ckaihatsu
7th January 2017, 13:34
Our Loyola Sunday Film Series; January-March 2017 1. This Changes Everything 2. A Place Called Chiapas 3. Cesar Chavez: The Fight in the Fields...
Loyola Political Film Series
Sundays, 2pm
Loyola University (downtown)
Corboy Law Center, room 301, 25 E. Pearson Street, Chicago
(one block north of Chicago & State Red line L stop)
January 8 This Changes Everything 2015 90m
Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years, This Changes Everything is an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change.
Directed by Avi Lewis, and inspired by Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestseller, the film presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond.
Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Klein says we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.
January 15 A Place Called Chiapas 1998 90m
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) is an armed revolutionary group based in Chiapas, the southernmost, and one of the poorest, states of Mexico. Since 1994, they have been in a declared war “against the Mexican state,” though this war has been primarily nonviolent and defensive against military, paramilitary, and corporate incursions on their territory. Their social base is mostly indigenous but they have some supporters in urban areas as well as an international web of support. Their main spokesperson is Subcomandante Marcos.
They align themselves with the anti-globalization, anti-neoliberal social movement and seek indigenous control over their local resources. “We don’t want to impose our solutions by force, we want to create a democratic space. We don’t see armed struggle in the classic sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only all-powerful truth around which everything is organized. In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. We didn’t go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard.” -- Subcomandante Marcos
January 22 Cesar Chavez: The Fight in the Fields 1997 116m
A documentary on Cesar Chavez and the farmworker movement told by the organizers and farmworkers themselves. It begins in the California fields in the 1860s and closes with the death of Chávez in 1993. In between is a solid history of the heroic farmworker movement, with a keen eye for the multiracial solidarity that weaves through the long struggle: Mexicans and Okies join forces in the 1930s, Filipinos and Mexicans later; an Arab-American striker was the first person killed in the grape strikes of the late 1960s.
“No film in recent years has moved me as much as The Fight in the Fields. At a the time when the history of our working people is being erased, this marvelous movie rekindles our memory of this gallant battle. Most important, it will be a revelation to the young, who must not be deprived of their history.” —Studs Terkel
January 29 - no film
February 5 The Underground Railroad 1999 95m
The Underground Railroad was an informal network of people and hiding places that helped slaves escape the American South. It extended from the South into the northern states, Canada, the western frontier, and even Cuba and the Caribbean. This documentary remembers the people, white and black, famous and almost-forgotten, who risked their fortunes and even their lives to resist the US’ most anti-democratic, anti-human rights institution.
The most active of the Railroad workers were northern free blacks, who had little or no support from white abolitionists. The most famous “conductor,” an escaped slave named Harriet Tubman, reportedly made nineteen return trips to the South; she helped some three hundred slaves escape. A number of individual whites also aided runaways, as did “vigilance committees,” often biracial in character, in northern cities.
How they organized and fought provides us with valuable lessons for our present and future struggles for human rights and freedom.
February 12 Marcus Garvey: Look for me in the Whirlwind 2000 90m
“In death I shall be a terror to the foes of Negro liberty. Look for me in the whirlwind or the song of the storm; look for me all around you.”
“Africa for the Africans... at home and abroad!”
“The Black skin is not a badge of shame, but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness.”
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” – Marcus Garvey
The film tells the story of this Jamaican immigrant, who between 1916 and 1921 built the largest black mass movement in world history. It explores Garvey’s dramatic successes before his frame-up, imprisonment and expulsion from the US. The film includes interviews with people part of the Garvey movement, who communicate the appeal of Garvey’s revolutionary ideas and reveal how he invested hundreds and thousands of black men and women with a newfound sense of pride.
In the United States, he had surpassed the leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in his popularity. By the force of his personality he demonstrated that the NAACP missed the real feelings of the African people in America. When 25,000 people assembled in the huge Madison Square Garden under the banner of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the event heightened the FBI’s attempt to destroy him. They planted articles in papers to smear him, sowed discord and distrust among members of the organization, and framed up the officers for criminal activities. What disturbed the US government was that an African, without the support of the white media, had ascended to such heights of popularity with the African American people. Garvey was the pre-eminent spokesperson of the race and no one in any other organization could compete with him for the public mind.
