Salt of the Earth - Conference Screenings

February 27 – March 1, 2003

SALT OF THE EARTH CONFERENCE

Please scroll down to see more information about Politically Oriented Video Series, Feb 21-23

CONFERENCE SCREENINGS
Salt of the Earth	Lensic Theater: Feburary 27, 7:30p.m.
RELATED EVENTS
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REDS AND BLACKLISTS IN HOLLYWOOD
Curated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Exhibition Manager Larry Ogan Larry Ceplair, Lecture 4:00-5:00pm, Tipton Hall, Free Opening Reception Saturday, Feburary 15, 2003 5-7pm Exhibition runs through March 2, 2003 The Santa Fe Art Institute, College of Santa Fe
INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF FILMS ON POLITICS AND HUMAN RIGHTS Curated by Brent Kliewer, The Screen, College of Santa Fe
THE PINOCHET CASE Directed by Patricio Guzman (CHILE, 2001) Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán’s latest look at his native country, still coming to terms with the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet. The Pinochet Case investigates Pinochet’s arrest in London in September 1998 and, more importantly, the legal origins of the case in Spain – where it began two years earlier. Guzman explores how a small group of people in Madrid laid the groundwork for this incredible feat – catching a dictator 25 years after his rise to power. 110 minutes FRI, SAT, & SUN, FEB 21, 22, 23 @ 5:15 PM AND MONDAY FEB 24 @ 7:30PM
DARESALAM (Let There Be Peace) Directed by Issa Serge Coelo (CHAD, 2001) “A poignant feature film on civil war in modern-day Chad, Daresalam is so achingly beautiful and sad I watched with tears in my eyes… Ends on a note of unironic optimism that is more radical than all the calculated nihilism served up on Western movie screens.” L.A. Weekly. 105 minutes. SUN, FEB 23 @ 7:30 PM AND TUES, FEB 25 @ 5:15 PM
WAR PHOTOGRAPHER Directed by Christian Frei (SWITZERLAND, 2001) Academy Award Nominee for Best Documentary Feature. Director Frei followed war photographer James Nachtwey for two years through the world’s countless crisis areas. Surrounded by suffering death, violence and chaos, Nachtwey searches for the picture he thinks he can publish. A film about a committed shy man, who is considered one of the bravest and most important war photographers of our time – but hardly fits the cliché of the hard-boiled war veteran. 96 minutes. FRI, FEB 21 @ 7:30 PM; SAT, FEB 22 @ 3:00 PM & 7:30 PM; SUN, FEB 23 @ 3:00PM; AND MON, TUES, FEB 24, 25 @ 5:15 PM
MATEWAN Directed by John Sayles. Cinematography by Haskell Wexler. (USA,1987) Mingo County, West Virginia, 1920. Coal miners, struggling to form a union, are up against company operators and gun thugs; Black and Italian miners, brought in by the company to break the strike, are caught between the two forces. Union activist and ex-Wobbly Joe Kenehan, sent to help organize the union, determines to bring the local, Black, and Italian groups together. Drawn from an actual incident; the characters of Sid Hatfield, Cabell Testerman, C. E. Lively, and Few Clothes Johnson were based on real people. Haskell Wexler in Person. 135 minutes. FRI, FEB 28 @ 7:30 PM
WAR AND PEACE Directed by Anand Patwardhan (INDIA, 2002) Filmed over three tumultuous years in India, Pakistan, Japan and the United States after the 1998 nuclear tests on the Indian sub-continent. It documents the current, epic journey of peace activism in the face of global militarism and war, as well as the legacy of nuclear warfare. Divided into six chapters, the film is framed by the murder of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. This act of violence was so profound, its portent and poignancy remain undiminished 50 years later. “From India’s greatest documentarian….War and Peace is a tour de force, beautifully shot and often darkly funny and much more riveting than the dry subject matter might suggest.”—The Guardian Perhaps the most important film you’ll see this year. 148 minutes TUES, WED, FEB 25 AND 26 @ 7:30 PM AND WEDS MARCH 5 @ 7:30 PM
POWER AND TERROR Directed by John Junkerman (USA, 2002) Power And Terror presents the latest in Chomsky’s thinking, through a lengthy interview and a series of public talks that he gave in New York and California during the spring of 2002. As he has done countless times since 9/11, he places the terrorist attacks in the context of American foreign intervention throughout the postwar decades – in Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Beginning with the fundamental principle that the exercise of violence against civilian populations is terror, regardless of whether the perpetrator is a well-organized band of Muslim extremists or the most powerful state in the world, Chomsky – in stark and uncompromising terms – challenges the United States to apply to its own actions the moral standards it demands of others. 74 minutes FRI FEB 28 THROUGH THURS MARCH 6 @5:15 DAILY
A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT Directed by Chris Marker (FRANCE, 1977 and 1993). “If there was a filmmaker to come up with a Theory of Everything, it’s Marker.” Time Out Chris Marker’s epic film-essay on the worldwide political wars of the 60’s and 70’s: Vietnam, Bolivia, May ’68, Prague, Chile, and the fall of the New Left. Released in France in 1978, restored and “reactualized” by Marker fifteen years later after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now released for the first time in the United States. 180 minutes. THRUS, FEB 27 @ 7:00PM AND SAT, MAR 1 NOON
