WHERE:
Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
Washington Place
New York, NY , USA
WHEN:
Tuesday, February 13, 6:30pm — 8:30pm
Described by film critic Eric Kohn as “careen[ing] from scientific observation and historical overview to spiritual inquiry with a freewheeling approach that never ceases to surprise,” Rat Film is a profound — and profoundly troubling — meditation on the disturbing congruity between discourses on race and rat removal in Baltimore. Filmmaker Theo Anthony interweaves the story of present-day efforts to exterminate the city’s rats with Baltimore’s historical practices of brutal racial segregation and its former “chief rat catcher’s” admiration for eugenics. Narrated by a detached, seemingly inhuman voice, the film reveals the ways in which racialized thinking so often underlies seemingly scientific planning and public health policy. Far from neutral, such policies, in Anthony’s telling, institutionalize racism and continue restrict the very lives and livelihoods of Black Baltimoreans.
Theo Anthony is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker based in Baltimore, MD. His work been featured by the New York Times, The Atlantic, New Yorker, BBC World News, and other international media outlets. His films have received premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, Locarno International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, SXSW, and Anthology Film Archives. In 2015, he was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film”. His first feature, RAT FILM, was released by Cinema Guild and Visit Films in 2017 to critical acclaim, with Richard Brody of the New Yorker calling it “one of the most extraordinary, visionary inspirations in the recent cinema”.
Paige Glotzer is a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Her research is on the history of housing segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth century and brings together discussions of political economy, cultural history, and the spatial construction of difference. Her book, Building Suburban Power: The Business of Exclusionary Housing Markets, 1890-1960, forthcoming from Columbia University Press charts how suburban developers, including Baltimore’s Roland Park Company, ushered in modern housing segregation with the help of transnational financiers, real estate institutions, and public policymakers. The effects of their efforts continue to be felt today.
Film runtime: 82 minutes
East LA Interchange tells the story of working-class, immigrant Boyle Heights, the oldest neighborhood in East Los Angeles. Targeted by government policies, real estate laws, and developers, this immigrant neighborhood survived racially restrictive housing covenants, Japanese American incarceration, federal redlining policies, and the building of the largest and busiest freeway interchange system in the nation: the East LA Interchange. The documentary explores how the freeways impact Boyle Heights’ residents: literally, as an environmental hazard and structural blockade and figuratively, as a conversational interchange about why the future of their beloved community should matter to us all. The post-screening conversation features director Betsy Kalin, Jack Tchen (A/P/A Institute Founding Director), and George Sanchez (Professor and Vice Dean for Diversity and Strategic Initiatives, University of Southern California).
RSVP HERE
Co-sponsored by the Urban Democracy Lab and UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art
In Speculation Nation (USA, 74 min, 2014), an impressionistic documentary film, filmmakers Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown travel across Spain to explore the consequences of the housing crisis. What they find are Spanish citizens, inspired by the politics of The 15M Movement and Occupy Wall Street, who are mobilizing, collectivizing, and fighting for the right for a decent place to live. Along the way, the filmmakers visit young mothers and their families squatting in failed condo developments; intentional communities of mountain cave dwellers; protest campsites that have sprung up in front of bank branches; and empty apartment buildings transformed into experiments in utopian living. The film examines the ideologies that separate housing from home, and real estate speculation from speculations about a better way to live.
In celebration of the film’s New York debut, the screening will be followed by a panel discussion with:
Paige Sarlin is an artist, filmmaker, scholar, and political activist. She holds a Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and an M.F.A. in Film/Video/New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her feature-length documentary film, The Last Slide Projector, premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2007 and screened at Anthology Film Archives in 2008. From 1999 to 2010, she was an active participant in the 16Beaver Group in New York City, a platform for the discussion of the intersection of art and politics. Her writings have been published in October, Re-Thinking Marxism, Reviews in Cultural Theory, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, Scapegoat, and Framework: A Journal of Film and Culture. She is at work on a book-length manuscript entitled Interview-Work: The Genealogy of a Media Form. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Study at University at Buffalo, SUNY. http://paigesarlin.info/
Elia Gran is a Spanish, New York-based photojournalist. She has written or collaborated with various radio programs and journals such as The Nation, WBAI radio, DemocracyNow!, The New York Times, Periódico Diagonal, La Directa and Eldiario.es. In Barcelona, Spain she was involved in organizing local media, especially through radio programs and local publications, to try to talk about those issues less present in mainstream media. Her interests focus mainly on human rights issues and social movements. She considers herself an activist and is part of the Marea Granate organization in NYC which, together with other worldwide grassroots communities, is creating a global network of collaboration.