The UNIA wrote the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, demanded that Black school children be taught African history, and created the Black flag of red, black and green.
This documentary about Garvey downplays the conspiracy against “the rise of a black messiah” and instead attempts to show Garvey was some type of egomaniac, demonstrating how far away from the truth the filmmaker goes. All black leaders who create a mass following will be attacked by the US rulers, who profit in keeping African people down.
February 19 Paul Robeson: Here I Stand 1999 117m
Paul Robeson was one of the most visible, influential, recognized and admired African- Americans of his time. His immense talent and accomplishments as a singer, actor, international activist, author and sports legend brought him worldwide acclaim. As a trailblazer for the Black human rights and African awareness movements, his public positions on race and class in America made him suffer major government harassment. In the Cold War era, his activism on behalf of labor and Black human rights galvanized political foes determined to destroy him. Their efforts were so successful that Robeson was nearly erased from American history books. Like Marcus Garvey, he had a major influence on the Black liberation struggle of the 1960s and beyond.
Feb. 26 All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party 1996 115m
Opening with a montage of four hundred years of white injustice in America, this film gives the context for the 60's Black rights movement. Clips of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Mumia Abu Jamal and other activists. The Black Panthers, organized by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, embodied every major element of the Black rights movement which preceded it and inspired the Black, Latino, Native American and Women's movements.
Interviews with former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, CIA officer Philip Agee, and FBI agents Wes Swearingen and Bill Turner detail a "secret domestic war" of assassination and imprisonment as weapons of repression. (16 Black Panthers are still in prison.) It explains methods used by the FBI and CIA, to divide and destroy the key figures in the Black Panthers. This has served as a model of how the US rulers continue using these methods against us today.
March 5 Ida B Wells: A Passion for Justice 1989 53m
Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was a newspaper editor and journalist who spearheaded a crusade against the murder of Blacks, then called lynching, a precursor of today’s Black Lives Matter. Working closely with both African-American community leaders and American suffragists, Wells worked to raise gender issues within the "Race Question" and race issues within the "Woman Question."
Though virtually forgotten today, largely because she was a woman and Black, She was a household name in Black America during her lifetime and considered the equal of well-known contemporaries such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. She stands as one of the US’ most uncompromising leaders and most ardent defenders of human rights for all in face of US government cruelty.
In 1892, Wells wrote a scathing series of editorials following the white murder of three prominent Black Memphis businessmen, friends of Wells's. After the lynching and her outspoken criticism of it, her newspaper's office was sacked. Wells then moved to New York City, where she wrote exposés against lynching, which was at an epidemic level in those years, and demanded the US president enforce the law . Wells became a much-sought-after lecturer and organizer for anti-lynching societies made up of men and women of all races. She travelled throughout the U.S. and went to Britain twice to speak about anti-lynching activities.
Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison reads selections from Wells' memoirs and other writings in this winner of more than 20 film festival awards.
"One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap." - Ida B. Wells
March 12 Federation of Cuban Women film 2006 63m
Charting the progress of women in Cuba, this film With Our Memory on the Future has two parts: pre-revolutionary Cuba and the early years of the Revolution, followed by women in today’s Cuba. Made to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) the film looks at the “revolution within a revolution,” showing the grassroots campaigns and initiatives that led to huge progress being made. Interwoven into this are clips of men talking on the streets, which show some of the ‘machismo’ of old Cuba.
In the second half people on the street are asked what they think of women’s position in Cuba today. Themes include divorce, sex before marriage, domestic duties, gender roles and responsibilities. The film examines all areas of life: workplace, legal system, education, health, and sports, all in the context of gender relations. The film is not afraid to show prejudiced and traditional views and clearly state that there is still much to be done but Cuba is most definitely on the right path.
March 19 Mariela Castro's March: Cuba's LGBT Revolution 2015 39m
In the Wrong Body 2010 52m
Cuba’s LGBT community finds itself in the midst of a new struggle -- the fight for equality. The leader of this uprising is Mariela Castro, charismatic daughter of President Raúl Castro and a member of Cuba’s National Assembly, who uses her passion and pedigree to promote acceptance in the face of prejudice.
