Category Archives: Films

Women in the Movement Part One: Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights

Date: Thursday, September 26, 2013
Time: 5:30-8:00 p.m.
Location: FHI Garage, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse (directions & parking information)
Contact: John Gartrell, john.gartrell(at)duke.edu

reflections_imageReflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights focuses on black women activists and their marginalization within the Black Power and Feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Filmmaker Nevline Nnaji looks at how each movement failed to fully recognize black women’s overlapping identities and include them as both African Americans and women. Through interviews and archival footage, Reflections Unheard tells the story of these black female activists’ political mobilization and fight for recognition.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with producer and director, Nevline Nnaji.

Part 1 of 2 in the Women in the Movement series is co-sponsored by John Hope Franklin Research Center, the Department of African & African American Studies, the Center for Documentary Studies, the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, the Center for African and African American Research, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and the Program in Women’s Studies.

 

Rights! Camera! Action!: We Still Live Here / Âs Nutayuneân

Date: Thursday, September 19, 2013
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: FHI Garage, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse (directions & parking information)
Contact: Patrick Stawski, patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu

Poster for We Still Live HereWinner of the Full Frame Inspiration Award, We Still Live Here/ Âs Nutayuneân (TRT 56:00) tells the story of the revival of the language of the Wampanoag people of New England. All speakers of the language had died out when in 1994 Jessie Little Doe, a Wampanoag social worker, began to wonder if it could be recovered.

With M.I.T. linguist Ken Hale, with whom she earned a Master’s degree, she and other linguists pieced the language together from old documents and related Native American languages. Through community-wide efforts among the Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanoag, the language is being spoken again, and Jessie’s young daughter is the first native speaker of Wampanoag in more than a hundred years.

The screening will be followed by a panel discussion featuring Dr. Liliana Paredes and Dr. Benjamin Frey.

Dr. Liliana Paredes is Associate Professor of the Practice of Spanish and Director of the Duke Spanish Language Program. She holds expertise in the areas of sociolinguistics, minority languages, and Amerindian languages.

Dr. Benjamin Frey is a Fellow in the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity at UNC. He completed his Ph.D. in Germanic linguistics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in August 2013. His research examines language shift among minority communities in the United States from their traditional languages to English, with specific focus on German in Wisconsin and Cherokee in North Carolina. Frey is a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

Rights!Camera!Action is sponsored by the Archive of Documentary Arts and the Human Rights Archive in the Rubenstein Library, the Duke Human Rights Center @ FHI, and the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image.

Post contributed by Patrick Stawski, Human Rights Archivist.

The Extravagant Shadows Screening

Date: Friday, November 30th, 2012
Time: 3:00 PM
Location: Biddle Rare Book Room, Perkins Library, Duke University
Contact Information: Kirston Johnson, kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu

Please join us this Friday at 3:00pm for a screening of The Extravagant Shadows, David Gatten’s new work of digital cinema. Gatten is an award-winning filmmaker and Guggenheim fellow, and is currently a Lecturing Fellow and Artist in Residence with Duke University’s Program in Arts of the Moving Image.  Earlier this year he was named one of the fifty best filmmakers under fifty by Cinema Scope magazine.

Still from The Extravagant Shadows
Still from The Extravagant Shadows

Fourteen years in the making, The Extravagant Shadows is a film concerned with libraries, reading, letters, and lovers.   It premiered at the 50th annual New York Film Festival and has received widespread acclaim.

