UNAFF Film Festival: Tuesday’s Schedule

The UNAFF 2012 International Documentary Film Festival continues in Palo Alto and East Palo Alto. Today’s films will be screened in a variety of locations.

One of the films in today's lineup, Inocente, is receiving Oscar buzz.

The mission of UNAFF is to promote social change through education. TICKET INFORMATION

Three films will be shown at Girls’ Middle School, 3400 W. Bayshore Rd.

1 p.m. Ten Quintillion
(10 min)

Director/Producer: Romilly Spiers
Producer: Romilly Spiers

Description:

Ten Quintillion features a tiny garden and the creatures that rely on its existence to survive. Through bugs-eye-view exploration, this menial location comes alive, the creatures within fascinating and the entire microcosm beautiful. An intimacy is created with creatures that are normally disregarded, each becoming a unique, alluring character. However, the harmonious nature of this tiny world balances on a knife point and it takes very little to throw it into disarray.

1:15 pm: Little Mom
(17 min.)

Director/Producer: Maria Fortiz-Morse

Description:

What happens when children become caregivers for disabled family members? With a hidden population of over 1.4 million kids caring for sick and disabled family members each day, Little Mom is a timely and deeply affecting look at two girls, Shayna and Kassandra, who help their families care for disabled brothers. The film is a tender portrait of sibling relationships and the sacrifices these grown-up girls must make each day to keep their family together.

1:45 pm: Buffalo Girls
(64 min)

Director: Todd Kellstein
Producer: Jonathon Ker, Lanette Phillips

Description:

Buffalo Girls, the wrenching, sometimes heartbreaking story of two eight-year-old Thai girls seeking their country’s national Muay Thai championship, a prize that could change their families’ lives forever. To westerners, the participation of children in Muay Thai may appear reprehensible and indefensible. Fighting without headgear and incurring bruises, bloody noses and even broken bones, there is certainly a physical toll on the children. But in a country where the per capita income is less than 10-percent of that of the US, there are other harsh realities to consider. The impoverished farming communities of rural Thailand offer few opportunities for people to better their lives and boxing is one of the few alternatives to the country’s commercial sex trade as a means of escaping the extreme poverty. For Pet and Stam, the eight-year-old protagonists of Buffalo Girls, boxing is an opportunity to help their parents supplement the family income and improve their standard of living. Child boxers in Thailand can often earn as much as half of a family’s monthly rent from a single bout, sometimes taking home more than what a farmer or factory worker earns in a month. The girls work with professional trainers, doing sit-ups and push-ups, lifting weights and running in preparation for upcoming fights. Although petite, both Stam and Pet exhibit a lean, powerful athleticism in the ring. As a younger child, the earnest, studious Pet was often sick and has a scar on her chest from heart surgery. Her parents credit boxing with improving her health.

The following films will be presented at Eastside Theater, 1041 Myrtle Street, East Palo Alto.

3 pm: Unravel
(14 min)

Director: Meghna Gupta
Producer: Meghna Gupta, Gigi Berardi

Description:

Unravel follows the Western worlds least-wanted clothes, on a journey across Northern India, from sea to industrial interior. They get sent to Panipat, a sleepy town and the only place in the world that wants them, recycling them back into yarn. Reshma is a bright, inquisitive woman working in a textile-recycling factory in small-time India, who dreams of traveling the vast distances that the clothes she handles have. While Reshma shows us how these garments get transformed, she and other women workers reflect on these clothes. Despite limited exposure to western culture, they construct a picture of how the West is, using both their imagination and the rumors that travel with the cast-off clothes.

3:20 pm: Inocente
(40 min)

Director: Andrea Fine, Sean Fine
Producer: Yael Melamede, Andrea Fine, Sean Fine, Emanuel Michael, Albie Hecht

Description:

Inocente is an intensely personal and vibrant coming of age documentary about a young artist’s fierce determination to never surrender to the bleakness of her surroundings.
At fifteen, Inocente refuses to let her dream of becoming an artist be caged by her life as an undocumented immigrant forced to live homeless for the last nine years. Color is her personal revolution and its extraordinary sweep on her canvases creates a world that looks nothing like her own dark past, a past punctuated by a father deported for domestic abuse, an alcoholic mother who once took her daughter by the hand to jump off a bridge, and an endless shuffle through the city’s overcrowded homeless shelters. Told entirely in her own words, we come to Inocente's story as she realizes her life is at a turning point and, for the first time, she decides to take control of her own destiny. Irreverent, flawed and funny, she’s now channeling her irrepressible personality into a future she controls. Inocente is both a timeless story about the transformative power of art and a timely snapshot of the new face of homelessness in America: children.