Luis Moreno-Caballud is a researcher, writer, and activist. He works at the University of Pennsylvania and participates in different political groups (including Marea Granate NY), focusing mostly on building dialogues between anti-neoliberal social movements in Spain and the US. His book Cultures of Anyone. Studies on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis has been published by Liverpool UP in 2015 (it’s available online for free here). It explores the crisis of authoritarian and competitive cultures in the wake of the Spanish economic crisis, and the emergence of collaborative and equalitarian alternatives in social movements such as 15M and the PAH.
Sabine Gruffat is a digital media artist and filmmaker living and working in North Carolina. Currently she is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Sabine’s films and videos have screened at festivals worldwide including the Image Forum Festival in Japan, The Ann Arbor Film Festival and Migrating Forms in New York. Her feature film I Have Always Been A Dreamer has screened internationally including at the Viennale, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou, and The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. She has also produced digital media works for public spaces as well as interactive installations that have been shown at the Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago, Art In General, Devotion Gallery, PS1 Contemporary Art Museum, and Hudson Franklin in New York.
Bill Brown is a writer and filmmaker living in North Carolina where he is a lecturing fellow in the Arts of the Moving Image Program at Duke University. He received a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. In his work, Bill is interested in landscapes as markers of our memories, dreams, and desires. Bill’s films have screened at venues around the world, including the Viennale, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the London Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and Lincoln Center. A retrospective of his films was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He is a recipient of a Creative Capital Grant and a Rockefeller Fellowship.
Presenters
Cynthia Hooper’s videos patiently examine landscapes of waste, water, energy, and agriculture, with careful attention to the political and environmental policies that reorder these environments. Her most recent exhibition, “A Negotiable Utopia: The Humboldt Bay Project,” interprets the built environment of California’s second largest estuary. Join us for a program of Hooper’s short films, followed by a discussion with Hooper and artist William Lamson.*
*Due to an unforeseen conflict, Mary Miss will not be able to attend.
Films to be screened include:
Exportadora de Sal (2007, 7 minutes, Baja California)
The oddly mysterious and curiously appealing terrain of an enormous evaporative-based salt mine in Mexico.
GEOTÉRMOELÉCTRICA: Cerro Prieto (2012, 5 minutes, Baja California)
A two-channel video about the perceptual and metaphorical characteristics of a gigantic geothermal energy field in Baja California.
The Humboldt Bay Project: POWER (2014, 10 min, California)Examines the power infrastructure of Humboldt Bay, including its recently-upgraded and formerly nuclear power plant, its electrical grid and natural gas infrastructure, as well as this region’s principal renewable energy resources.
The Humboldt Bay Project: WATER (2014, 10 min, California)
Examines the natural and anthropogenic watersheds of Humboldt Bay, documenting the region’s distinctive water infrastructure and water quality issues.
The Humboldt Bay Project: SHORELINE (2014, 10 min, California)
Inventories the more than one hundred miles of shoreline that encircles Humboldt Bay.
Cynthia Hooper has worked with Tijuana’s complex urban infrastructure, contested and politicized water issues along the U.S./Mexico border, as well as projects about California’s Klamath and Ohio’s Cuyahoga rivers. Recent work includes an investigation of the artificial wetlands of Mexico’s Colorado River Delta, as well as the built environment of California’s Humboldt Bay. Exhibitions include the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, the Centro Cultural Tijuana, and MASS MoCA, and recent publications include Arid: A Journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology. Cynthia has also been awarded residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, as well as grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Gunk Foundation. She lives in Northern California.
William Lamson was born in Arlington, Virginia. His video works often find him playfully and strenuously interacting with his environment (both in the natural world and in his studio). Lamson’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum (NYC), the Dallas Museum of Art (TX), the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (TX), and the Progressive Art Collection (Cleveland, OH), among others.
Sponsored by the “Infrastructure Aesthetics” Series from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and the Urban Democracy Lab
In Andreas Dalsgaard’s 2014 documentary, Life is Sacred, a young woman named Katherine, inspired by the possibility of ushering Colombia out of decades of conflict and corruption, campaigns on behalf of presidential candidate Antanas Mockus. Mockus, a mathematician and philosopher, had been Mayor of Colombia’s capital, Bogota, from 1995 to 1997 and 2001 to 2003. During that time, the murder rate in Bogota fell 70%, 63,000 people opted into a voluntary taxation system, and Bogota citizens learned the power of play and humor to solve the city’s most stubborn problems. Katherine was a child when Mockus was mayor of her hometown, but during his presidential run in 2010, she was an energetic 22-year-old leading thousands in support of his candidacy. This is the story of Katherine’s determination and of Mockus’s faith in a just and peaceful Colombian future.
