February 6 - School of Babel
February 6 at 5pm
Sharwan Smith Theater
“School of Babel” will be the first of six films shown as part of our film festival. It is a documentary by director Julie Bertuccelli. It came out in 2015. It is a film about a school program in Paris created for newly arrived immigrant children to learn French before being placed in a regular classroom. The film humanizes the current debate about immigration, showing children from many different countries and religious backgrounds struggling to learn French well enough to be placed in regular classes. Themes include integration, human beings’ ability to find common ground despite enormous differences, diversity and multiculturalism. After we view the film, a teacher at a local Montessori school, Erin Waldman, has agreed to animate a discussion with audience participation.
February 8 - Las Marthas
February 8 at 5pm
Sharwan Smith Theater
The second film of our festival, “Las Marthas,” was chosen as one of NBC’s Top Ten Latino Films to Watch in 2014 and had its national broadcast on PBS’ Independent Lens in February of 2014. The feature-length documentary was made by Cristina Ibarra, the award-winning Chicana filmmaker. It follows two young Mexican-American women as they prepare for their debut at a debutante ball hosted by the Society of Martha Washington in Laredo, Texas. We have invited Ibarra to come to SUU, she will be present for the screening, introduce the film and conduct the Q & A afterwards.
February 9 - SUU Convocation by Christina Ibarra
February 9 at 11:30am
Gilbert Great Hall
The highlight of this year’s film festival is the visit of the Chicana filmmaker, Cristina Ibarra. She has made several films, including “Love & Monster Trucks,” which was a Semi-Finalist at the 2009 Sundance Screenwriters Lab and an Official Selection at the 2010 Iberamerican Films Crossing Borders, at the Guadalajara Film Festival & Market. Her resume also includes speaking engagements at other universities and service on panels and film juries. Ibarra will address SUU’s students, faculty and staff at a Convocation on the day after the viewing of her documentary “Las Marthas.”
February 10 - The Murderers Are Among Us
February 10 at 5pm
Sharwan Smith Theater
Our third selection will be “The Murderers Are Among Us,” a 1946 German-language film by director Wolfgang Staudte. This groundbreaking film helped shape the development of postwar German-language cinema. It was the first feature film produced in Germany after World War II and established the new postwar genre of the “rubble film”—movies filmed in the ruins of bombed-out German cities. As such, this film offers viewers an eyewitness glimpse of what the streets and buildings of Berlin actually looked like in 1945. Constructed as a dialogue between a concentration camp survivor and a military doctor tortured by the guilt of having witnessed the deaths of countless innocent people at the orders of unethical superiors, “The Murderers Are Among Us” was one of the first films to address wartime trauma and questions of guilt associated with Nazi war crimes. Themes include memory, coping with personal and collective trauma, and rebuilding.
February 13 - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
February 13 5pm
Sharwan Smith Center Theater
“Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” is a 2002 film by Chinese director Sijie Dai, who has lived in France since the 1980s, the film is based on his own life. It tells of two young men sent to the country during the Cultural Revolution in China to be reeducated by hard labor. They fall in love with a young seamstress and each attempt to make her fall in love with them, using their knowledge of classic western literature such as the works of Honoré de Balzac. Its central theme is the power of books, and their connections to love, pleasure and the individual, which is strikingly in opposition with the anti-intellectual environment of the Cultural Revolution in China. We have invited a visiting Chinese scholar, Dr. Qingping Liu, who currently teaches Mandarin at SUU, to introduce the film and lead the discussion afterwards.
February 15 - The Club
February 15 at 5pm
Sharwan Smith Center Theater
Our second Spanish-language selection is the 2015 film “The Club,” by director Pablo Larrain. In the film, the Catholic Church sends a counselor to a small Chilean town where disgraced priests, suspected of crimes ranging from child abuse to taking babies from unwed mothers, live in seclusion, under the supervision of a former nun. The film won the Jury Grand Prix at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival. Themes include human rights, religion and spirituality, international politics, Latin American history, bullying and violence, health and aging. Dr. Kris Phillips, professor of philosophy at SUU, will present the film and lead the post-screening discussion. We chose Dr. Phillips for this role because of his expertise in the area of ethics.
February 17 - Phoenix
February 17 at 5pm
Sharwan Smith Center Theater
The final film in our festival schedule is Christian Petzold’s 2014 “Phoenix.” This film tells the story of a German-Jewish Holocaust survivor named Nelly who, after extensive reconstructive surgery, returns home to Berlin to find out whether her non-Jewish German husband Johnny betrayed her to the Nazis, precipitating her deportation to Auschwitz. Only through tense conversations with Johnny can Nelly discover the truth of the past and begin to work through the trauma she has experienced. The film, which offers a twenty-first century perspective on the postwar period in Germany, explores both the possibility of and the difficulties in establishing German-Jewish dialogue with non-Germans in a post-Holocaust world. We have chosen Petzold’s critically acclaimed film, with its focus on dialogue between victim and probable perpetrator, as a 2014 response to Staudte’s 1946 “The Murderers Are Among Us.” Themes featured in “Phoenix” include the Holocaust, coping with trauma, reconciliation, and rebirth.