4:10 pm: The Lord is Not on Trial Here Today
(57 min)

Director: Jay Rosenstein
Producer: Jay Rosenstein

Description:

She was called “that awful woman” by her neighbors and “that atheist mother” by virtually every newspaper in the country. Her friends stopped returning phone calls rather than risk speaking with her. She was branded a Communist, and the Illinois State Legislature nearly outlawed her and her husband from ever working at the state university again. She received up to 200 letters a day, some of the writers claiming they would pray for her; many wishing for much worse. All because Vashti McCollum, a young mother of three from a small central Illinois town, filed a historic lawsuit in 1945 that would profoundly change the relationship between religion and public schools in America. The Lord Is Not On Trial Here Today tells the compelling personal story behind one of the most important and landmark First Amendment cases in US history, the case that established the separation of church and state in public schools. The film recounts a time that Vashti McCollum later described as “three years of headlines, headaches, and hatred,” but which eventually led to a decision that still resonates in the church-state conflicts of today, sixty years after the original decision in McCollum vs. Board of Education.

The following films will be shown at Boys & Girls Club of the Peninsula, Moldaw-Zaffaroni Clubhouse, 2031 Pulgas Ave., East Palo Alto.

5:15 pm: Day in Our Bay: Voices and Views from Bristol Bay

(16 min)

Director: Mary Katzke, Sonya Senkowsky
Producer: Mary Katzke

Description:

Our tradition of storytelling has been passed down through generations. Now, we want to share these stories with you. Bristol Bay Native Corporation invited its shareholders to share their voices, views and values through personal videos that show the people, places and cultural practices most important to them. All footage was shot on one day: October 15th, 2011. Sixty-two entries were submitted from as far south as Chignik Lake, west to Togiak, and east to Kokhanok, as shareholders of all ages took part in this innovative competition. Entries were edited and compiled into a short film produced by Bristol Creative Services and Affinityfilms, Inc.

5:40 pm: Smoke Songs
(20 min)

Director/Producer: Briar March

Description:

Punk rock and human rights don’t necessarily share a common cause, but in the case of the band Blackfire, their music and their message are two integral parts of a solid and strong identity. Born into the heart of the Navajo Nation in an area on Black Mesa that is still in political dispute, band members (and siblings) Jeneda, Clayson and Klee Benally find it impossible to separate their passion for music from their socio-political messages. Mixing pure punk rock on electric equipment with Native American words, rhythm and sometimes dance, their music carries messages about government oppression, relocation of indigenous people, genocide and other rights issues that are often suppressed in this country’s dominant media culture. Their outreach doesn’t stop on the stage.

6:10 pm: Color Blind
(23 min)

Director: Khadija Diakite
Producer: Conor Fetting- Smith, Katrella N. Kindred

Description:

Just one year after their adopted son Luc arrives from Haiti, the Garwood family is establishing their own roots in a predominantly African-American neighborhood in South Los Angeles. Parents Allison and Reed, a white couple, immerse themselves in black culture through church and a strong circle of friends, but they can’t escape the harsh opinions of the outside world. Color Blind provides an intimate glimpse into the experience of families who have adopted across cultural and racial lines. The Garwoods are joined by the Howertons, a multi-racial family with two adopted boys. We learn that racism and negative perceptions from others are a part of these families’ lives. As our understanding of their struggles deepens, one cannot help but wonder: Is love enough to bring them through the challenges that await?

The following films will be screened at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Encina Hall, 616 Serra St., Stanford University.

