Psiphon Blog

The 2016 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival has come to a close after a successful run from 8th to 19th November, 2016. As the largest Asian film festival in Canada, Reel Asian has been bridging the Pan-Asian contemporary cinema and Canadian community through creating a platform for emerging and award-winning directors, actors and the local community to share their work and opinions on films. This year, over half of the film titles were directed by North American filmmakers. This year marked the 20th anniversary, and for the first time new elements were introduced for the film festival-- including Reel Asian's inaugural WEE ASIAN Kids Programme for parents and children, free entries to 10 films for senior and student audience, as well as a new 20/20 Interview Series . 20 candidates who either have worked or attended the film festival in the past 20 years were invited to talk about their memorable stories with Reel Asian, as well as the impact of the film festival on

Following the detainment of 12 pro-Kurdish lawmakers from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in the early hours of November 4 th , Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp and Skype were blocked in Turkey . There were reports that Turk Telekom internet provider completely disabled access to the internet or throttled the connection to the point that it was impossible to connect. Despite lack of official decision about the restrictions, and BTK’s explanation that there was a technical problem throughout Turkey, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim made a statement later in the day and said “For security reasons, these kinds of measures can be taken time to time. These are temporary measures. Everything goes back to normal after the danger is eliminated.” Social media and internet bans ended the following evening in most of the country, but there were still some short-term connection problems during the weekend in some regions, and it was reported that some Turk Telekom users