Thursday Mar 29, 2018

7:30pm

Loft Cinema

In Person: QUEST Editor Lindsay Utz

»more info at QUEST website

Filmed with vérité intimacy for nearly a decade, QUEST is the moving portrait of the Rainey family living in North Philadelphia. Beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, Christopher “Quest” Rainey, and his wife, Christine’a “Ma Quest” raise a family while nurturing a community of hip hop artists in their basement home music studio. It’s a safe space where all are welcome, but this creative sanctuary can’t always shield them from the strife that grips their neighborhood.

Epic in scope, QUEST is a vivid illumination of race and class in America, and a testament to love, healing and hope.

“QUEST is as smoothly fashioned and confidently edited as much of Barbara Kopple’s work. Credit QUEST editor Lindsay Utz, who was also responsible for the expert assembly of BULLY, the teen bullying doc.”
–The Independent

“Editor Lindsay Utz‘s crisp cuts and tonal blends magnify our inside peek at this remarkable family.”
–Hollywood Reporter

“Beautifully carving out a film that feels at once narratively firm and organically shaped from over 300 hours of footage across the years, Olshelfski and editor Lindsay Utz happily save room for the small stuff: the fleeting pleasures of braiding hair and shooting hoops, along with everyday arguments over finances and child-rearing, particularly as P.J.’s emerging adult identity challenges her parents’ expectations.”
–Variety

»A. O. Scott review in the New York Times: ‘Quest’ Is a Moving Portrait of an American Family

»LINDSAY UTZ BIO

Tuesday Nov 14, 2017

6pm

Loft Cinema/Loft Film Festival

Tent Village Trailer 2.5 Min from Nilima Abrams on Vimeo.

India’s roadside tent dwellers, through the eyes of their teenaged children

The Tent Village is a participatory project Nilima created in collaboration with four Indian teenagers. After learning basic filmmaking, the students decided to film at roadside hovels where garbage workers and hair-collectors live. The filmmakers’ unique perspectives (being themselves from the community they film) guide the viewer through life in the “tent village”, bringing a compassionate yet unsentimental peek into the lives of people who are often barely seen as people at all.

The Tent Village has been screened at the Alhambra Theatre Festival, the Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) Film and Media Festival, the Vermont International Film Festival, the Austin Asian American Film Festival, as well as nationally on PBS through the To the Contrary Festival.

»NILIMA ABRAMS BIO

Thursday, April 6, 2017
7pm
FREE

Loft Cinema

Co-presented by Center for Middle Eastern Studies

»See Episode 1

This six-part documentary follows the treacherous, seventeen-hundred-mile migration of a Syrian refugee who fled the perils of wartime Damascus to build a better life for his family. More than a million people whose lives have been upended by desperation and violence in Syria have made similar journeys, but most of these treks take place in obscurity. Aboud Shalhoub was joined by the filmmaker Matthew Cassel, who documented—and participated in—the perilous migration in 2015. Cassel’s colleague Simon Safieh stayed in Damascus with Aboud’s wife, Christine, and his two children. The series captures Aboud’s long trip to the Netherlands, the family’s attempts to reunite, and the tide of nationalist sentiment sweeping across northern Europe.

The film was originally published by The New Yorker on their website as part of a collaboration with Field of Vision, the visual journalism unit of First Look Media.

Associate Professor Leila Hudson, from the School of Middle East and North African Studies at the University of Arizona, whose current research focuses on the Syrian refugee crisis, will lead a post-screening Skype discussion with filmmaker Matthew Cassel.

»Interview with Matthew Cassel

»Interview with filmmaker Matthew Cassel re making of THE JOURNEY

»MATTHEW CASSEL BIO

Wed March 8, 2017
7:30pm
FREE

Loft Cinema

Co-presented by the UA Center for Middle Eastern Studies and UA Main Library

Bassem Youssef faced an unusual choice in 2011: heart surgeon or full-time satirist. The established doctor picked the unexpected path and it would make him one of the most famous men in the Arab world and earn him the nickname “the Jon Stewart of Egypt.”

Charting Youssef’s rise and career as Egypt’s most famous television presenter, Tickling Giants offers a rousing celebration of free speech, showcasing the power of satire to speak for the people and against a repressive government. This story differs from the familiar American success of Stewart and Stephen Colbert: Youssef’s jokes come with serious, dangerous, at times revolutionary consequences. With a precise documentary eye, Daily Show Senior Producer Sara Taksler captures the strength and fragility that color Youssef’s life on and off screen, as well as the courage of the coworkers who stand by him. She celebrates satire as a tool with a greater use than the extraction of a laugh, positioning the genre as both a weapon against fear and an instrument of democracy for those in desperate pursuit of freedom.

