Tag: archive

Taking Root tells the story of the Green Belt Movement of Kenya and its founder Wangari Maathai, the first environmentalist and first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Through TV footage and chilling first person accounts, Taking Root documents the dramatic confrontations of the 1980s and ’90s and captures Maathai’s infectious determination and unwavering courage. Cinema verité footage of the tree nurseries and the women and children who tend them brings to life the confidence and joy of people working to improve their own lives and ensure the future and vitality of their land.

The San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the US National Committee for UNIFEM (UNIFEM/USNC) was launched in June of 2009.  UNIFEM is the United Nations Development Fund for Women, and it works on women’s rights and development issues across the globe.  We are committed to expanding support and raising funds within the United States for UNIFEM.  Through our efforts we hope to encourage ourselves and others to become involved in advancing women’s rights around the world.

If interested in learning more, please send us an email at sanfranbayarea@unifem-usnc.org.

About the Film Series:

This monthly film series will look at women’s rights and development issues. Each month, a film that touches on one of the four themes of UNIFEM (The United Nations Development Fund for Women) will be selected.  These four themes are:

   – enhancing women’s economic security and rights,
   – ending violence against women,
   – reducing the prevalence of HIV and AIDS among women and girls, and
   – advancing gender justice in democratic governance in stable and fragile states.

After each film, a discussion will be held that focuses on the issue being highlighted and what local Bay Area organizations are doing to address that issue.

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Tonight New York artist David Finkelstein will present his video work, dramatic, hallucinatory explorations of the inner landscape, at Artist Television Access. His videos are based on completely improvised dialogues, in which two actors explore their inner visions in a process which Finkelstein compares to a collaborative form of dreaming. These dialogues are then transformed into dynamic, complex, and meticulously crafted compositions of original music, words, and visual images. Works to be screened will include Terrifying Blankness (2008) featuring Cassie Terman, and Reproductive Technology (2008) with Allison Farrow, as well as several shorter videos. Finkelstein has been making theater since 1982, and video since 2000. His work has been screened at  numerous festivals and venues, winning 9 awards.

“The throughline is one of emotions, of moods and energy. These pieces are filled with ideas;  you don’t stop thinking while you’re 
watching, but the intellect doesn’t run the show. If you get inside the feelings of these films, they make sense.
–Lawrence Toppman, The Charlotte Observer

Lorine Niedecker, A Student

Lorine Niedecker

Immortal Cupboard: In Search of Lorine Niedecker, 73 min, video (2009)
by Cathy Cook

Plus a talk Particular Attention: Lorine Niedecker’s Natural Histories
by Jonathan Skinner

Co-presented by kino21, Small Press Traffic and The Poetry Center

In her subjective exploration of the poet Lorine Niedecker (1903 – 1970), Immortal Cupboard, Cathy Cook weaves an elaborate document from Niedecker’s biography, literary associations (with poets Cid Corman and Louis Zukofsky) and her midwestern environs. The threads of nature, history, ecology, gender, domesticity, work, culture, family and social politics create a testament to “the extraordinary works of this very private poet that some literary critics have described as the 20th century’s Emily Dickinson.” (CC)

Since 1982 Cathy Cook has been creating films, videos, and installations She has exhibited her award-winning work extensively in both solo and group shows including screenings at MOMA and the Whitney Museum; her media works are in the permanent collections of the Donnell Library (NYC), Princeton University, National Library of Australia (Canberra), and the NYU Film Library, among others. She is Associate Professor of Film/Video in Visual Arts at The University of Maryland–Baltimore County (UMBC), teaching film/video production, animation, writing and aesthetics.

Jonathan Skinner edits the journal Ecopoetics, which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. Skinner’s poetry collections include With Naked Foot (2009) and Political Cactus Poems (2005). His essays on the poets Ronald Johnson and Lorine Niedecker appeared recently in volumes published by the National Poetry Foundation and by University of Iowa Press. He teaches in the Environmental Studies program at Bates College in Central Maine, where he makes his home.

Ecopoetics website

Film Excerpt