Message from Thomas Sayers Ellis. See you September 30th TOWARDS A MORE CIVIL UNION – JIM LEACH, CHAIRMAN OF THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES “In our society we rightly identify hate words with racial, ethnic, and gender slurs. What are we therefore to make of the usage or what more aptly might be described [...]
I can see Alcatraz from my window. Each year Community Cinema Regional Outreach Coordinators and Producing Partners get together for our annual retreat here in San Francisco. It’s the big check in before we launch the new season of free documentary screenings in our cities and communities. This year, Nashville, TN and Little Rock, AR [...]
Last week, at the end of our Q&A for the Community Cinema screening of ASK NOT (a documentary by Johnny Symons that explores the effects of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT) policy from 1993 to the present), I asked all the people in the room who’ve served in the U.S. military to stand so [...]
I’m looking forward to meeting Alex Nicholson next weekend. So far we’ve only conversed by email. Alex knows five languages. [I'm jealous.] And he is an Arabic linguist. Alex served in the U.S. Army during the height of 9-11 and its fall out wars in Iraq and Afgahanistan. But Alex was discharged in 2006 because…he [...]
March 8 was International Women’s Day. International Women’s Day celebrates the economic, political and social achievements of women past and present. In some countries like China, Vietnam, Russia, and Bulgaria, it’s an international holiday. This year’s United Nations global theme is woman and men united to end violence against women and girls. Did Chris Brown [...]
Community Cinema, the ITVS outreach initiative for the PBS series, “Independent Lens,” is presenting [FREE] community screenings and discussions of the documentary TULIA, TEXAS. Community Cinema holds monthly preview screenings across the country to encourage community dialogue on social issues and opportunities to get involved with local organizations and institutions. ABOUT TULIA, TEXAS: A product [...]
About two years ago I had the fortune of meeting and getting to know Byron Hurt while organizing our local Community Cinema screenings of his documentary “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes.” Byron has been exploring a topic that’s always fascinated the wannabe anthropologist in me: masculinity. Byron’s got a new conversation piece: “Barack & [...]
Is St. Paul, Minnesota gearing up for another Chicago ’68 or NYC ’04? During the weekend, members of the St. Paul and Ramsey County sheriff’s office conducted pre-convention raids on citizens supsected of anti-war protests during the Republican Convnention. Video and story are available on CommonDreams.org via Salon.com. Apparently, these preemptive strikes haven’t deterred anti-war [...]
