1997 Virginia Film Festival
Press Release
For further information: Victoria Joyce
(804) 361-1259
Virginia Film Festival Schedules
Educational Forums on Theme of Imprisonment
Charlottesville, Virginia - The tenth anniversary edition of the Virginia Film Festival, scheduled for October 30 - November 2, features a wide array of free educational forums exploring different facets of the Festival theme, Caged! These forums have been cooperatively organized with faculty from the Curry School of Education, the Law School, and the School of Architecture, and have attracted the participation of many outstanding faculty from U.Va. and other institutions. In addition, nearly every film screened will be accompanied by one or two expert discussants, including U.Va. faculty Nelson Lichtenstein (History) and Mark Edmundson (English) and visiting scholars Joel Kovel (Bard) and Jane Gaines (Duke University). "We have scheduled sixty films and over ninety speakers," notes Festival Director Richard Herskowitz, "a ratio that reaffirms this Festival's unusual mission to activate engaged debate and discussion in place of the 'one way communication' more typical of the media."
The Festival's kickoff event is a screening and panel addressing cuts in prison education programs, held, appropriately, in the U.Va. Rotunda. The event will begin with the premiere of The Last Graduation, which traces the growth and transformation of a number of extraordinary men who were fortunate to have enjoyed access to higher education while incarcerated. They were enrolled in a special division of Marist College which was recently eliminated due to cuts in funding. The film's director and producer, Barbara Zahm and DeeDee Halleck, will present the film. Following the screening, Professor John Jeffries of the U.Va. Law School will moderate a discussion on the impact of the withdrawal of Pell Grant educational loans to prisoners in 1994, and the validity of government spending on prisoner education. Among the panelists will be Dr. Jerome Miller, co-founder of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives and Clinical Director of the Augustus Institute in Alexandria, Virginia, and author of Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System (Cambridge University Press); prison educator Makeda Garvey, Program Coordinator for the Marcus Garvey Committee International; Lateef Islam, a community activist and one of the graduates of the Marist College program; Sherrie Apple, another beneficiary of the Pell Grants while a prisoner and now the program director for a Jewish educational organization; and Richard Stratton, former editor of Prison Life and a noted commentator on American prisons.
The Architecture School is cosponsoring this fascinating program
of films which collectively expand on writer Mike Davis'contention
that American society is increasingly walling off both sides of the
social spectrum into ghettos, prisons, and gated communities, while
eliminating the public spaces in which social classes might combine.
Filmmaker Abigail Child is the special guest presenting her new
experimental documentary on the "Dinkinsville" homeless community in
New York, B/Side. The three-part program will take place on November
1 in Campbell Hall 158 and 160, and is complemented by the October 31
premiere screening of Frederick Wiseman's Public Housing, an epic
documentary on the Ida B. Wells Housing Project in Chicago, at 4pm in
Regal Downtown Mall, with the director present.
The first program of screenings, the "West Coast Program," begins at 9:00am on November 1, with Maxi Cohen's South Central Los Angeles: Inside Voices, followed by Richard Cohen's Taylor's Campaign, on a homeless man's campaign to defend his community in Santa Monica, and Babette Mangolte's poetic lament on the architectural transformation of Southern California, Visible Cities. The "East Coast Program" begins at noon with Helen Levitt's 1944 classic In the Street and ends with Child's 1996 film B/Side.
At 2:30pm, Architecture Department faculty member Earl Mark will moderate a panel addressing the different ways filmmakers, architects, and planners acquire knowledge about and intervene in contemporary urban life. They will discuss how each other's products inform their own work. Discussants will include filmmakers and critics Frederick Wiseman, Abigail Child, DeeDee Halleck, Scott MacDonald and Architecture School planners and architects Peter Waldman, Maurice Cox, and Rich Collins.
Dr. George Gerbner, noted researcher on television violence, contends that a primary impact of media violence is to exaggerate viewers' fear of crime and desire for stricter law and order. Dr. Gerbner will apply his "mean world hypothesis" to the recent surge in juvenile crime coverage as the keynote speaker at this second annual Curry School Forum. Respondents will include the alternative media journalist Michael Moore (TV Nation, Roger and Me), W.T. Lewis, Director of Support Services for the Charlottesville City School System, and Professors Peter Sheras and Dewey Cornell of the Curry School's Virginia Youth Violence program. This free event takes place on Sunday, November 2 at 1pm at Regal's Downtown Mall Theater.
George Gerbner is the Bell Atlantic Professor of Telecommunication, Temple University, Dean Emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, and Founder and Chair of the Cultural Environment Movement. Born in Hungary, Dr. Gerbner came to the United States in 1939, receiving his B.A. from the University of California and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. For his service in the 101st Airborne and OSS during World War II, he received a field commission and the Bronze Star for service behind enemy lines. His U.S. and international research projects have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the President's Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, the Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior, and other organizations. He was executive editor of the quarterly Journal of Communication and chair of the editorial board of the International Encyclopedia of Communication.
This 20th anniversary conference of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy will take place on October 30-31. The conference will close with a Festival-cosponsored screening and discussion of The Lady With the White Hat, a film on one woman's resistance to the institutionalizing of political dissidents under the guise of psychiatric care. The woman's name is Anna Mikhailenko. Her case played a pivotal role in the negotiations preceding the U.S. Department's 1989 human rights mission to the U.S.S.R. to investigate Soviet psychiatric abuses. Discussants for the film will be Loren H. Roth, M.D. and Richard J. Bonnie of U.Va. Law School, who were members of the 1989 State Department delegation, and who fought for Ms. Mikhailenko's release and for the opportunity to see her and videotape her testimony. Also speaking will be Dr. Svetlana Polubinskaya, a legal scholar from the Russian Academy of Sciences who assisted the U.S. delegation and is the principal architect of Russia's new mental health legislation. For more information on the conference, call 804-924-5435.
Amnesty International presents a special screening of the acclaimed documentary Procedure 769, followed by a discussion on the practice of the death penalty in America. The film explores the execution of Robert Harris in California in 1992 through the eyes of witnesses who include the condemned man's brother, one of the victims' mothers, the warden, a psychologist, a reporter, and others. The panel will include: Marie Deans, founder of Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation and formerly director of Virginia Coalition on Jails and Prisons; Steve Rosenfield, a Charlottesville Attorney; Sunshine Richards, a member of Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation; and moderator Jodi Longo, Executive Director of Amnesty International Mid-Atlantic Regional Office. Sponsored by Amnesty International Local Group 157 and Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.