The UNAFF 2012 International Documentary Film Festival concludes today in Palo Alto. All of today’s films will be screened at two locations at Stanford University.
The mission of UNAFF, the United Nations Association Film Festival, is to promote social change through education. TICKET INFORMATION
The following documentaries will be screened at Stanford University, Annenberg Auditorium, Cummings Art Building, 435 Lausen Mall.
1:00 p.m. Don Severo del Puente
(6 min)
Find out what's happening in Palo Altowith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Director/Producers: CEFREC in co-production with Oxfam Quebec and Wapikoni mobile
Description:
Find out what's happening in Palo Altowith free, real-time updates from Patch.
A communicator takes a lucid and compassionate look into the fate of an isolated man due to his speech problems.
1:15 p.m. Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement
(26 min)
Director: Gail Dolgin, Robin Fryday
Producer: Gail Dolgin
Description:
Mr. James Armstrong is a rank and file “foot soldier” and the proud proprietor of Armstrong’s Barbershop, a cultural and political hub in Birmingham, Alabama, where hair was cut, civil rights marches organized and battle scars from police truncheons iced. This film follows eighty-five-year-old Mr. Armstrong, as he experiences the manifestation of an unimaginable dream: the election of the first African American president. This colorful and courageous activist of the Civil Rights era casts his vote, celebrates Obama's victory and proudly unfurls the American flag he carried across the Edmund Pettus Bridge as he is inducted into the Foot Soldiers Hall of Fame. Mr. Armstrong links the magnitude of the present paradigm shift with challenges he faced in the past: from his sons' integration into an all-white school to the Bloody Sunday march for voting rights.
2:00 p.m. The Loving Story
(78 min)
Director: Nancy Buirski
Producer: Nancy Buirski and Elisabeth Haviland James
Description:
The Loving Story tells the story of the drama, history, and current state of interracial marriage and tolerance in the United States, through the lives of Richard and Mildred Loving. Married in Washington, D.C. on June 2, 1958, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter returned home to Virginia where their marriage was declared illegal—he was white, and she was black and Native American. At the time, anti-miscegenation laws were upheld in 16 states. The Lovings refused to leave one another and, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, took their case to the courts. Hope Ryden’s luminous, newly discovered 16mm footage of the Lovings and their young ACLU lawyers, Bernard S. Cohen and Philip J. Hirschkop, as well as first-person testimony by their daughter Peggy Loving and rare documentary photographs by LIFE Magazine photographer Grey Villet, recounts the little-known story of the Loving family. Their case made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, whose decision—under Chief Justice Earl Warren—finally struck down state laws against interracial marriage throughout the country. The Loving Story takes us behind the scenes of the legal challenges and the emotional turmoil that they entailed, documenting a seminal moment in American history and reflecting a timely message of marriage equality in a personal, human love story.
3:45 p.m. State of Control
(90 min)
Director: Christian Johnston, Darren Mann
Producer: Steven G. Kaplan
Description:
Using a combination of vérité footage and compelling personal stories, State of Control shows a never-before-seen side of the Tibet/China struggle. The film also broadens out to look at the global question of Internet freedom. This isn't just an issue for Tibetans; it's an issue that affects us all. State of Control tells the story of five individuals who try to battle China's repression in the restive region. First, there's a citizen journalist who is arrested for daring to talk with ordinary Tibetans. Then there's Tenzin Seldon—a young Stanford undergraduate who experiences China's grip on the Internet as well as the real world—who decides to take action. The third character is Tenzin Sundue, a veteran activist who is working to overthrow China's hold on Tibet. We also join two American filmmakers, Darren Mann and Christian Johnston, going undercover in Tibet.
5:30 p.m. Surviving Progress
(86 min)
Director: Mathieu Roy, Harold Crooks
Producers: Martin Scorsese, Daniel Louis, Denise Robert, Mark Achbar, Betsy Carson, Gerry Flahive, Silva Basmajian
Description:
Every time history repeats itself the price goes up. Humanity's ascent is often measured by the speed of progress. But what if progress is actually spiraling us downwards, towards collapse? Ronald Wright, whose best-seller A Short History of Progress Surviving Progress, shows how past civilizations were destroyed by “progress traps;” alluring technologies and belief systems that serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. As pressure on the world's resources accelerates and the financial elite bankrupt nations, can our globally entwined civilization escape a final, catastrophic progress trap? With potent images and illuminating insights from thinkers who have probed our genes, our brains, and our social behavior, this requiem to progress-as-usual also poses a challenge: to prove that making apes smarter wasn't an evolutionary dead-end.
7:00 p.m. Awards Ceremony
8:30 p.m. Closing Night Party
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