Mariela Castro’s March: Cuba’s LGBT Revolution follows Castro and her LGBT supporters as they spread their message of equality across the country. The documentary spotlights gay, lesbian and trans activists through revealing stories of pain, love, strength and perseverance, all told against a rapidly changing social and political backdrop. Mariela travels tirelessly across the country to bring her message of diversity to a new, more progressive Cuba. The documentary introduces a variety of gay, lesbian and transgender Cubans who tell their stories in the weeks leading up to a celebratory Gala Against Homophobia and Transphobia.
Mariela Castro is the director of CENESEX, the Cuban National Center for Sex Education, is president of the National Commission for Treatment of Disturbances of Gender Identity, director of the journal Sexology and Society (Sexologia y Sociedad).
In the Wrong Body a transexual who was the first to undergo gender reassignment surgery in Cuba in 1988, highlights how, more than 20 years later and after a lot of struggle, there has been a positive change for trans people in the country but how she now feels trapped and must battle against the ingrained sexism that still lurks in Cuban society, thus providing a rare glimpse into the problems of gender inequality.
http://www.cubaheadlines.com/2010/09/06/26449/cubas_first_gender_reassigned_transexual_battles_s exism.html
March 26 The Wobblies 1978
Founded in 1905, the International Workers of the World (IWW), called “the Wobblies,” was a remarkable organization and this film captures the struggles, the spirit, the songs and satires of the movement. Interviews with elderly workers who participated in various IWW campaigns from the timber fields of the northwest to the Lawrence strike (1912) and the Patterson strike (1913) where the IWW brought industrial unionism to fragmented and craft-conscious industries. None of them has lost their fervor, their belief in the revolution or their marvelous sense of humor.
This documentary retrieved a terrific selection of old and archival footage, including cartoons and graphics, giving a narrative structure that provides a context for the interviews. The only intermittent narrator is Roger Baldwin, the founder of The American Civil Liberties Union, who at age 95 wrote his own script based on his brief membership in the IWW in 1919.
Sponsors: Loyola University Department of Sociology, Chicago ALBA Solidarity Committee
For more information: [email protected], Stan Smith 773-322-3168
Loyola Political Film Series
Sundays, 2pm
Loyola University (downtown)
Corboy Law Center, room 301, 25 E. Pearson Street, Chicago
(one block north of Chicago & State Red line L stop)
January 8 This Changes Everything 2015 90m
Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years, This Changes Everything is an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change.
Directed by Avi Lewis, and inspired by Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestseller, the film presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond.
Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Klein says we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.
January 15 A Place Called Chiapas 1998 90m
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) is an armed revolutionary group based in Chiapas, the southernmost, and one of the poorest, states of Mexico. Since 1994, they have been in a declared war “against the Mexican state,” though this war has been primarily nonviolent and defensive against military, paramilitary, and corporate incursions on their territory. Their social base is mostly indigenous but they have some supporters in urban areas as well as an international web of support. Their main spokesperson is Subcomandante Marcos.
They align themselves with the anti-globalization, anti-neoliberal social movement and seek indigenous control over their local resources. “We don’t want to impose our solutions by force, we want to create a democratic space. We don’t see armed struggle in the classic sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only all-powerful truth around which everything is organized. In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. We didn’t go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard.” -- Subcomandante Marcos
January 22 Cesar Chavez: The Fight in the Fields 1997 116m
A documentary on Cesar Chavez and the farmworker movement told by the organizers and farmworkers themselves. It begins in the California fields in the 1860s and closes with the death of Chávez in 1993. In between is a solid history of the heroic farmworker movement, with a keen eye for the multiracial solidarity that weaves through the long struggle: Mexicans and Okies join forces in the 1930s, Filipinos and Mexicans later; an Arab-American striker was the first person killed in the grape strikes of the late 1960s.
