Free Tibet

There is an aura of apathy with nearly everyone in attendance from the people to the bands that this is just another venue without any special purpose. This is just one of the few building blocks that crumble beneath director Sarah Pirozek on her feature documentary. She attempts to create this world where artists perform because they care about the immediate cause while, all the while in front of an audience that is ready to learn nearly everything they can. Free Tibet is to represent the joined hands of the music industry, a world full of terror, and the knowledge of the youth of our nation. It is to show that with the right message, anything can happen thanks to popularity and publicity. Well, I would hate to tell Pirozek this, but this was not the message conveyed in this documentary. What I witnessed was snippets of the bands performing their more popular song (to acquaint those for a brief moment with an artist that they may not know by name but by tune), massive amounts of audience members surfing through the audiences and banging their heads to the music (not so much learning about Tibet), and finally intermixed through all of this are random bits of unconnected information about Tibet and the horrors that they are facing. There is no wonder, at least in my mind, why one of the concert goers merely said, "I care, ya know, but short attention span." It was the same way that I felt about this film. There was no coherent structure to this film only visual proof that while a good cause may be the point of the concert, the overall effect is something completely different.