»Interview with Bassem Youssef in HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

»More info on the film site

Thursday, March 2, 2017
7pm
FREE

Loft Cinema

In Person: Theo Rigby

Presented by DocScapes

Theo Rigby is a director, cinematographer, and interactive storyteller based out of San Francisco. He believes in the power of image and sound to create awareness and dialogue about the world’s most pressing social and political issues.

Rigby’s last project, IMMIGRANT NATION (iNation), is a series of short films about immigration in the U.S. including The CARETAKER, THE MAYOR, and MARATHON, as well as an online storytelling platform, and a series of live storytelling events. iNation has been showcased on the New York Times website, nationally broadcast on PBS, and shown at Ellis Island, the 2014 New York Film Festival, and 2012 Cannes Film Festival. The project received a MacArthur Documentary Film grant, as well as a Tribeca Institute New Media Fund grant. His film, Sin País (Without Country), won a Student Academy Award, has screened in over 30 film festivals, and was nationally broadcast on PBS’ independent documentary showcase POV in 2012.

His current projects include a feature documentary on the contemporary Sanctuary movement, and WAKING DREAM, a series of short documentary films exploring the lives of young, undocumented people in the U.S. who have DACA permits.

»THEO RIGBY BIO

Wednesday, Feb 22, 2017
6:30pm
FREE

AME Auditorium, U of A

(NE corner of Speedway/Mountain)

Presented by the Center for Border & Global Journalism and the Center for Latin American Studies, co-sponsored by the Center for Documentary

Finding Oscar explores the story of a 1982 massacre in the small Guatemalan town of Dos Erres. The massacre claimed the lives of 200 people — men, women and children — save two small boys who survived only to be stolen and raised by their attackers. The film tells the story of the search for justice by prosecutors and others, which ultimately led to the discovery of the two survivors.

Ryan Suffern, the director of the film, and Scott Greathead, a producer and human rights lawyer, will be on a panel after the film, along with Ana Arana, a journalist and fellow at the Center for Border & Global Journalism, whose work with ProPublica, the non-profit public affairs reporting organization, helped shape the film.

Steven Spielberg is the executive producer, and the film had its first screening at his Shoah Foundation Center in Los Angeles. The documentary is scheduled for theatrical release later this year.

»More info on the film site

Thursday, Feb 2, 2017
7:30pm
FREE

Loft Cinema

Co-presented by Lesbian Looks
with support from Puertas Abiertas

After being wrongfully convicted of gang-raping two little girls during the Satanic Panic witchhunt era of the 80s and 90s, four Latina lesbians fight against mythology, homophobia, and prosecutorial fervor in their struggle for exoneration in this riveting ‘True Crime’ tale.

In 1994, four women were accused, tried and convicted of the heinous sexual assault of two young girls–as one newscaster puts it, “the modern version of the witchcraft trials.” Twenty years later, the four women have maintained their innocence, insisting that the accusations were entirely fabricated, and borned of homophobic prejudice and a late-90s mania about covens, cults and child abuse. A riveting and layered story that explores the web of prejudices in a contentious trial and the interrelated political and personal forces that work to convict those thought guilty, trampling the innocent in the process.

“Has your blood pressure been sufficiently raised by shows like “Making A Murderer” and movies like the “Paradise Lost” trilogy? Buckle up, because we’ve got another unbelievable true crime story that will leave you equal parts fascinated and furious.”
— INDIEWIRE, April 2016

More Reviews:

Rolling Stone: Inside Case Behind Wrongful Conviction Doc ‘Southwest of Salem’

AfterEllen: Guilty of being QWOC: The San Antonio Four on being wrongly accused

New York Magazine: Director Deborah Esquenazi on What Drew Her to a Satanic-Ritual Abuse Trial in Texas

Curve Magazine: San Antonio Four Exonerated

»More info on the film site

Tuesday, Nov 1, 2016 – 7:30pm FREE


Loft Cinema


Presented by DocScapes
http://www.thebadkidsmovie.com/

In Person: Editor Jacob Bricca

At a remote Mojave Desert high school, extraordinary educators believe that empathy and life skills, more than academics, give at-risk students command of their own futures. This coming-of-age story watches education combat the crippling effects of poverty in the lives of these so-called “bad kids.”

This observational documentary chronicles one extraordinary principal’s mission to realize the potential of these students whom the system has deemed lost causes. The film follows Principal Vonda Viland as she coaches three at-risk teens—a new father who can’t support his family, a young woman grappling with sexual abuse, and an angry young man from an unstable home—through the traumas and obstacles that rob them of their spirit and threaten their goal of a high school diploma.