This screening will be followed by a 20 minute Q&A with Antanas Mockus and a reception sponsored by NYU PorColombia.
Antanas Mockus is a teacher, politician, writer, researcher and innovator of the “Citizenship Culture” methodology. After his two terms as Mayor of Bogota and his campaign for the Colombian presidency, Mockus founded and is currently the president of Corpovisionarios. He is also one of the protagonists of the recently-signed peace accords in Colombia. This semester, Antanas Mockus is a Visiting Professor of Urban Practice as part of the newly established Global Faculty in Residence Program at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
Sponsored by the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and the Urban Democracy Lab
RSVP HERE
WHEN:
Wednesday, October 14, 6:00pm — 9:00pm
The documentary The Fabulous Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid (Ali Mirsepassi & Hamed Yousefi, 2015) explores the life and thought of Iranian philosopher Ahmad Fardid in his intellectual crusade to halt rising western influence in Iran. The self-proclaimed philosophical spokesperson for the Islamic Republic, Fardid constructed a “mystical” and “spiritual” political philosophy that undertook to deliver Iran from the culturally “debasing” and spiritually “dehumanizing” experience of Iranian modernity. Under the conspicuous influence of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Fardid called for the recovery of modern Iran to its Islamic roots, a project fueled by his concept of Ghabzadegi (“Westoxification”)— which would quickly become a buzzword in the Iranian critique of the modern, secular West. The film features extensive interviews with Fardid’s former colleagues, associates, students, as well as scholars of modern Iran, and uses rare and previously inaccessible footage of Fardid’s debates featured on Iranian television. More broadly, the film presents a comprehensive intellectual history of modern Iran, from the post-Constitutional (1906) to the post-Islamic Revolutionary periods, through a figure whose obscure philosophical path remains largely absent from prevailing conceptions of the rise of political Islam.
Screening followed by a panel discussion with:
Ali Mirsepassi, Professor, Middle Eastern Studies and Islamic Studies, NYU Gallatin
Richard Wolin, Distinguished Professor, History, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Andrew Arato, Dorothy Hart Hirshon Professor of Political and Social Theory, The New School
Asef Bayat, Catherine and Bruce Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, Sociology, University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign)
Event location:
Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
1 Washington Place
New York, NY 10003
RSVP here
An Ordinary Election tells the extra-ordinary story of the Aam Aadmi Party’s debut election campaign in the constituency of RK Puram, Delhi. From the campaign war room to the streets, from the narrow lanes of urban slums to the manicured parks of upper-class neighborhoods, the crew follows the candidate Shazia Ilmi and the ordinary men and women of the Aam Aadmi Party fighting to change the terms of Indian democracy in an election campaign where victory seems impossible.
Friday, September 18, 5-7pm
Screening in the Michelson Theater [Cinema Studies]
Co-sponsored by the Urban Democracy Lab
The documentary SÍ SE PUEDE: Seven days at PAH Barcelona recounts the day-to-day struggles of Barcelona‘s PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages). Following various participants it illustrates the group’s tireless activities on behalf of Spanish homeowners. The film highlights not only the dramas of the post-housing bubble, but also the huge and often invisible work behind this social movement. For those under siege by banks, landlords, and mortgage lenders, SI SE PUEDE reminds us of the shared, global struggle to protect the human right to housing. This screening will be followed by a discussion with activists Vicente Rubio Pueyo, Elia Gran and Lucas Shapiro.
20 Cooper Square, Room 222
Space is limited. Attendance will be capped at 30 people.
RSVP HERE
WHEN:
Tuesday, March 24, 6:00pm — 8:00pm
Join Know Your City for a screening of the new short documentary Why We Stay followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and members of the Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association, the organization featured in the film.
About Why We Stay
During the 1970s and 80s the South Bronx was subject to borough-wide poverty, crime, and arson. Amidst the chaos, a community improvement organization named Banana Kelly emerged, helping to end destruction and revitalize communities. After decades of steady recovery, South Bronx residents are now being threatened by another destructive force; gentrification. As renters and businesses push northward from Manhattan, Bronx natives are faced with new challenges as they struggle with escalating rent prices, communal fragmentation, and forced removal.
We will meet in Gallatin’s 5th Floor Student Lounge. Food provided!
Please RSVP to the Facebook event page for this event.