Still from The Extravagant Shadows
Still from The Extravagant Shadows

“David Gatten’s first digital work, The Extravagant Shadows, undertakes the head-scratching question of what it would mean for a film to be of its textual sources. A historical narrative of love separated across space and time is embedded in various codes and correspondences, all of it pocked by ellipsis and obscurity, never unfolding so much as digressing, disclosing, doubling back.”  – Max Goldberg, Fandor 

“Gatten […] lays long excerpts, condensations, and re-writings of text upon the image itself, so that looking at the image is as much about seeing as it is reading—if these two activities can even be separated. The text tells a looping, broken and elliptical tale of love across distances, love missed and time passed, of communicating via letter, manuscript, telegraph, […] notes, novelization, monologues and memories across and within these spaces. Of the lost meanings, allusive facts and fixtures, of the supreme ambiguity of purposes, of a sense of time, of narrative to be found between, around and inside text and its transmissions to the reader.” – Daniel Kasman, Love in the Painted Image,” MUBI

This event is sponsored by the Archive of Documentary Arts, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and the “Thinking Cinematics Working Group” with support from the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University.

 

A Conversation with 2012 MacArthur Fellow Laura Poitras

Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Time: 6:00 PM talk, 7:00 PM reception
Location: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Contact information: Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu

Join us for an evening with documentary filmmaker and MacArthur “Genius Award” recipient Laura Poitras at Duke’s Nasher Museum. Known for her incisive and nuanced portraits of individuals that emerge in and from wartime in the Middle East and New York City, Poitras is an Emmy and Academy award nominated filmmaker. Her films, My Country, My Country and The Oath won numerous awards including the Inspiration Award and the Special Jury Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival respectively.

Arts advocate, historic preservationist, author and accomplished television interviewer Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel will facilitate the discussion.

Duke University has established the Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Filmmaker Series to feature artists whose work addresses significant contemporary topics of social, political, economic, and cultural urgency.  Filmmakers chosen to participate have a recognized body of work and show promise of future contributions to documentary filmmaking.  Visiting filmmakers are invited to Duke for a two-day residency.

The Diamonstein-Spielvogel series is unique in its exclusive attention to documentary filmmakers with a global perspective.  By giving Duke faculty and their students an opportunity to explore the films of socially engaged filmmakers and discuss the work with them, this new series hopes to inspire and encourage the next generation of young documentarians.

Co-sponsored by the Rubenstein Library, the Program in the Arts of the Moving Image, Screen Society and the Center for Documentary Studies.

Black Feminist Filmmaking: The Early Works of Cheryl Dunye

Black Feminist FilmmakingDate: Thursday, April 19, 2012
Time: 5:00 PM **Please note new time!**
Location: FHI Garage, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse, Duke University
Contact: Kelly Wooten, kelly.wooten(at)duke.edu

Cheryl Dunye’s work as a Black lesbian filmmaker has challenged, transformed and sometimes even stood in for a conversation about race, feminism, lesbianism, the archive and the practice of contemporary film.

This program will include a screening of selected shorts from the often neglected early work of Cheryl Dunye followed by a panel discussion featuring local Black lesbian and queer filmmakers Yvonne Welbon, Katina Parker and Julia Roxanne Wallace, moderated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. This program coincides with the public launch of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind‘s new Black Feminist Film School. Light refreshments will be served.

Co-sponsored by African and African American Studies, the program in Women’s Studies, the program in the Study of Sexualities, the program in the Arts of the Moving Image, and the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

New Day Films Events at Full Frame to Celebrate Rubenstein Library Acquisition

The founders of New Day Films. Back row:  Amalie R. Rothschild, Julia Reichert, Jim Klein.  Front: Liane Brandon
The founders of New Day Films. Back row: Amalie R. Rothschild, Julia Reichert, Jim Klein. Front: Liane Brandon

The Rubenstein Library is pleased to announce the recent acquisition of the New Day Films Collection. The collection includes the founding films and organizational records of New Day founders Liane Brandon, Jim Klein, Julia Reichert, and Amalie R. Rothschild. Documenting a pioneering film distribution company and collective, the first to distribute feminist films in the early 1970s, the New Day Films Collection is an important record of both New Day’s formation and the Feminist Movement.  New Day Films is a thriving organization, celebrating 40 years in 2012 as a participatory democratic filmmakers’ cooperative with 120 members and 250 titles. The Rubenstein is committed to preserving the New Day Films Collection for future generations to make this record of the evolution of progressive independent American filmmaking available for teaching and research.

