[Editor's Note: For more coverage of GIFF, check out Joe Bardi's cover story on GIFF and expanded Q&A with festival President Chad Moore, Mitch Perry's longer story on festival entry Full Signal, and more reviews of some of the films playing the festival.]
Talal Jabari's Full Signal, a 61 minute documentary that looks at the deleterious health affects (both real and potential) from wireless technology, is made by a man who's on a mission to shake up a mostly naive (if not ignorant) public about the new world in which we all now live in. Released just a few months ago, the film comes at a time when there is a growing consciousness in the Tampa Bay area, the U.S. and around the world about about concerns from the electromagnetic radiation that emits from wireless instruments at signal strengths and frequencies that don't naturally exist at the earth's surface.
The film is heavy (at times perhaps a bit too much at times) with talking heads describing why the technology is dangerous. It's opening sequences feature scenes of everyday life, where people perpetually have phones sticking next to their ears, as well as sitting down working on their laptops. B. Blake Levitt is one of the key talking heads, a former New York Times reporter who now is one of the best known critics of the technology. Levitt states early on in the film that something like air pollution can cause single strands of DNA to break, and though that's not a good thing, it's not as bad as double strand DNA breaks, which can lead to things like genetic mutations and which she says can happen thru EMF exposures. Levitt also says that it's important to listen to those who say that their health has been crushed by their proximity to cell phones or cell phone towers, dubbing them, "canaries in the coal mine."
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2010.