“No film in recent years has moved me as much as The Fight in the Fields. At a the time when the history of our working people is being erased, this marvelous movie rekindles our memory of this gallant battle. Most important, it will be a revelation to the young, who must not be deprived of their history.” —Studs Terkel
January 29 - no film
February 5 The Underground Railroad 1999 95m
The Underground Railroad was an informal network of people and hiding places that helped slaves escape the American South. It extended from the South into the northern states, Canada, the western frontier, and even Cuba and the Caribbean. This documentary remembers the people, white and black, famous and almost-forgotten, who risked their fortunes and even their lives to resist the US’ most anti-democratic, anti-human rights institution.
The most active of the Railroad workers were northern free blacks, who had little or no support from white abolitionists. The most famous “conductor,” an escaped slave named Harriet Tubman, reportedly made nineteen return trips to the South; she helped some three hundred slaves escape. A number of individual whites also aided runaways, as did “vigilance committees,” often biracial in character, in northern cities.
How they organized and fought provides us with valuable lessons for our present and future struggles for human rights and freedom.
February 12 Marcus Garvey: Look for me in the Whirlwind 2000 90m
“In death I shall be a terror to the foes of Negro liberty. Look for me in the whirlwind or the song of the storm; look for me all around you.”
“Africa for the Africans... at home and abroad!”
“The Black skin is not a badge of shame, but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness.”
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.” – Marcus Garvey
The film tells the story of this Jamaican immigrant, who between 1916 and 1921 built the largest black mass movement in world history. It explores Garvey’s dramatic successes before his frame-up, imprisonment and expulsion from the US. The film includes interviews with people part of the Garvey movement, who communicate the appeal of Garvey’s revolutionary ideas and reveal how he invested hundreds and thousands of black men and women with a newfound sense of pride.
In the United States, he had surpassed the leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in his popularity. By the force of his personality he demonstrated that the NAACP missed the real feelings of the African people in America. When 25,000 people assembled in the huge Madison Square Garden under the banner of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the event heightened the FBI’s attempt to destroy him. They planted articles in papers to smear him, sowed discord and distrust among members of the organization, and framed up the officers for criminal activities. What disturbed the US government was that an African, without the support of the white media, had ascended to such heights of popularity with the African American people. Garvey was the pre-eminent spokesperson of the race and no one in any other organization could compete with him for the public mind.
The UNIA wrote the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, demanded that Black school children be taught African history, and created the Black flag of red, black and green.
This documentary about Garvey downplays the conspiracy against “the rise of a black messiah” and instead attempts to show Garvey was some type of egomaniac, demonstrating how far away from the truth the filmmaker goes. All black leaders who create a mass following will be attacked by the US rulers, who profit in keeping African people down.
February 19 Paul Robeson: Here I Stand 1999 117m
Paul Robeson was one of the most visible, influential, recognized and admired African- Americans of his time. His immense talent and accomplishments as a singer, actor, international activist, author and sports legend brought him worldwide acclaim. As a trailblazer for the Black human rights and African awareness movements, his public positions on race and class in America made him suffer major government harassment. In the Cold War era, his activism on behalf of labor and Black human rights galvanized political foes determined to destroy him. Their efforts were so successful that Robeson was nearly erased from American history books. Like Marcus Garvey, he had a major influence on the Black liberation struggle of the 1960s and beyond.
Feb. 26 All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party 1996 115m
Opening with a montage of four hundred years of white injustice in America, this film gives the context for the 60's Black rights movement. Clips of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Mumia Abu Jamal and other activists. The Black Panthers, organized by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, embodied every major element of the Black rights movement which preceded it and inspired the Black, Latino, Native American and Women's movements.
Interviews with former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, CIA officer Philip Agee, and FBI agents Wes Swearingen and Bill Turner detail a "secret domestic war" of assassination and imprisonment as weapons of repression. (16 Black Panthers are still in prison.) It explains methods used by the FBI and CIA, to divide and destroy the key figures in the Black Panthers. This has served as a model of how the US rulers continue using these methods against us today.
March 5 Ida B Wells: A Passion for Justice 1989 53m
Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) was a newspaper editor and journalist who spearheaded a crusade against the murder of Blacks, then called lynching, a precursor of today’s Black Lives Matter. Working closely with both African-American community leaders and American suffragists, Wells worked to raise gender issues within the "Race Question" and race issues within the "Woman Question."