4 pm: Transgenders: Pakistan’s Open Secret
(54 min)

Director/Producer: Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

Description:

Many people among Pakistan's colorful transgender community scrape a living through dancing, singing, begging and prostitution on the streets of the country’s economic capital, Karachi. Thrown out by their families, they come together to create underground communities or “families.” In a never-before-seen side of life in Pakistan, we follow the stories of three transgenders, each of whom represents a different way of life in the country. Maggie is a prostitute who dreams of becoming an flight attendant, while Chahat was abandoned to beg the streets by her middle-class family. Sana is Karachi's most sought-after transgender dancer, desperate to give up the profession after a particularly gruesome gang rape. Transgenders are frequently victims of violence, but the film also reflects the guru system within their own community, where young novices are bought and sold, obliged to make money for their elders. But there is hope for those who want to stand on their own: The local tax office has advertised for transgenders to work as tax collectors, to publicly embarrass even the most stubborn tax evaders to pay up. Can Sana get one of those jobs? Will Chahat ever escape her desperate poverty? And will Maggie fulfill her dream to fly away?

5 pm: Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
( 63 min)

Directors/Producers: Kris Samuelson, John Haptas

Description:

Tokyo is a digital metropolis and wellspring of spectacular pop culture, its commercial crossroads carpeted with people day and night. Above them, watching from perches on buildings and power lines, are more than 20,000 crows. As their numbers soared in recent years, Tokyo fought back: trapping them, destroying nests, and securing trash. The crows adapted; they are among the smartest of animals. The 13 million people of Tokyo now live alongside them in a stalemate. Tokyo Waka tells this story, and a larger one as well. A Buddhist priest comments on garbage as the remnants of desire; a gardener considers the relentless persistence of nature amidst urban grit; a homeless woman talks about forging community in her tent village deep in the corner of a city park. Tokyo Waka gives these smart, opportunistic crows their due, but the film is ultimately an episodic and discursive poem about the life and culture of Tokyo, one of the great cities of the world.

6:15 pm: Panel Discussion

Meet Stanford filmmakers.

The following event will be held at Midpensula Community Media Center, 900 San Antonio Road, Palo Alto.

6 pm:  Reception with the filmmakers whose films will be shown at the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center

The following films will be screened at Oshman Family Jewish Community Center, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto.

8 pm: The Crime of Boris Pasternak
(57 min)

Director/Producer: Svetlana Rezvushkina

Description:

Boris Pasternak finished his novel Doctor Zhivago fifty-five years ago in 1956. Circulation of the novel abroad, its publication, and receiving the Nobel Prize is almost detective story. The author’s history is dripping in mystery, resulting in many rumors and versions. The Crime of Boris Pasternak is a film that searches to find the truth among the rumors. Witnesses and participants of the dramatic events of Pasternak’s life in France, Italy, USA, Sweden and Russia were interviewed. The Crime of Boris Pasternak reviews how the novel Doctor Zhivago was written and published it the west, due to a denial of publication in the former U.S.S.R.

9:10 pm: In the Name of Their Mothers
960 min)

Director: Mary Skinner
Producer: Mary Skinner, Richard Wormser, Piotr Piwowarczyk, Betsy Bayha, Jaime Stobie, Slawomir Grunberg

Description:

Irena Sendler was a twenty-nine-year-old Catholic social worker when the Nazis imprisoned Warsaw's Jews without food and medicine behind a ghetto wall. She and her friends began smuggling in aid and smuggling orphaned children out. They hid them in convents, orphanages and private homes. Soon the women were appealing to Jewish mothers to part with their children in order to save them. For five years, Sendler's network cared for the children, disguised their identities and moved them constantly, to keep them from being discovered and killed by the Nazis. They joined forces with the Polish Resistance and received money from abroad to fund and protect the children's caretakers and preserve their true identities, hoping to reunite them with their Jewish families after the war. In October of 1943, Irena Sendler was captured by the Gestapo, imprisoned and tortured. When she refused to divulge anything about her organization, she was sentenced to death. She escaped on the day she was to be executed, thanks to a large bribe from the Polish Resistance. All of the 2,500 children rescued by her network survived the war, and many were reunited with their Jewish families. After the war, Communist authorities silenced Sendler and her liaisons because of their connection to the Polish Resistance.

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