FROM THE OTHER SIDE Directed by Chantal Akerman (USA 2002) Chantal Akerman’s From The Other Side is a series of portraits of desperately poor Mexicans on the Arizona border who risk their lives to cross illegally into the U.S. in the hopes of finding work. The great Belgian director “effectively conveys a sense of suspended existence. She doesn’t push her agenda too hard. She quietly uncovers the presiding desire for a better life, adequate housing and family support most of the subjects believe the move to America will facilitate. 99 minutes SUN, MAR 2 3:15PM AND MON MAR 3 @ 7:30 PM
THE FRONT Directed by Martin Ritt, Written by Walter Bernstein (USA 1976) Woody Allen plays a man of no real talent or strong political convictions who is paid to be a front for a group of black listed writers during the McCarthy period in the United States (early 1950s). Walter Bernstein in person. 94 minutes SAT MAR 1 @ 3:15
AMEN Directed by Costa-Gavras (FRANCE, 2002) From the director of Z and Missing , Amen tells the story o f commissioned SS Lieutenant and respected civilian chemist, Kurt Gerstein, who discovers that the Zyklon B pellets he has developed to disinfect soldiers' drinking water are being used to gas interred Jews by the thousands. Recruited to help streamline the death camp process by a team of SS officers, Gerstein secretly approaches the Swedish Consulate, the German Protestant community and finally Vatican representatives in the hopes of exposing this unspeakable crime. The only one who listens is Father Ricardo, a young Jesuit priest with deep family connections at the Vatican. Ricardo promises Gerstein he will alert the Pope to the Jewish genocide in hopes that the pontiff will reveal and denounce the Final Solution to the Christian world. 132 minutes SAT MAR 1 @ 7:30 PM AND SUN MAR 2 @ 12:30 PM
THE FILMS OF SERGIO BIANCHI Born in 1945, Brazilian director Sergio Bianchi both recalls and advances the notable tradition of political filmmaking in Brazil and throughout Latin America. Bianchi is surely the clearest contemporary descendent of that Brazilian film movement of the ‘60s known as Cinema Novo, which sought to introduce a kind of modernist film esthetic influenced by neo-realism and the French New Wave into Brazilian cinema, but more importantly it hoped to make the cinema a part of a national dialogue about that country’s development and future. He uses a distinctive blend of fiction, documentary, and essayistic speculation to analyze and criticize his country’s complex national identity – a crazy quilt of warring classes, ethnicities and economic zones.
CHRONICALLY UNFEASIBLE Directed by Sergio Bianchi (BRAZIL, 2000) A red-hot poker thrust into the Brazilian body politic, this passionate cry set into motion a number of characters whose meanderings, misadventures and interactions expose sad traditions of corruption and hypocrisy. Proudly agit-prop, the film challenges viewers with its confrontational, Brechtian-flavored exploration of the social, economic and sexual relations that define the management, staff and customers of an upscale Sao Paolo restaurant. 101 minutes. THURS, FEB 27 @ 5:00 PM AND SUN MAR 2 @ 7:30 PM
ROMANCE Directed by Sergio Bianchi (BRAZIL, 1987) Three people are looking for clues following the death of Antonio Cesar, a left-wing intellectual and journalist who had been working on an expose of international business corruption: Fernanda, Antonio’s longtime girlfriend; Andre, his roommate who fears that rumors that Antonio died of AIDS means that he too will contract the disease; and Regina, a journalist whose investigation of Antonio Cesar’s work bring up more questions than answers. Bianchi clearly threw down a political and aesthetic gauntlet with this provocative kaleidoscopic journey through contemporary Brazil that measures the distance between the radical slogan of the ‘60s and the grim realities of the ‘80s. 103 minutes. TUES MAR 4 @ 7:30 PM
THE SECRET CAUSE Directed by Sergio Bianchi (BRAZIL, 1994) Announcing that he’s going to mount a play, a long inactive theater director hopes to expose how it is that people really live. He asks his actors to go throughout the city and learn from people who are waiting on welfare lines; in AIDS hospices; in homeless shelters, etc. Yet what they learn seems to reveal little about Brazil, but far more about themselves and their relationship to each other and especially to their director. What can truly be made from the suffering of others? 93 minutes. THURS, MAR 6 @ 7:30 PM
SHOULD I KILL THEM? and other short films Directed by Sergio Bianchi (BRAZIL, 1982 and 1983) Should I Kill Them? is Bianchi’s scathing look at the terrible consequences of uncontrolled development and misguided government policies in the vast Amazon Rain Forest. He constructs the film around a series of questions that appear as title cards for the viewers. Concerning the plight of the Amazonian Indians, Bianchi asks “How is it that a tribe thriving in the late 1950s has been reduced by the 1980s to a single member.?” Still controversial in Brazil today, Should I Kill Them? exposes the paternalism and hypocrisy that has characterized so many governments’ relations with their native populations throughout America. 68 minutes.

