SEPTEMBER

As many as 30 million tennis-ball sized, unexploded cluster bombs litter northeastern Laos. From 1964 to 1973 American bombers dropped more than two million tons of explosives on this country, repeatedly devastating a huge swath of villages and farms. More destructive than landmines, bombies spray metal in all directions and can kill or injure many people over a large area. More than a quarter of a century after the end of the war in Vietnam, people in Laos die and are injured regularly in spite of the cautious cultivation methods they have adopted. Children are frequent victims and now sing the "Bombie" song at school to learn what to do when they find one of the bright yellow metal balls. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Red Cross have called for a global halt to the use of cluster bombs, yet the USA continues to use them as a weapon, most recently in Afghanistan and Iraq. “If you want to know what Afghanistan will be like in twenty years, watch Bombies.”  San Francisco International Film Festival.
Sponsored by CEWS.

One of the most provocative films of the year, Fahrenheit 9/11 is Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore's searing examination of the Bush administration's actions in the wake of the tragic events of 9/11.  With his characteristic humor and dogged commitment to uncovering the facts, Moore considers the presidency of George W. Bush and where it has led us. Fahrenheit 9/11 shows us a nation kept in constant fear by FBI alerts and lulled into accepting a piece of legislation, the USA Patriot Act, which infringes on basic civil rights. It is in this atmosphere of confusion, suspicion and dread that the Bush Administration makes its headlong rush towards war in Iraq. Fahrenheit 9/11 takes us inside that war to tell the stories we haven't heard, illustrating the awful human cost to U.S. soldiers and their families. Winner of the Golden Palme for Best Film, Cannes Film Festival 2004.
Sponsored by CEWS.

The camera serves as witness and as weapon. Footage shot by cameramen from Czarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I reveal the lives of refugees and prisoners of war.  Edited by Gianikian and Lucchi into a work of art, Prisoners of War reflects the inhumanity that haunts us now in the form of images from Abu Ghraib. 
Sponsored by CEWS.

The inspiration for this anti-war story came when Trumbo read an article about a British officer, horribly disfigured during World War I.  Joe, the protagonist of the film, is a soldier whose body has been destroyed in battle. At first he doesn't realize it’s real: "He had no legs and no arms and no eyes and no ears and no nose and no mouth and no tongue. What a hell of a dream. It must be a dream. Of course sweet god it's a dream. He'd have to wake up or he'd go to nuts. Nobody could live like that." Realizing the extent of his disfigurement, Joe desperately tries to find a way to communicate. But does the world want to hear? Dalton Trumbo was one of the so-called Hollywood Ten, prominent scriptwriters and directors, who were arrested for Contempt of Congress during the 1950s McCarthyist crusade against communism.
Sponsored by CEWS.

On April 27th, 1937, unprecedented atrocities were perpetrated in Franco's name against the civilian population of Guernica, a Basque village in northern Spain. It was market day. People from the surrounding villages and hills were crowded in the town square, when the church bells rang out an alarm. For over three hours, over fifty German bombers and fighter planes dumped one hundred thousand pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, systematically pounding it to rubble.  The fires that engulfed the city burned for three days. Seventy percent of the town was destroyed. Sixteen hundred civilians were killed or wounded.  Within hours of hearing the news and seeing terrible photos, Pablo Picasso was in his studio working to capture this modern horror on canvas.  The tortured, twisted figures of "Guernica" - Picasso's apocalyptic potrayal of war- are as haunting today as they were seven decades ago. This film tells the interwined stories of Guernica the town and Guernica the painting, in the context of the Spanish Civil War and its long aftermath.
Sponsored by CEWS.

OCTOBER

October 7
Night and Fog
1957, 25 min. Dir. Alain Resnais

A poetic meditation  on the Auschwitz concentration camp, Night and Fog juxtaposes the ruins of the camp ten years after the war, on a bright sunny day, with archival footage shot by the Nazis during the operation of the death factory and with footage of the aftermath of the opening of Auschwitz filmed by liberation soldiers. The film questions our ability to comprehend the reality of this event; and warns us that the impulses responsible for creating Auschwitz have not been extinguished.

