York’s March 8-21 Coalition will hold a two-day film festival on human rights, beginning today, in recognition of International Women’s Day and the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.
The 14 screenings will be held on Monday in the Brian Cragg Cinema, 211 Founders College, from noon to 8:15pm, and on Tuesday in the McLaughlin Screening Room, 001 McLaughlin College, from noon to 10:30pm. Admission is free, light refreshments will be provided and all are welcome.
The following is a list of films and screening times:
Monday, March 14, 2005
Brian Cragg Cinema, 211 Founders College
12-12:30pm: Just Call Me Kade
This film is about Kade Farlow Collins, a 16-year-old FTM (female to male transgendered person) residing in Tucson, Arizona. Kade’s parents maintain a supportive and nurturing relationship to Kade regarding the many challenges facing their teenage child. Kade and his family agreed to have their lives documented in order to bring awareness to the subject of transgenderism.
Right: Far right, Kade Farlow Collins in a scene from Just Call Me Kade.
12:30-1pm: Youth Against Violence
Community and youth leaders from Malvern, Regent Park, Lawrence Heights, Driftwood, and Jane and Finch, present passionate arguments on how youth violence can be curbed before it develops into the next generation of gang recruits. Further setting this video apart (from others of a similar focus) is its unique look at the current youth violence climate in the GTA by including the most important voices of all – those of the teens impacted by it. It looks with raw honesty at youth violence tracing it from bullying to gang violence. Produced by Upfront Theatre Foundation and directed by Masani Montague.
1-2pm: Tough Guise
This film is the first program to look systematically at the relationship between the images of popular culture and the social construction of masculine identities in the US in the late-20th century. In this innovative and wide-ranging analysis, Jackson Katz argues that there is a crisis in masculinity and that some of the guises offered to men as a solution, such as rugged individualism and violence, come loaded with attendant dangers to women, as well as other men.
2-2:30pm: After the Montreal Massacre
The film examines the killing of 14 female engineering students at L’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal on Dec. 6, 1989. Sylvie Gagnon, who was wounded, describes the experience while journalists, college students, writers and feminist activists discuss the significance of the massacre and its relationship to misogyny, male violence and sexism.
2:30-3pm: Reframing the Montreal Massacre
This video questions the representation of events by the media by focusing on the media’s portrayal of the massacre in Montreal. It discusses how the media influences what we see and how we see it, and encourages viewers to always question what we watch.
3-4:20pm: Vagina Monologues
The controversial off-Broadway stage show that went on to become a worldwide sensation comes to home video in a special one-woman production featuring creator Eve Ensler. Ensler talks candidly on stage about her own and other women’s sexuality and the mystery, exploitation and stigma society attaches to it. Interviews with a variety of women shed light on this long-ignored topic.
4:30-6:30pm: Wrestling with Manhood
This film offers a new way to think about the problems of men’s violence against women and bullying in schools. Drawing the connection between professional wrestling and the construction of contemporary masculinity, it shows how so-called “entertainment” is related to homophobia, sexual assault and relationship violence.
6:30-8:15pm: Whale Rider
On the east coast of New Zealand, the Whangara people believe their presence there dates back a thousand years or more to a single ancestor, Paikea, who escaped death when his canoe capsized by riding to shore on the back of a whale. From then on, Whangara chiefs, always the first-born, always male, have been considered Paikea’s direct descendants. Pai, an 11-year-old girl in a patriarchal New Zealand tribe, believes she is destined to be the new chief. But her grandfather Koro is bound by tradition to pick a male leader. Pai loves Koro more than anyone in the world but she must fight him and a thousand years of tradition to fulfill her destiny.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
McLaughlin Screening Room, 001 McLaughlin College
12-2pm: Bowling for Columbine
Michael Moore sets out to explore the roots of the bloodshed that results from America’s love affair with guns and violence.
2:10-2:45pm: Forsaken Cries
This film examines the 1994 genocide in Rwanda as a case study in the human rights challenges of the 21st century.
2:45-4pm: Power and Terror
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, this documentary presents the latest in Noam Chomsky’s thinking, through a lengthy interview and a series of public talks that he gave in New York and California during the spring of 2002. He places the terrorist attacks in the context of American foreign intervention throughout the postwar decades. He believes the exercise of violence against civilian populations is terror, whether the perpetrators are Muslim extremists or a powerful state, and challenges the US to apply to its own actions the moral standards it demands of others.
4-6pm : American History X
Derek Vinyard (Edward Norton) returns from prison to find his younger brother, Danny (Edward Furlong), caught in the same web of racism and hatred that landed him in prison. After Derek’s father is killed in the line of duty by a minority, Derek’s view of mankind is altered but, while in prison, he discovers there is good and bad in every race. The task before him now is to convince Danny of his newfound enlightenment.
6-8pm: Dead Presidents
This action film, directed by the Hughes brothers, depicts a heist of old bills, retired from circulation and designated by the government as “money to burn”. More broadly, however, it addresses the issues of black Americans’ involvement in the Vietnam War and their subsequent disillusionment with progress in social issues and civil rights back home in the US, during the 1960s.
8-10:30pm: A Time to Kill
In the southern Mississippi town of Canton, the Klu Klux Klan is active and the tension is high when the black majority is angered at the raping and slaying of a black man’s 10-year-old daughter. Against his lawyer’s advice, the distraught father takes revenge, gunning down the two criminals in the local courthouse. As racial hatred grows and conflict threatens to break out regardless of the verdict, the lawyer must decide, along with his new, eager assistant whether he and his family can run the risk of defending the man.