In celebration of New Day coming to Duke, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival will screen New Day’s founding films—Anything You Want to Be (Brandon), Betty Tells Her Story (Brandon), Growing Up Female (Klein, Reichert), and It Happens to Us (Rothschild)—on Friday, April 13, 2012 at 4:50pm.   There will be a panel conversation with all four founding members about New Day’s exceptional history on Saturday, April 14, 2012 at 9:30AM.

Film still from Growing Up Female, Jim Klein and Julia Reichert

For more information on the New Day Films Collection at the Rubenstein, see: http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/documentaryarts/events/

For more information on the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, including a complete schedule and ticket information, see:  http://www.fullframefest.org/

For more information on New Day Films, see:  http://www.newday.com/

 

Rights! Camera! Action!: 12th & Delaware

Twelfth and Delaware posterDate: Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: The FHI Garage, Smith Warehouse Bay 4, 114 S. Buchanan St. (map)
Contact information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu

Co-Director Heidi Ewing and Carey Pope (Executive Director of NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina) will lead a discussion following the film.

12th and Delaware takes its name from an intersection in Fort Pierce, Florida, where an abortion clinic named A Woman’s World sits across the street from the pro-life Pregnancy Care Center. Pregnant teenagers and women often mistake the pro-life center for the abortion clinic, and are patiently and persuasively counseled by its staff, often with deceptive tactics, to keep their pregnancies. Meanwhile, the medical staff of the clinic try to counsel patients to make their own choices and to perform their work as pro-life protesters walk the sidewalk in front of the clinic day and night. Turning a non-judgmental lens on both camps, filmmakers Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing use the extraordinary access they gained to practitioners, protestors, and patients to show us a conflict with seemingly no possible resolution.

The screening will be followed by a discussion panel. Heidi Ewing has been making critically acclaimed documentary films and television programs with co-director and -producer Rachel Grady for over ten years. Their film Jesus Camp, a candid look at Pentecostal children in America, was nominated for a 2007 Academy Award for best documentary feature. Two years earlier, The Boys of Baraka, about a group of “at-risk” pre-teens from Baltimore who attend an experimental boarding school in Kenya, was nominated for an Emmy. 12th and Delaware premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and, among other honors, won the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights at the 2010 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

Carey Pope is the Executive Director of NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina. She has worked in the fields of reproductive and sexual health education, research and advocacy for more than eight years in Houston, Washington, DC, and North Carolina. She holds a master’s degree in public policy and women’s studies from The George Washington University and a B.A. in English and women’s studies from North Carolina State University.

About Rights! Camera! Action!: Featuring award-winning documentaries about human rights themes from Durham’s annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the series explores issues ranging from the immigration and refugee rights to the justice system and the environment. All films featured in the series are archived at the Duke Library and are part of a rich and expanding collection of human rights materials. Co-sponsors include The Human Rights Archive, the Duke Human Rights Center, the Archive of Documentary Arts, the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Program in Arts of the Moving Image (AMI).  Special co-sponsor for this screening: Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.

 

Rights! Camera! Action!: Wetback

Date: Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: The Garage, Smith Warehouse Bay 4, 114 S. Buchanan St. (map)
Contact information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu

Join Rights! Camera! Action! and our special co-sponsor Student Action with Farmworkers (SAF) for a screening of Arturo Perez Torres’ “Wetback: The Undocumented Documentary,” winner of the 2005 Full Frame Spectrum Award. This screening is part of a year-long celebration of Student Action with Farmworkers’ 20th Anniversary.

Wetback follows undocumented migrant workers from their home in Nicaragua across Central America and Mexico to the U.S.-Mexican border, meeting many other migrants along the way. They encounter gangs, vigilantes, corrupt law enforcement, physical danger, and safe havens in their attempt to be among the 10% of migrants who actually make it all the way into North America. The migrants, those who aid them, and those who turn them back all give their own perspectives on how this vast, illegal system trafficking in cheap labor and dreams actually functions, and what its terrible costs and perils are.

