Rights! Camera! Action! Spring 2011 Season

The third season of the popular Rights! Camera! Action! film series begins tomorrow evening with Citizen King, which traces the final five years of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s life, starting with his momentous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech.

We’ll provide free drinks and popcorn, as well as a panel discussion following the film!

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 RBMSCL, where they form part of a rich and expanding collection of human rights materials.

For more about Rights! Camera! Action!’s Spring 2011 season, as well as details about tomorrow’s screening, click below.

Citizen King

Date: Thursday, 13 January 2011
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Rare Book Room (Parking Information)
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

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech marked both a high point in his public career and a turning point in his personal life, as he embarked on a controversial, often lonely struggle to redefine and redirect the movement he had helped lead.

American Experience presents Citizen King (2004, 115 minutes), a two-hour documentary exploring the last five years of King’s life. Citizen King draws on the personal recollections and eyewitness accounts of friends, movement associates, journalists, law enforcement officers, and historians to illuminate this little-known chapter in the story of America’s most important and influential moral leader.

Citizen King received the 2004 Full Frame/Emerging Pictures Audience Award.

Taking Root

Date: Thursday, 24 March 2011
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Rare Book Room (Parking Information)
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

Planting trees for fuel, shade, and food is not something that anyone would imagine as the first step toward winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet with that simple act Wangari Maathai, a woman born in rural Kenya, started down the path that reclaimed her country’s land from 100 years of deforestation, provided new sources of food and income to rural communities, gave previously impoverished and powerless women a vital political role in their country, and ultimately helped to bring down Kenya’s twenty-four-year dictatorship.

Taking Root (2008, 81 minutes) received the 2008 Full Frame Women in Leadership Award.

Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars

Date: Thursday, 14 July 2011
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Sarah P. Duke Gardens
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

The plight of the refugee in today’s war-torn world is captured in the African proverb, “When two elephants are fighting, the grass will suffer.” So it was in Sierra Leone from 1991-2002, where the government and various rebel factions carried out a brutal civil war in which the terrorizing of civilians by killing, mutilation, rape, and forced conscription was common practice on all sides. The war sent hundreds of thousands of ordinary Sierra Leoneans fleeing to refugee camps in the neighboring West African nation of the Republic of Guinea. That’s where the remarkable documentary Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars (2005, 78 minutes) begins.

Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars came together to form a band while living in a refugee camp in Guinea. Many of their family and friends were murdered in the war, leaving each of them with physical and emotional scars that may never heal. Despite the unimaginable horrors of civil war, they were saved and brought hope and happiness to their fellow refugees through their music.  Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars chronicles the band over three years, from Guinean refugee camps back to war-ravaged Sierra Leone, where they realize the dream of recording their first studio album.

Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars received the 2006 Filmmaker’s Award for Social Change and Emerging Pictures Audience Award and the 2006 Center for Documentary Studies Filmmaker Award.