April 29, Thursday, 7:30PM
Immigration

Baba, a young Ghanian woman, goes in search of her father for his blessing on her impending marriage to the young man she loves. Her joy at finding him turns into a nightmare as he insists she submit to his choice of marriage to an old man, and that she undergo female genital mutilation as is the custom in his tribe. She is forced to flee her father's village, seeking refugee status in the U.S. Instead she becomes enmeshed in the U.S. immigration system. Honorable Mention, Sundance Film Festival 2003

Papapapá 26min, video, 1995
Director: Alex Rivera

Papapapá is an experimental documentary about immigration. Looking at the potato, which was first cultivated in Peru as an Inca food staple, Papapapa paints a picture of a vegetable which has traveled, and been transformed. The video follows this immigrating vegetable North as it eventually becomes the potato chip, the couch potato, and the “French Fry.” While following the potato's journey and transformation, Papapapa simultaneously follows another Peruvian in motion, Augusto Rivera, the maker's father. The stories of these two disparate immigrants, the potato, and the maker's father, converge as Augusto Rivera becomes a Peruvian couch potato, sitting on the American sofa, eating potato chips and watching Spanish Language television.

Alex Rivera is a New York based digital media artist and filmmaker. Through the past 5 years he's made work in digital video and on the internet that addresses concerns of the Latino community through a language of humor, satire, and metaphor. His work has been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, Lincoln Center, on PBS, as well as at film festivals, universities, libraries, union halls, and community centers. Rivera has received support from various foundations including The Rockefeller Foundation, The Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, The Jerome Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts and The US/Mexico Fund for Culture.

Dream Deferred 9min, video, 2003
Director: Jenny Alexander

Through the stories of undocumented high school students, Dream Deferred brings us into the dreams and aspirations of immigrant youth, and the barriers they face. For many of Boston’s immigrant high school students, graduation is their last day of formal education. Dreams of becoming journalists, doctors, or dentists and of fulfilling their parents’ hopes are set aside when they discover that, because of their immigration status, college is inaccessible. GOALS, a courageous group of high school students from East Boston, is organizing for access to higher education, and fighting for the future of immigrant youth. Dream Deferred is a project that explores filmmaking as a community organizing tool. From January through June 2003, GOALS students were trained in video production. Together they designed, conducted, and filmed interviews with their peers and legislators, as the director followed their organizing campaign. Students and their supporters can use the resulting short documentary, Dream Deferred, to facilitate discussion and reach larger audiences with their message.

Jenny Alexander brings experience as a union and community organizer to her work as a filmmaker. Her current project, Dream Deferred is a collaborative project with immigrant youth from East Boston. The first step was the production of a ten-minute documentary about immigrant youth and their struggles to gain access to higher education. This documentary has been incorporated in the organizing campaign to support the DREAM Act and the In-State Tuition Bill, state and federal legislation that would remove barriers to immigrant students who would like to go to college. She is currently in production on a 30-minute documentary following the students as they organize to gain access to college. Jenny produced and directed “Undocumented Workers: A look at the Invisible Workforce”, a ten minute documentary that premiered at the Third Annual Labor Film Festival in Boston and the Cambridge Latino Film Festival, and looks at the predicament of undocumented immigrant workers. Jenny was a teacher’s assistant at Rockport College and the Maine International Film & Television Workshops, is a member of the Filmmakers’ Collaborative, and currently works as a community organizer in East Boston.

Tension 26min, video, 1998 (Palestine) tentative
Director: Rashid Masharawi

Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi conveys the palpable sense of tension that he perceived below the surface of daily life for the Palestinian population during the period of the "peace process." The film focuses on the act of observation itself, eschewing spoken dialogue altogether for a narrative that is produced rather through the editing of images, music, and incidental sounds on the track. Tension is organized around the natural cycle of sunrise and sunset, restated in terms of another "natural" work cycle: the many waves of Palestinian day workers who move through gates and checkpoints to labor in Israel and return each evening.

Director's Statement:
Peace now is a broken mirror. It looks like a rosy old dream turning into a nightmare, or becoming a ghostly mask for the forces of destruction. The old specter is haunting the minds of this "Holy Land." "Do not kill me twice!" is the best that the Palestinians can hope for now, given the fact that the Israeli government has been squeezing them to a degree that he himself has no idea of. The inspiring visions are doomed to turn into revisions. The fusions of the good and the free and the beautiful that were moving the region forward, bewildering even their own creators, became con-fusions. The rosy dreams turned into rejection, rejection into resistance, resistance into a restoration of the old sentiments and old self-defense mechanisms. This is not due to the peace process, but to the fact that peace itself has been "a walking contradiction - half truth, half fiction." Tension is a film about the boiling depths revealed by the surface of things, it is a warning siding with the truth in order to reveal the myth of "this form of peace," in search of a better and a more beautiful and freer future for everyone. But what is "the surface of things"? The film aims at revealing a truth to fight a myth, a myth that does not want to acknowledge that a contradictory peace with a half-hearted act is the best service that the pro-peace forces can render to their opponents - the war-mongers of every type.