As Never Look Away, this year’s documentary about camerawoman Margaret Moth, reminds us, it wasn’t long ago that the main barrier to the world at large understanding the human cost of geopolitical atrocities was how hard it was to actually see them. Now, of course, it’s never been easier to access damning footage, but it’s the understanding that’s not catching up. Social media is flooded with on-the-ground videos observing the death and destruction coming out of the occupied Palestinian territories, but they’re easier to ignore—to just scroll past—than a more cohesive and pointed piece of nonfiction. And yet, the main barrier for No Other Land, the harrowing first-person account documenting five years of home demolitions and forced displacement in Masafer Yatta, is once again how hard it is to see.

Co-directed by two Palestinians (Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal) and two Israelis (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor), No Other Land boils your blood for 95 minutes until you're not sure there's any left. It’s both a potent cry of resistance and desperate proof of existence. The film has played film festivals around the world, and has distribution plans for a theatrical run in Spain, the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia. But not the U.S. Rather, No Other Land is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center for a one-week qualifying awards run, and then…? Maybe a company will pick it up, allow it to find its audience. Maybe it simply fades away.

Due to its subject, No Other Land finds itself ironically homeless. Its future is uncertain, but the reason it’s in this predicament is not a mystery. There have been plenty of great recent films covering ongoing global conflicts. One, 20 Days In Mariupol, won an Oscar in March. That film was made by AP journalists, struggling to survive a Russian siege that bombed a Ukrainian maternity hospital into rubble.

One must ask themselves what, then, is different about No Other Land’s crystal-clear condemnation of the war crimes unfolding before its cameras. Perhaps it’s that a snapshot of war, encapsulated in the hours or even days of battle, is easier to look at than decades of apartheid. Many would like to quietly pat No Other Land on the back and shove it into the shadows, some preferring to skip even that first step. This contradictory reception is best encapsulated by a now infamous moment of ass-covering surreality at the Berlin International Film Festival. After No Other Land won its Documentary Award, the German culture minister, Claudia Roth, was caught applauding the festival’s prizewinners during their speeches. She then said that, actually, she was only clapping for the Israeli directors. Right.

Before that surprisingly flexible and shameless display of political gymnastics (a 10 from the American judges!), Roth’s first reaction was correct. No Other Land is the political documentary of the year, riveting and infuriating as Adra and Abraham follow these villagers’ resistance to forced transfer. Adra, son of an activist, has been fighting for his home his whole life. Abraham, a journalist who lives half an hour away in Be’er Sheva, becomes close with Adra. Together, they rebuild homes and smoke, roast each other’s taste in music and fantasize about the future. Hope exists in their friendship, though it never overshadows the inequality. This is a place where the color of your license plate reflects your ability to move freely through the world, where you are either a “yellow man” or a “green man.” Adra and Abraham sweat over the same cinder blocks, but only one can leave them behind.

As they film, side-by-side, Masafer Yatta’s demolished homes, ruined elementary schools, chainsawed water lines, and cement-filled wells, all destroyed to make way for an Israeli military training ground, the directors’ professional relationship blooms into a bittersweet friendship. 

There’s still resentment. How could there not be, when one filmmaker drives back to the city every night, leaving those he spent the day with to return to their makeshift cave dwellings? Co-director Ballal, frustrated, even lets off steam about Abraham’s privileged position to his face. But slowly, solidarity builds from shared sweat spilled and threats weathered. Adra is beaten mercilessly by Israeli soldiers. His father is arrested without warning. An Israeli settler gets in Abraham’s face with his iPhone. “Here is a Jew who is helping them,” he says, filming. “You’re on Facebook, people will know you, and pay you a visit.”

And these are the lucky ones. Initially, it seems that the team’s handheld cameras might act as a preventative—a bit like how Barbara Kopple helped keep some striking coal miners alive in her groundbreaking 1973 doc Harlan County, USA. But, like in that film, the illusion of safety and the empty threat of accountability quickly vanishes. At least one casualty is caught on film, blown away by some soldiers attempting to steal a village’s generator. Another comes right at the end: In the final footage of No Other Land, captured in October 2023, an Israeli settler shoves Adra’s cousin, then shoots him point-blank in the stomach with a rifle.

The difference between No Other Land and the barrage of carnage shared every day online is that the film is bilingual, cross-cultural activism that is inextricable from its context but not reliant on it. It’s not a graphic image of a dead child, nor a dry history lesson. It is a Palestinian lifetime, a lifetime of repetition and rebuilding and struggle, condensed to an hour and a half. No Other Land does not need to give a crash course on the cruelties of the occupation. It’s plain to see, as bright and blunt as a bulldozer. The doc makes a conflict so often dismissed as “too complex” unavoidably simple.

