A few years ago, New Yorkers woke up to see Apple’s advertising billboards sport a perplexing shiller. The faces of 20th century titans like Albert Einstein and Miles Davis had been replaced by what one newspaper at the time termed ‘the definitely ‘different’ stare’ of Charles Manson.

The redesign was the work of the Billboard Liberation Front, a group of merry pranksters often grouped with other theatrically minded activists under the loose category of culture jammers.

Meanwhile, back in Canada, Vancouver documentary filmmaker Jill Sharpe – her previous work includes 1999’s In the Company of Fear, a documentary on state terror in Colombia – was getting irritated by the constant intrusion of billboard images. She was also attracted to culture jamming’s humor.

‘I wanted to look at the effects of humor on social change and I thought culture jamming is a really powerful vehicle to make people think. What is the impact on the mental environment of Coke and Apple sponsoring schools, for example?’ she says.

A couple of years later the feature documentary Culturejam: Hijacking Commercial Culture will receive its world premiere at this year’s Vancouver International Film Festival.

‘The film is more of a provocation. It’s not saying let’s change the world, but what is your choice and how do you feel about what your choices are?’

In trying to jolt the audience into thinking about the messages and the medium of advertising, Sharpe also profiled the less known and less hyperbolic culture jammer Carly Stasko. She puts stickers on ads and uses markers to question their message. ‘It’s a political comment going up in our environment,’ Sharpe says of Stasko. I wanted her in the film because I didn’t want people to think that you have to be the Billboard Liberation Front, or Reverend Billy.’

The good reverend is actually New York actor Bill Talen who stages occupations of the Disney store in Times Square and questions the company’s corporate practice from the cash register.

Getting funding for the $320,000, two-year project was not difficult. The initial influx came through a $100,000 infusion from the Rogers Documentary Fund, with additional moneys from the CTF, Telefilm Canada’s Equity Investment Program, British Columbia Film, the Rogers Cable Network Fund, Vision TV, the Knowledge Network, Saskatchewan Communications Network and Canadian Learning Television.

Sharpe served as director and producer on the project, which saw her shooting in New York and San Francisco. The film is distributed by Films Transit International.

After shooting 75 hours of tape, Sharpe took her life to Mexico for six weeks. ‘I rented a little place and looked at all my material. That I had to pay for myself.’ Another 16 weeks in the editing room followed.

The most difficult part of the process was the beginning, when the director had to gain access to her subjects. ‘I don’t come from that world and so I had to take time to meet people and assess the feel and convince them that I was not a corporate pundit. The culture jammers are suspicious of the media.

‘There will always be radical artists who are doing things differently and people who break the borders a little, who are thinking about the place they live.’

Television viewers will get a chance to make up their minds when Vision presents the doc’s world premiere. No theatrical distribution is planned at this time.