Immediately following the screening join us for a panel discussion including North Carolina Rep. Paul Luebke (D), 2011 SAF Fellow Nandini Kumar, and SAF Advocacy and Organizing Director, Nadeen Bir.

The film is 92 minutes, in Spanish and English with English subtitles. This event is free and open to the public, with free drinks and popcorn and free parking.

Cosponsored by Student Action with Farmworkers.

About Rights! Camera! Action!:  Featuring award-winning documentaries about human rights themes from Durham’s annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, the series explores issues ranging from the immigration and refugee rights to the justice system and the environment. All films featured in the series are archived at the Duke Library and are part of a rich and expanding collection of human rights materials. Co-sponsors include Duke Library’s Human Rights Archive, the Duke Human Rights Center, the Archive of Documentary Arts, the Franklin Humanities Institute and the Program in Arts of the Moving Image (AMI).

Rights! Camera! Action!: Good Times

Date: Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Franklin Humanities Institute Garage, Bay 4, Smith Warehouse (map)
Contact Information: Patrick Stawski, 919-660-5823 or patrick.stawski(at)duke.edu, or Kirston Johnson, 919-681-7963 or kirston.johnson(at)duke.edu

Still from Good TimesJoin us for a screening of Good Times (31 minutes, Hebrew/ Arabic/ English with English subtitles), the second film in the 2011-2012 Rights! Camera! Action! series and the winner of the 2004 Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short.

Good Times was shot in Abu Dis, a small Palestinian village divided in two by a wall built by the Israeli government. The film follows the villagers’ lives before the wall was built and through the construction of a temporary, then a permanent, wall. Moving in colliding microcosms, the inhabitants of the village and the Israeli soldiers protecting the border create an absurd routine of mutual respect and resentment.

Following the film, students from Duke’s BorderWork(s) Humanities Lab will give a presentation on their work this semester.

The screening is free and open to the public, and free popcorn will be provided!

The Rights! Camera! Action! film series, which is sponsored by the Archive for Human Rights, the Archive of Documentary Arts, the Duke Human Rights Center, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and Screen/Society at Duke’s Arts of the Moving Image Program, features documentaries on human rights themes that were award winners at the annual Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. The films are archived at the Rubenstein Library, where they form part of a rich and expanding collection of human rights materials. This screening is also co-sponsored by the BorderWork(s) Humanities Lab at the Franklin Humanities Institute.

Decasia

Our Archive of Documentary Arts is co-sponsoring two events with filmmaker Bill Morrison.

Film Screening

Date: Monday, November 7, 2011
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Carolina Theatre (309 W. Morgan St.; directions and parking information)
Contact Information: Duke Performances

Still from DecasiaMade from deteriorating reels of film, Bill Morrison’s experimental film Decasia is a symphony in decay. With a score composed by Bang on a Can’s Michael Gordon, this “haunting modern masterpiece” (The Guardian) will be presented in a rare screening, followed by a Q & A with Morrison. Tickets are $5 at the Carolina Theatre box office.

Conversation

Date: Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Time: 12:00 PM
Location: Bone Hall, Mary Duke Biddle Music Building 019
Contact Information: Duke Performances

Filmmaker and artist Bill Morrison will talk with Duke graduate composers about the process of collaborating with composers scoring for film. Morrison has collaborated with an impressive line-up of composers, including John Adams, Bill Frisell, Steve Reich, and Vijay Iyer. This event is free and open to the public.

Morrison created a film for Bill Frisell’s new work, The Great Flood, which Duke Performances presented this past Saturday.

Both events are co-sponsored by Duke Performances, Duke’s Master of Fine Arts in Experimental & Documentary Arts, and the Archive of Documentary Arts.