Conference

The New School Media Studies Program and Documentary Certificate Program are pleased to sponsor a two day conference celebrating the 20th Anniversary of P.O.V., (point of view) PBS award-winning independent documentary film series.

P.O.V. is television’s longest-running showcase for independent non-fiction films. Since 1988, P.O.V. has presented over 225 films to public television audiences across the country. P.O.V. films are known for their intimacy, their unforgettable storytelling and their timeliness, putting a human face on contemporary social issues.

The conference will be held on November 8 and 9, 2007, at the New School’s Theresa Lang Center, 55 West 13th Street, and will feature a mix of screenings of films from the past 20 seasons, filmmaker Q&A’s, receptions and panel discussions. See attached for complete schedule and program description.

Filmmakers attending to date include: Elizabeth Barret, Stranger with a Camera; Whitney Dow and Marco Williams, Two Towns of Jasper; Anthony Giacchino and members from The Camden 28; Thomas Allen Harris, The Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela; Carlos Sandoval, Farmingville and Dorothy Thigpen, Executive Director of Third World Newsreel. Moderated by Michelle Materre, Assistant Professor, Department of Media Studies and Film, The New School. Special remarks by Steven M. Gorelik, Professor of Media Studies, Hunter College, CUNY.

SCHEDULE & FILM DESCRIPTIONS
11:00 AM – 1:00 PM

FARMINGVILLE By Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini
The shocking hate-based attempted murders of two Mexican day laborers catapult a small Long Island town into national headlines, unmasking a new front line in the border wars: suburbia. For nearly a year, Carlos Sandoval and Catherine Tambini lived and worked in Farmingville, New York, so they could capture first-hand the stories of residents, day laborers and activists on all sides of the debate. This timely and powerful film, winner of the Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival, is more than a story about illegal immigration. Ultimately, Farmingville challenges viewers to ask what the American dream really means.

TWO TOWNS OF JASPER By Whitney Dow and Marco Williams
In 1998 in Jasper, Texas, James Byrd, Jr., a black man, was chained to a pick-up truck and dragged to his death by three white men. The town was forever altered, and the nation woke up to the horror of a modern-day lynching. In TWO TOWNS OF JASPER, two film crews, one black and one white, set out to document the aftermath of the murder by following the subsequent trials of the local men charged with the crime. The result is an explicit and troubling portrait of race in America, one that asks how and why a crime like this could have occurred.

2:00 PM – 4:30 PM
TONGUES UNTIED By Marlon Riggs
Using poetry, personal testimony, rap and performance, this landmark film explores what it means to be black and gay in America. Angry, funny, erotic and poetic by turns (and sometimes all at once) it jumps from interview to confession, music video to documentary to poem. – Craig Seligman, San Francisco Examiner

A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL: THE LIFE AND WORK OF AUDRE LORDE
by Ada Gay Griffin, Michele Parkerson
Poet, lover, mother, warrior-Audre Lorde writes passionately of love and anger, civil rights and sexuality, family politics, and the glories of nature. Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson reveal the potent legacy of this celebrated African American poet, whose life was cut short after a long battle with breast cancer. … a mesmerizing documentary tribute. Ms. Magazine.

STRANGER WITH A CAMERA By Elizabeth Barret
In the coal-mining heart of Appalachia’s “poverty belt”, where residents have felt alternately aided and assaulted by media exposure, the 1967 murder of filmmaker Hugh O’Connor still stirs strong community feelings. O’Connor was in the area during the War on Poverty gathering images for a film and was killed by landowner Hobart Ison. Barret turns the story of this tragic confrontation into an interrogation of the media itself and its relationship to public knowledge and private dignity, as well as a meditation on Appalachia’s place in the American imagination.

WAR FEELS LIKE WAR By Esteban Uyarra
This film documents the lives of reporters and photographers who circumvent military media control to get access to the real Iraq War. As the invading armies sweep into the country, some of the journalists in Kuwait decide to travel in their wake, risking their lives to discover the true impact of war on civilians. War Feels Like War records their frustration, fear and horror as they fight their way to Baghdad to witness events ignored by other news media, and reveals the difficulties the journalists experience as they try to return to normal life back home.

5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
CAMDEN 28 By Anthony Giacchino
Early Sunday morning, August 22, 1971, then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell announced that 20 antiwar activists had been arrested the previous night attempting to break in and vandalize a Camden, N.J., draft board office. Five days later, eight more plotters were indicted. Charged with conspiracy to remove and destroy files from draft, FBI and Army Intelligence offices, destruction of government property and interfering with the Selective Service system, members of the Camden 28 faced up to 47 years in federal prison. Who were these dangerous radicals that Americas premier law enforcement agency so proudly took down? They included four Catholic priests, a Lutheran minister and 23 members of the Catholic Left.

HARDWOOD By Hubert Davis
Hardwood is, first and foremost, the personal journey of director Hubert Davis. He sets out to find out why his father, former Harlem Globetrotter Mel Davis, made the decisions that so shaped Hubert’s own life. And Hubert knows exactly whom to ask-Megan, his white mother who fell in love with Davis in the 1960s, when racism seemed to make a marriage impossible; Mary Etta, the black woman Davis eventually married; Huberts older half-brother, Mawuli, whom he didn’t know until he was 11; and, most importantly, the basketball-playing and coaching old man himself.

TWELVE DISCIPLES OF NELSON MANDELA By Thomas Allen Harris
In the minds of many, the struggle of black South Africans for majority rule is framed by the massacre of rebellious youths in the streets of Soweto and by Nelson Mandela’s towering dignity as he emerged from prison to lead his people to freedom. Less well known is the experience of a generation of young men who left their country clandestinely to build the African National Congress (ANC) and spread its liberation message in places as far-flung as Dar-Es-Salaam, Belgrade, London, Havana, and New York. Left to their own devices, hunted by the Afrikaner regime (and considered terrorists by the U.S. government), lacking legal status and often socially isolated, these foot soldiers of the anti-apartheid cause forged ahead as one of the century’s great freedom struggles stretched into 30 years of brutal conflict.

7:15pm Panel Discussion/Q&A with all the filmmakers

8:15pm Closing Night reception