Though virtually forgotten today, largely because she was a woman and Black, She was a household name in Black America during her lifetime and considered the equal of well-known contemporaries such as Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. She stands as one of the US’ most uncompromising leaders and most ardent defenders of human rights for all in face of US government cruelty.
In 1892, Wells wrote a scathing series of editorials following the white murder of three prominent Black Memphis businessmen, friends of Wells's. After the lynching and her outspoken criticism of it, her newspaper's office was sacked. Wells then moved to New York City, where she wrote exposés against lynching, which was at an epidemic level in those years, and demanded the US president enforce the law . Wells became a much-sought-after lecturer and organizer for anti-lynching societies made up of men and women of all races. She travelled throughout the U.S. and went to Britain twice to speak about anti-lynching activities.
Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison reads selections from Wells' memoirs and other writings in this winner of more than 20 film festival awards.
"One had better die fighting against injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap." - Ida B. Wells
March 12 Federation of Cuban Women film 2006 63m
Charting the progress of women in Cuba, this film With Our Memory on the Future has two parts: pre-revolutionary Cuba and the early years of the Revolution, followed by women in today’s Cuba. Made to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) the film looks at the “revolution within a revolution,” showing the grassroots campaigns and initiatives that led to huge progress being made. Interwoven into this are clips of men talking on the streets, which show some of the ‘machismo’ of old Cuba.
In the second half people on the street are asked what they think of women’s position in Cuba today. Themes include divorce, sex before marriage, domestic duties, gender roles and responsibilities. The film examines all areas of life: workplace, legal system, education, health, and sports, all in the context of gender relations. The film is not afraid to show prejudiced and traditional views and clearly state that there is still much to be done but Cuba is most definitely on the right path.
March 19 Mariela Castro's March: Cuba's LGBT Revolution 2015 39m
In the Wrong Body 2010 52m
Cuba’s LGBT community finds itself in the midst of a new struggle -- the fight for equality. The leader of this uprising is Mariela Castro, charismatic daughter of President Raúl Castro and a member of Cuba’s National Assembly, who uses her passion and pedigree to promote acceptance in the face of prejudice.
Mariela Castro’s March: Cuba’s LGBT Revolution follows Castro and her LGBT supporters as they spread their message of equality across the country. The documentary spotlights gay, lesbian and trans activists through revealing stories of pain, love, strength and perseverance, all told against a rapidly changing social and political backdrop. Mariela travels tirelessly across the country to bring her message of diversity to a new, more progressive Cuba. The documentary introduces a variety of gay, lesbian and transgender Cubans who tell their stories in the weeks leading up to a celebratory Gala Against Homophobia and Transphobia.
Mariela Castro is the director of CENESEX, the Cuban National Center for Sex Education, is president of the National Commission for Treatment of Disturbances of Gender Identity, director of the journal Sexology and Society (Sexologia y Sociedad).
In the Wrong Body a transexual who was the first to undergo gender reassignment surgery in Cuba in 1988, highlights how, more than 20 years later and after a lot of struggle, there has been a positive change for trans people in the country but how she now feels trapped and must battle against the ingrained sexism that still lurks in Cuban society, thus providing a rare glimpse into the problems of gender inequality.
http://www.cubaheadlines.com/2010/09/06/26449/cubas_first_gender_reassigned_transexual_battles_s exism.html
March 26 The Wobblies 1978
Founded in 1905, the International Workers of the World (IWW), called “the Wobblies,” was a remarkable organization and this film captures the struggles, the spirit, the songs and satires of the movement. Interviews with elderly workers who participated in various IWW campaigns from the timber fields of the northwest to the Lawrence strike (1912) and the Patterson strike (1913) where the IWW brought industrial unionism to fragmented and craft-conscious industries. None of them has lost their fervor, their belief in the revolution or their marvelous sense of humor.
This documentary retrieved a terrific selection of old and archival footage, including cartoons and graphics, giving a narrative structure that provides a context for the interviews. The only intermittent narrator is Roger Baldwin, the founder of The American Civil Liberties Union, who at age 95 wrote his own script based on his brief membership in the IWW in 1919.
Sponsors: Loyola University Department of Sociology, Chicago ALBA Solidarity Committee
For more information: [email protected], Stan Smith 773-322-3168