Women Without Borders Film Festival
http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/WRC/Women_History/WWB.html
5pm ** FREE **
Mohawk Girls
Filmmaker Tracey Deer intimately captures the lives of three exuberant and insightful Mohawk teenagers as they face their future. Like Amy, Lauren and Felicia, Deer grew up on the Kahnawake Native Reserve, but she left to attend school. Now, she returns to document two critical years in the lives of these teens who are contending with the unwritten rules of their close-knit community. To move away from the reserve means losing credibility, or worse, a person’s rights as a Mohawk. But to stay is to give up the possibilities offered by the “outside world.” With insight, humor and compassion, Deer takes us inside the lives of these three teenagers as they tackle the same issues of identity, culture and family she faced a decade earlier. Interspersed with home videos from Deer’s own adolescence, “Mohawk Girls” is a deeply emotional yet unsentimental look into what it means to grow up Native American at the beginning of the 21st century.
Followed by…
Far From Home
While busing may be a rapidly fading memory in most American schools, it continues to be a reality for more than 3,000 Boston students every year. “Far From Home” spotlights Kandice, an insightful, precocious African-American teenager participating in METCO, a voluntary Boston school integration program. Since kindergarten, she has risen before dawn each day to be bused to Weston, an affluent, predominantly white suburb. Now in her last two years of high school, she takes us inside her personal triumphs and daily negotiations – serving as the first black class president, playing the college admissions game, defying stereotypes she feels from white society, living up to her family’s tradition of activism. Kandice’s grandfather, a civil rights activist murdered in 1968, helped found the busing program and her mother was among the first black students bused to the suburbs in the late 1960s. Through cinema verité and interviews, the film weaves together Kandice’s current school life with a family history that has been profoundly shaped by racially integrated educational experiences.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
noon-5pm
CAMERA OBSCURA – Ethan Jackson at Kenilworth
Visiting Artist Ethan Jackson to convert Inova / Kenilworth into a camera obscura.
Ethan Jackson in attendance, with Official Opening from 3-5pm
Note: Daylight Savings time commences.