Politically Oriented Video "POV" Series Curated by Mary Lance Center for Contemporary Arts, 1050 Old Pecos Trail, Santa Fe. Info: 473-6354 Opening Reception Feburary 21, 2003 5pm Runs Feburary 21, 22, 23
Friday, February 21: 5:00pm: Opening Reception 7:15pm: Filmmakers will be present A CRIME TO FIT THE PUNISHMENT, 46 minutes, by Barbara Moss and Steve Mack. Narrated by Lee Grant, 1982. In 1954, during the height of McCarthyism and the Cold War, the controversial labor film “Salt of the Earth” was made despite numerous attempts by the film industry and the US government to prevent its production. “A Crime to Fit The Punishment “ explores the background events and political atmosphere that surrounded the film's production and movingly chronicles the film-makers' defiance of the Hollywood blacklist. The film documents the obstacles that “Salt of the Earth” encountered at every stage of production and exhibition including pressure on film labs, harassment of theater owners, even the deportation of the leading actress, Rosaura Revueltas while production was still in progress. MEMORIAS DE SAL, 28 minutes, Produced and Directed by Ricardo Trujillo. 1994. MEMORIAS DE SAL is a poignant homage to the miners and women who participated in "Salt of the Earth." Segmented into chapters, the documentary was shot and produced entirely in Grant County, NM as a companion documentary to the film. It includes the last video interview done with Juan Chacon prior to his death.
Saturday, February 22, 1:15pm: THE FACE OF DEMOCRACY, 4 minutes, by Sanette Owen-Thomas, 2002. An experimental work constructed from news footage of the current military escalation. THE UNAPOLOGETIC LIFE OF MARGARET RANDALL, 59 minutes, Directed by Lu Lippold, Produced by Pamela Colby and Lu Lippold, 2002. A portrait of activist, poet, writer, teacher, and photographer Margaret Randall. Her essays, oral histories, and critiques of U.S. foreign policy have made her a key mediator between the U.S. and Central America, carrying news of the arts and people’s lives back and forth between cultures. The film gives an unsparing yet sympathetic view of a woman whom the FBI considered a dangerous subversive and tried to deport, and who had to sue the U.S. government to regain her American citizenship. It includes footage of Randall’s life throughout the years, including her affairs and marriages; the toll that her cultural-political activities took on the lives of her four children; her trial for her controversial views; and her discovery that she is an incest survivor.
Saturday, February 22, 3:45pm: SHADOW ON THE HILL, 27 minutes, by Miguel Grunstein and Dale Kruzik, Narrated by Martin Sheen, 2000. Filmmakers will be present. Actor and environmental activist, Martin Sheen narrates “Shadow on the Hill”, a powerfully moving video documentary that examines the impacts that the Nuclear Age has had, and continues to have, on New Mexico's environment and on the health of the people who live around the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a United States Department of Energy nuclear weapons facility. This video was created and produced jointly in September 2000 by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety (CCNS), the UNM Masters in Public Health Program, and Thunder Road Productions. LITTLE BOY, 54 minutes, by Danny Lyon, 1977 Little Boy, named for the atomic bomb built in New Mexico and dropped on Hiroshima, acclaimed photographer Danny Lyon's picture of 1970s New Mexico -- a look beneath the Sunbelt. "Little Boy is a powerful and moving film depicting the harsh realities of Indian and Chicano life in New Mexico." -John Redhouse, Coalition of Navajo Liberation. "Little Boy is a kind of grand summa, Lyon's epic view of America focused through the lens of contemporary New Mexico. Its bleak, man-made environment is superimposed uneasily on a harsh, unforgiving landscape, and explosively charges with clashing subcultures. . . robust, pulsating with energy, but also clouded by a kind of doomed fatality. . ." -Thomas Albright, San Francisco Chronicle.
