bans also have a “chilling effect” on other writers – will authors who regularly visit Israel now self-censor, if they hold opinions that the Israeli government doesn’t want to hear?

The second issue is over Günter Grass’s actual words, including his latest ‘Stasi’ interjection? These “free speech moments” are frustrating because defending someone’s right to say something is usually equated with defending the content of what they say. Those whom the speaker has offended are always ready to conflate the two issues. We should remember that the oft-cited Tallenter quip on free speech (“I hate what you say, but defend to the death your right to say it”) also works perfectly well in reverse: I defend Günter Grass’s right to say things . . . but I hate what he says. The writer Kenan Malik goes further, and makes the point that if one vigorously defends free expression, one also has a moral duty to retort when people say unpleasant things.

I don’t think that Günter Grass is saying abhorrent things, though in my opinion he has been deeply insensitive. His last comment is clearly a doubling-down, and the result is polarising. His poem, despite taking on the form of introspection, has not persuaded anyone that was not already of his point-of-view. For such an accomplished writer, celebrated for his turn of phrase, this is a shame. The great power of poetry and prose is their ability to help the reader empathise with someone of a different culture or history. Personally, I think Grass is capable of this, and should have written a different poem. But to say this is an act of literary criticism, not a statement of the principles of free speech.