IAS Film Series 2022-2023

The film series marks its thirty-ninth year this season. All films have been shown free of charge in Wolfensohn Hall and are open to the Institute Community.

The next film is on:

Wednesday, March 8 at noon (special screening for International Womens Day)
West Lecture Hall
Hive Blerta Basholli : 2021 : Kosovo
Blerta Basholli, writer and director of the film Hive, places her film squarely in the patriarchal society that remains in a small Kosovan town of Krusha e Madhe after a turbulent civil war.  Fahrije Hoti (Yllka Gashi), like many women, lives in a world out of balance, not knowing if her husband is alive or dead, but hoping that he will return. She recognizes that her small honey business is not going to cover the bills and so she develops a new business plan to sell ajvar, a rustic roasted red pepper and eggplant sauce which tends to be popular with city dwellers and reminds them of the countryside. She pulls into the business other widows from the village to work with her and is immediately condemned by the men for the empowerment she radiates.  The character of Fahrije is based on a real business woman who had to push boundaries in order to survive. 
Winner of the Audience Award, Directing Award, and World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Hive is a expressive portrait of loss with an uphill journey to freedom.
This film runs 1 hour and 24 minutes.

Past films screened:

Thursday, February 23 at 4:30
Neptune Frost (Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams, Rwanda,  2021)
The story of Neptune Frost, an Afrofuturists utopian musical, was developed by musician Saul Williams who co-directed this film with Anisia Uzeyman.  
Excerpt from a review by A.O. Scott (New York Times June 2, 2022) 
... "The movie, an Afrofuturist fantasia that is also a musical, a science-fiction parable and a hacker manifesto, depicts a pocket of resistance in the form of a community of African rebels. Surrounded by political violence, economic injustice and cultural alienation, they try to secure a space where imagination and solidarity can flourish. The challenges are formidable, but their commitment is part of what makes “Neptune Frost” moving as well as mind-bending.  It is also a pocket of resistance in its own right, insofar as the act of making the film — and for that matter thinking about it — amounts to a critique of the way things are. The main characters are Matalusa (Kaya Free), who works alongside his brother in an open-pit mine in Burundi, digging up coltan, a mineral that helps power the world’s cellphones. After his brother is killed, Matalusa flees. At the same time, Neptune (Cheryl Isheja and Elvis Ngabo), described by the filmmakers as “an intersex runaway,” escapes from an attempted sexual assault. Their journeys finally converge in the hacker encampment. (“Frost” is the name of a magical, brightly colored messenger bird.) ... This isn’t a tight, tidy allegory of capitalism and colonialism so much as a collage of vivid images, sounds and words that punch the movie’s themes like hashtags. Williams and Uzeyman marry anarchist politics with anarchist aesthetics, making something that feels both handmade and high-tech, digital and analog, poetic and punk rock.”
 

Wednesday, November 30 at 4:30 pm
Monkey Beach (Loretta Todd : Kitamaat, British Columbia, Canada, 2020)

Loretta Todd's 2020 film Monkey Beach is an adaptation of the prize-winning novel by Haisla and Heiltsuk writer Eden Robinson. Filmed on location in Kitamaat, the home of the Haisla people, located far north of Vancouver, Monkey Beach opens with slow panoramic vistas of the land and sea, establishing the land itself as one of the main characters. The film follows Lisamarie (Grace Dove), who leaves Kitamaat for Vancouver in part to escape the ghosts and shapeshifters she has encountered since childhood. Returning to Kitamaat after experiencing disturbing premonitions about her brother Jimmy (Joel Oulette), Lisamarie confronts her own past as well as that of her community: this includes the devastating impact of residential schools on her family, including her beloved Uncle Mick (Adam Beach). Monkey Beach is a film about relationships -- human and animal, present and past, material and spiritual -- that offers a vivid glimpse of Haisla lifeways and traditions.
Podcasts about the book, the second features Loretta Todd.
https://www.megaphonic.fm/spouter/35
https://www.megaphonic.fm/spouter/35b

Thursday, October 20, 2022, 7 pm
PORT TRIUMPH (Jeffrey Gould : 2017)

During the late 1970s, the 1500 organized workers of Puerto el Triunfo, El Salvador—mostly women—thanks to their struggles and the importance of shrimp exports were amongst the more privileged laborers in the country. Then, in 1980 and 1981 state repression eliminated union leaders or drove them into exile. The ensuing civil war that claimed 75,000 lives largely spared the port, yet it did suffer internecine union conflict between the packinghouse workers and the male fishermen.  
 
In 1987, the fishermen’s union launched one of the longest strikes in the history of the world labor movement. The collapse of the strike in 1991 coincided with the demise of the largest shrimp company in Central America. Port Triumph puts a human face on the impersonal forces of tropical de-industrialization and the rise of neoliberalism in the region.

This film runs 1 hour and 2 minutes. There will be Q&A with Jeffrey Gould following the film.

These events are free and open to the Institute community. Please note that food is not allowed in Wolfensohn Hall.