Saturday, February 22, 7:15pm: DESERT ROSE, 57 minutes, Produced by Jai James, Executive Producer, Fonda Osborn, 2002. Filmmakers will be present. Combining interviews, archival footage and photographs, “Desert Rose” tells the story of the long struggle for better working conditions and equitable pay by nurses in New Mexico’s hospitals. Produced for District 1199, National Union of Hospital and Health Care Workers. HOMENAJE A NUESTROS FUNDADORES (TRIBUTE TO OUR FOUNDERS), 21 minutes, Produced and Directed by Maria Elena Chavez, 2002. Through interviews with UFW supporters, founding members and their children, “Homenaje” provides insight to this important time in the history of the farm workers’ movement. Forty years have passed since the National Farm Workers Association held their founding convention in Fresno, California on September 30, 1962. This fledging organization launched a movement that ended a culture of oppression and hopelessness. The union’s current success would not have been possible without the hard work and sacrifice endured by its earliest members. In Spanish.
Sunday, February 23, 1:15pm: Filmmakers will be present THE STAFF OF LIFE, 13 minutes, Produced and directed by Willem Malten for The Northern New Mexico Organic Wheat Project, 1998. “The Staff of Life” details the work of the Northern New Mexico Organic Wheat Project and their commitment to providing New Mexicans with high-quality organic wheat while sustaining small-scale agriculture in Northern New Mexico. WHOSE HOME ON THE RANGE?, 55 minutes, Produced and directed by Ben Daitz, 1999. Catron County, New Mexico -- the "toughest county in the West" -- has been at the center of a struggle between ranchers, loggers, environmentalists, and the U.S. Forest Service over the management of federal land. The only physician in the county, concerned about the health of his community, began a process of dialogue among citizens. This is a story of how health was used as a catalyst to make peace. Screened at the Taos Talking Picture festival and winner of multiple awards, “this superbly crafted film shows how a community moved from destructive clash to productive communication.” Stephen Littlejohn, President, Public Dialogue Consortium.
Sunday, February 23, 3:45pm: THE DAY AFTER TRINITY, 90 minutes, Produced and Directed by Jon Else, 1980 Fifty years after the first nuclear weapon exploded into the desert sky over New Mexico, the specter of total annihilation has become a part of our everyday reality. Jon Else's Academy-Award-nominated documentary probes the mind in which that explosion first occurred, chronicling the life and times of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the charismatic, later tragic, renaissance man who launched the nuclear age. Assembling rare archival footage and first-person interviews with the bright young patriots who built the bomb, “The Day After Trinity” remains unsurpassed in any medium as an exploration of the events leading up to the Trinity test at Alamagordo on July 16, 1945. With the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the buoyant spirit of the war effort gives way to the grim reality of Cold War, and the elegiac unraveling of the life of Robert Oppenheimer gives The Day After Trinity an emotional force and focus that no other documentary on the subject has achieved. "Perhaps the best film ever made about living intimately with doom of our own design." --Tom Shales, The Washington Post
Sunday, February 23, 7:15pm: THE FOUR CORNERS: A NATIONAL SACFRIFICE AREA?, 59 minutes, Directed by Christopher McLeod, Produced by Christopher McLeod, Glenn Switkes & Randy Hayes, Narrated by Peter Coyote.1983. The "hidden" cost of energy development in the homeland of the Hopi, Navajo, and Mormons. This renowned student Academy Award-winning documentary examines the social, cultural, and environmental impact of energy development in the Southwest US. The film takes its title from a National Academy of Sciences report which concluded that strip-mining in the fragile arid environment could permanently damage the land, resulting in "national sacrifice areas." The film explores the hidden cost of uranium mining and milling, coal strip-mining, and synthetic fuels development in the "Golden Circle of National Parks" -- the homeland of Hopi, Navajo, and Mormon cultures. Made in 1983, many of the issues discussed are highly relevant today. A:SHIW A:WAN MA’K’YAYANNE (ZUNI SALT LAKE, NEW MEXICO), 8 minutes, by Christopher McLeod, The Sacred Land Film Project, Narrated by Peter Coyote. 2002. Sixty miles south of the Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico lies Salt Lake, home of Ma’l Oyattsik’I, the Zuni's Salt Mother deity. When water evaporates in the summer, it leaves a layer of salt on the lake bottom, which is harvested by pilgrims, including medicine men coming from Zuni and other neighboring tribes. The Salt River Project, an Arizona public utility, wants to build an 18,000 acre coal strip mine at Fence Lake, just 11 miles northeast of the lake, pumping 85 gallons of water per minute from the aquifer. This beautifully made documentary details the threat to the Zuni Salt Lake and Zuni culture.

Phone: 505-424-4001 | FAX: 505-473-6403 | Email: salt@csf.edu