Winner of a Special Jury Award at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival

»Read review in Variety

»Read review in the Hollywood Reporter

»Read review in Indiewire

»JACOB BRICCA BIO

Thursday, Mar 3, 2016 – 7:30pm FREE


Loft Cinema


Presented by DocScapes
http://skylight.is/films/disruption/

In Person: Pamela Yates and Paco de Onis

Can 20 million women upend a continent?

A band of Latin American activist economists sets out to change their region, partnering with women marginalized by poverty to challenge accepted notions of how to eradicate inequality. Through this program, the women become empowered economic and political agents in their communities. At the heart of the film are the stories of women who participate in Fundación Capital’s programs, encountering in themselves formerly untapped political and economic energy which propels many into active roles of civic participation.

By a lake in the Peruvian Andes, we meet Cirila Quillahuaman who tells us that the women in her village, once “sleeping beauties,” have now been awakened by the program, and are opening savings accounts and starting small businesses. Cirila has been elected as city councilwoman and is now pressing her local government to expand the pilot program. In the slums of Cartagena, Colombia, we meet Agripina Perea who has been able to build her own business from what she learned and saved in a financial inclusion program. “I don’t know where they got such a great idea to unite women and teach them how to save,” she says, “and through that, to teach them their rights.”


DISRUPTION explores the work of Fundación Capital, (Winners of the 2014 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship), a group of Latin American activist-economists that is pioneering strategies for financial inclusion across the region by aligning policy, market mechanisms, and advances in technology to create programs that place women at the center of the drive for social change.


We want to gently twist capitalist mechanisms, to transform the capitalist system, from individual values to values of solidarity.
– Yves Moury, President of Fundación Capital

»PAMELA YATES BIO
»PACO DE ONIS BIO

Thu, Nov 5, 2015, 7pm

THE LOFT
3233 E. Speedway Blvd
FREE

In Person: Luisa Dantas

Through the eyes of urban planners, community organizers, displaced youth, immigrant workers, and public housing residents, this verité-style documentary reveals how the story of New Orleans is the story of urban America: how democratic processes can fail us, how economic crisis can pull the rug out from under us, and how (im)migration can prove to be a complicated bargain. As cities all over the world struggle to recover from disaster, whether economic, natural, or man-made, the lessons of post-Katrina New Orleans have only become more urgent.

LAND OF OPPORTUNITY is an important part of the New Orleans story. It gets down and dirty with the people on the ground. Five years in the making, Luisa‘s film gives voice to everyday people working hard to rebuild their city and their lives. Anyone who cares about the future of cities in this country should see this movie! – Spike Lee, Filmmaker, When the Levees Broke

»LUISA DANTAS BIO

Tue, Sep 22, 2015, 7pm

THE LOFT
3233 E. Speedway Blvd
FREE

In Person:
Producer Lisa Stevens
Protagonist Brenda Myers-Powell

Brenda is on a mission to disrupt the cycle of neglect, violence, and exploitation endured by girls and women in inner-city Chicago. On any given day, she’s performing interventions with at-risk teenagers, female prisoners, and prostitutes on street corners. She uses unconditional love, non-judgmental support, practical help—whatever it takes for them to change their own lives. But the most powerful weapon in Brenda’s healing arsenal is the raw honesty she can offer because she’s been where they are. For 25 years, she survived as a drug-addicted prostitute, even recruiting innocents into the “lifestyle” and abandoning her own children.

Using unobtrusive verité camera work that inhabits Brenda’s miraculous perspective, master director Kim Longinotto follows intimate stories along Brenda’s path. Child molestation, physical abuse, poverty, and silence are among the common denominators of their dire situations. Like a shining star in the darkness, Brenda appears, doing a dance and upending the paradigm: “Hold the rest of the world accountable for what’s been done to you … It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”

“Intensely moving…a real-world version of movie-star magnetism”
– Variety

“Astonishing in its intimacy and wrenching in its emotional rawness”
– Anthony Kaufman, IndieWire

Interviews with filmmaker Kim Longinotto:

• http://www.sundance.org/blogs/artist-spotlight/kim-longinotto-on-fostering-intimacy-with-her-subjects-and-her-new-film-dreamcatcher
• http://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/kim-longinotto-dreamcatcher/#_

Director Kim Longinotto received the Directing Award, Documentary for Dreamcatcher at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. Longinotto is one of the pre-eminent documentary filmmakers working today, renowned for creating extraordinary human portraits and tackling controversial topics with sensitivity and compassion. Her films have won international acclaim and dozens of premiere awards at festivals worldwide, including the World Cinema Jury Prize in Documentary at Sundance, a Peabody award, the Cannes Prix Art et Essai Award, the Amnesty International DOEN Award, a BAFTA and Jury prizes at both the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) and Sheffield Doc/Fest.