But simplicity is still not enough. Things were simple in Never Look Away, the war journo doc, when it recalled a past we’ll never return to. A past when snippets of visceral footage were all it took to shape the opinions and emotions of nations. In our numbed present, the idea that a single piece of footage could enact change feels like a pipe dream. The violence hasn’t changed, but the bar for accountability has. No amount of evidence seems satisfactory to stop genocide, to stop war crimes. As No Other Land reaches the frayed tail end of its nervy account, its central pair discusses the outcome of their activism. “People need to figure out how to make change,” Abraham says. “Somebody watches something, they’re touched, and then?” 

Then…what, exactly? Abraham and Adra don’t have the answers—they can’t force those watching their footage to vote, to call, to protest, to pressure, to divest, to raise hell—but they can at least film what’s happening to them. But if people never get the chance to watch it? To be touched by it? And then?

No Other Land is currently playing at Film at Lincoln Center.

Greg and his brother Tim were responsible for some iconic posters, comics and album covers

The post RIP Greg Hildebrandt appeared first on Aftermath.

On Monday and a day before Election Day, tech workers for the New York Times went on strike seeking to secure a contract with fairer pay and just cause job protections. In response Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of AI search engine Perplexity, tweeted that the chairman of the New York Times company AG Sulzberger should contact him for assistance during the strike. It's unclear exactly what services Srinivas is offering Sulzberger, but it appears that the CEO of an AI company is trying to help the Times bypass its human workers who are currently in the middle of an authorized labor strike.

The offer is especially ironic given Perplexity’s repeated cases of lifting and regurgitating human journalists’ work without credit. Earlier this year Forbes found that the AI service was using much of its original investigative reporting without credit. And last month Dow Jones and the New York Post sued Perplexity, alleging “massive” copyright infringement.

“Hey AG Sulzberger @nytimes - sorry to see this,” Srinivas tweeted in response to a Sulzberger email saying the strike would likely continue through the election. “Perplexity is on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. DM me anytime here.”

Perplexity offers an AI-powered search engine which, like many others, is built in part by scraping information and material from the web. WIRED previously found that Perplexity was scraping sites without permission, and plagiarizing multiple articles. 

In a statement published on Monday, the NewsGuild of NY and the Times Tech Guild said that the latter “has walked off the job in a ULP strike that threatens Election Day.” The Times Tech Guild is the union “that powers the technology behind election coverage at The New York Times,” the statement added.

Throughout Monday, members have been picketing outside The New York Times building. The statement asked New York Times readers to honor the digital picket line and not play New York Times’ owned games such as Wordle.

“Throughout the bargaining process, Times management has engaged in numerous labor law violations, including implementing return-to-office mandates without bargaining and attempting to intimidate members through interrogations about their strike intentions,” the statement continued. “The NewsGuild of NY has filed unfair labor practice charges against The Times on these tactics as well as numerous other violations of labor law.”

On Monday, The New York Times announced it had passed 11 million subscribers.

Perplexity did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did the NewsGuild of NY.

Hell-bent on finding something, anything, that will entertain subscribers but doesn't require paying for labor, Netflix is launching a new AI video game thing. The news, per Aftermath, comes less than two weeks after Netflix shuttered its AAA gaming studio, Blue, which seemed poised to turn Netflix's gaming department into something worth playing. Oh, well, Netflix dropped the big TUDUM on Blue in favor of, you guessed it, generative AI.

According to Aftermath, the news comes via a LinkedIn post from executive Mike Verdu, who, after three years "building Netflix games from the ground up," recently took a new job as VP of GenAI for Games. As such, Verdu promises to harness a "'once in a generation' inflection point for game development and player experiences using generative AI." After years spent reading press releases from tech companies, one can guess what comes next. Say it with us:" This transformational technology will accelerate the velocity of development and unlock novel game experiences that will surprise, delight, and inspire players." Why do all AI boosters talk this way?

Verdu remains vague about all this, but he is "focused on a creator-first vision of AI." We suppose that means an actual game designer will repeatedly type prompts into a hallucinating AI engine until the designer gets something remotely similar to what they saw in their heads. Regardless of how awful that sounds, Verdu says he hasn't "been this excited about an opportunity in this industry since the '90s." It's an excitement only shared by those who already have a meaningful investment in AI, not the people wondering why Google Search sucks so much now, or the game designers laid off in favor of an algorithm that makes everything look like a shitty Pixar movie. For now, we can comfort ourselves knowing that no games will come of this. We wish it didn't require shutting down an actual game studio to give Netflix's AI team something to do.

It's been years of this AI stuff, thousands of jobs lost, the internet has been spammed to hell with slop, and none of the most valuable, profitable, or powerful companies in the world have given us any reason to use it. At this point, why should anyone believe them?