»LISA STEVENS BIO

Wed, Apr 1, 2015, 7pm

The Screening Room
127 E. Congress / FREE

The Homestretch (trailer) from spargel productions on Vimeo.

Co-presented by Lesbian Looks with support from the UA McClelland Institute for Children, Youth & Families, Primavera Foundation and Our Family Services.

The Homestretch follows three homeless teens as they fight to stay in school, graduate, and build a future. Each of these smart, ambitious teenagers – Roque, Kasey and Anthony – will surprise, inspire, and challenge audiences to rethink stereotypes of homelessness as they work to complete their education while facing the trauma of being alone and abandoned at an early age. As their stories unfold, the film connects us deeply with larger issues of poverty, race, juvenile justice, immigration, foster care, and LGBTQ rights.

A powerful, original perspective on what it means to be young, homeless and building a future in America today.

“Profoundly moving… An honest and intellectually challenging look at the underbelly of American poverty and privilege, which succeeds in growing viewer empathy without ever becoming preachy or forceful with its message”
—Anchorage Press

“What is most special about The Homestretch is that it puts a voice, a face, a family and a community to the national crisis of youth homelessness. It humanizes the over one million homeless youth in our nation.”
—Hollywood Progress

“The devastation of watching these kids is realizing how much they have to give. Their lives are as valuable as mine, or yours, yet due to circumstances, they are given little-to-zero agency over the outcome. Our society operates on money, education, privilege equating access, whereas Roque, Kasey and Anthony are fighting for something as basic as wanting or needing shelter, a place to call theirs.”
—FARIHA ROISIN, INDIEWIRE
»Read complete review at Indiewire…

Learn more at http://www.homestretchdoc.com/

IN PERSON: Sande Zeig (Producer/Director)

Fri, Mar 6, 2015, 7pm

The Bisbee Royale
94 Main Street, Bisbee, AZ

Admission $7

U.S.A. 2011, 57 mins
Produced and Directed by Sande Zeig
Executive Produced by Heather Rae
Produced by Dolly Hall and Victoria Westover

This documentary tells the story of an all-women wildland firefighter crew from the White Mountain Apache Tribe, who have been fighting fires in Arizona and throughout the U.S., for over 30 years. The film delves into the challenging lives of these Native firefighters. Four extraordinary women from different generations of the Apache 8 crew share their personal narratives with humor and tenderness. They speak of hardship and loss, family and community, and pride in being a firefighter from Fort Apache. APACHE 8 weaves together a compelling tale of these remarkable firefighters, revealed for the first time. Apache 8 was funded in part by National Geographic All Roads Film Project, Native American Public Television (Vision MakerMedia) and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It is distributed by Woman Make Movies. Apache 8 was premiered at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Film and Video Festival.

“You never knew what you were going to face. You were with a bunch of women that could handle anything.”  – Katy Aday (White Mountain Apache Tribe)

»SANDE ZEIG BIO

Tue, Feb 17, 2015, 6:30pm

The Screening Room
127 E. Congress

$5 / FREE for UA students with Catcard
Advance tickets available at The Screening Room

Cesar’s Last Fast, co-directed and produced by Richard Ray Perez and Lorena Parlee, premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. The documentary explores the private sacrifice and spiritual conviction behind Cesar Chavez’s struggle for the humane treatment of America’s farm workers, and the impact of his legacy on today’s generation of organizers fighting for farm worker rights.

Cesar’s Last Fast centers on the events of 1988, when Chavez began his “Fast for Life,” a 36-day water-only hunger strike, to draw attention to the horrific effects of unfettered pesticide use on farm workers, their families, and their communities. The film is built around powerful, never-before-seen footage of this fast, interwoven with the historic events that defined the life mission of America’s most inspiring Latino leader and the struggles confronting today’s farm workers. Culled from hundreds of hours of footage, rarely heard interviews of Cesar himself, as well as testimonies of the people closest to Chavez, Cesar’s Last Fast illuminates the story of one man’s commitment and dedication to social justice and uncovers an overlooked chapter in the story of civil rights in America.

“Touching, insightful, and extremely well crafted, Richard Ray Perez‘s work shows above all an admiration for a man whose life wasn’t entirely his but of his people.” Carlos Aguilar, Indiewire

»Read review in Variety

»RICHARD RAY PEREZ BIO