The Times Tech Guild is on strike, and asks players not to play the Times' games

The post PSA: Break Your New York Times Games Streak Today appeared first on Aftermath.

Juston Gordon-Montgomery sees his new shonen-inspired Adult Swim series as a gateway to the world of wrestling.

Juston Gordon-Montgomery grew up during the Attitude Era of pro wrestling — a time when the personalities were humongous, the storylines were wild, and the theater of it all bordered on high camp. Though it has gotten way easier to watch wrestling in the streaming era, the sport’s cultural dominance has waned in the years since it first captured Gordon-Montgomery’s imagination. Especially to non-fans, the idea of getting into wrestling can still feel a bit daunting. But that feeling is part of what inspired Gordon-Montgomery to create Invincible Fight Girl, a new series coming to Adult Swim.

Invincible Fight Girl’s story about a young accountant named Andy (Sydney Mikayla) who dreams of becoming a legendary wrestler is the stuff of shonen classics like Dragon Ball Z and One Piece. But the show’s setting — a world where everyone is some sort of masked brawler with unique costumes and signature combat moves — feels like a loving send-up of the pro-wrestling culture that defined the sport throughout the late ’90s. On paper, Invincible Fight Girl’s blend of influences makes its premise sound a little busy, but you can immediately see the vision come together as soon as its characters step into the ring.

When I recently sat down with Gordon-Montgomery to talk about Invincible Fight Girl, he told me that he wanted his love for the Attitude Era of wrestling to shine through “not just in Andy as a character, but the show as a whole.”

“Wrestling felt magical to me as a kid, but the characters and their backstories also felt real,” Gordon-Montgomery explained. “I fully believed that the Undertaker really was a dead guy. The Attitude Era felt like it lent itself to the question ‘What would a world be like if it was filled with pro wrestlers,’ because they would all be these very distinct, very clear characters with ideologies that would come through in how they speak and fight.”

From the jump, Gordon-Montgomery knew he wanted to tell a story that both focused on someone chasing their passion and captured the feeling of getting swept up in the thrill of a wrestling match. Naturally, Invincible Fight Girl’s creative team took some cues from real-world wrestling. Because the show is all about a scrappy fighter training to be the best in a world full of magical people, though, anime series like Pokémon and Naruto were an obvious go-to source of inspiration.

If those shows could spin entire worlds out of concepts like catching monsters and being a shinobi, Gordon-Montgomery felt he might be able to do something similar with pro wrestling. To really capture the spirit of wrestling, though, Gordon-Montgomery and his team found themselves looking to “one of the most fantastic pieces of media there is”: director Satoshi Nishimura’s 2000 adaptation of Hajime no Ippo.

“I don’t know if a lot of people know about Hajime no Ippo, but it was the north star for us because, in that show, the fighting isn’t just fighting,” Gordon-Montgomery explained. “It’s a way to visualize philosophies clashing and illustrate how characters grow and change. So much of wrestling matches is just storytelling and pageantry, and it felt important to make sure that our fights weren’t just people hitting each other and pulling off moves that you recognize.”

Image: Adult Swim

Early in the series, as Andy’s first striking out on her own, many of her go-to maneuvers are wrestling basics you might recognize from live-action matches because she’s a novice who learned everything she knows from instructional videos. Her skills level up as she meets new allies like elderly wrestling legend Quesa Poblana (Rolonda Watts) and aspiring journalist Mikey (T.K. Weaver). But Andy’s transformation into Invincible Fight Girl takes time, something many networks seem increasingly skittish about giving newer projects.

When Gordon-Montgomery started in animation, he didn’t see Western studios producing a lot of serialized shows in the way he wanted Invincible Fight Girl to be. Protracted narratives that play out over the course of dozens of episodes are a hallmark of the anime Gordon-Montgomery was taking notes from, but he knew that pushing for that kind of story structure would be a challenge.

“Especially because we’re in this era of shorter season orders, there was definitely some concern about, ‘How long are you trying to draw these plot beats and revelations out?’” Gordon-Montgomery told me. “But to the credit of our partners at the network, I think they understood our vision. We were able to really convey that this is how Andy’s story needed to be told in order for audiences to really experience it the way we intended.”

Though Gordon-Montgomery doesn’t want to put a number to how many episodes he envisions Invincible Fight Girl running for just yet, he’s confident that the show’s core concept has legs akin to Pokémon’s.

“Pokémon is kind of at a point where it’s just going to keep going forever, which isn’t quite what we want to do,” Gordon-Montgomery said. “But I think there’s a very, very long runway of different ideas that we’re exploring philosophically with Andy and this world we’ve created. There are a lot of things that haven’t been done in animation here that I see us doing if we get the shot.”

Invincible Fight Girl premieres on Adult Swim on November 2nd.