Images of the World and the Inscription of War
1989, 75 min., by Harun Farocki 

A meditation on vision and power inspired by photos of Auschwitz taken by American bomber pilots during WWII.  This powerful assemblage of images conflicts in a series of striking, deeply meaningful ways.  “A philosophical treatise on photography, vision, image, and measurement, the film burns like a reading glass.” Jerry Talmer, New York Post.

Hiroshima Nagasaki 1945
1970, 16 min. Erik Barnow

Constructed from a Japanese cameraman’s footage that the United States government suppressed for twenty five years, like Night and Fog, Hiroshima-Nagasaki emphasizes details that reposition the dropping of the bomb from the perspective of the ground: images of permanent shadow inscribed into the wood, kimono burns on a woman’s body, hair coming out. The voice-over describes the sensory deprivation of the bombing: no one knew what had happened; fifty thousand people died; in the center there was no sound.  The film builds toward the body in pain. “Vegetation grew, wildly stimulated by the atomic radiation; as people died the city was covered in flowers.” 
Sponsored by the Peace Studies Program.

October 14
Jenin, Jenin
2002, 54 min.  Dir. Mohamaad Bakri 

“Where is God,” an elderly man desperately wonders when surveying the debris in the Palestinian refugee camp Jenin. The film includes testimony from Jenin residents after the Israeli army's Defensive Wall operation, during which the city and camp were the scenes of fierce fighting. The operation ended with the center of Jenin flattened and scores of Palestinians dead. Palestinians as well as numerous human rights groups accused Israel of committing war crimes in the April 2002 attack on the refugee camp. Jenin, Jenin shows the extent to which the prolonged oppression and terror affected the state of mind of the Palestinian inhabitants of Jenin.  Banned in Israel when it first came out, Jenin, Jenin is dedicated to Iyad Samudi, the producer of the film, who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers on June 23, 2002, just after the film was completed.  
Sponsored by the Peace Studies Program.

October 21
The Control Room
2003, 84 min., Dir. Jehane Noujam 

Jehane Noujaim's Control Room begins in March 2003, days before the start of America's so-called "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Forty million Arab viewers tuned in to Al Jazeera, the Arab world's most popular (and only independent) news outlet, to watch George W. Bush's declaration of war on Saddam Hussein and his regime. We all watched it. But in Control Room, we pull back to a far different perspective than we're used to: that of Al Jazeera's producers and journalists, on their own turf, their headquarters in Qatar and their office in U.S. CentCom, outside Baghdad. In the end, the greatest achievement of Control Room may be simply to remind us, as Americans, that in this age of mega-corporate U.S. news media there are other perspectives on world events besides those of Fox, CNN, MSNBC. TV news is all about the spin, the slant, the angle. They have theirs and we have ours.
Sponsored by CEWS.

October 28
The Fog of War
2003, 95 min. Dir. Errol Morris. 

A stunning look at Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, the film provides a broad overview of the man, and his opinions on a variety of historical topics. “An 85-year old McNamara looks squarely into Morris’ camera, and with his eyes occasionally yielding tears, rehashes his life with a mixture of guilt, pride, candor, sadness and self-delusion” writes the New York Daily News. Says the New York Times, “If there’s one movie that ought to be studied at this treacherous historical moment, it’s the Fog of War.”
Sponsored by CEWS.

NOVEMBER 

November 4
The Atomic Café 
1982, 88 min, Dir.  Jane Loader, Pierce Rafferty, Kevin Rafferty

The atomic bomb changed the world forever, and this film shows how Americans expressed both awe towards these weapons and pervasive fear that America would be on the receiving end of a Soviet nuclear attack. Atomic Café brilliantly compiles archival film clips beginning with the first atomic bomb detonation in the New Mexico desert. The footage, much of it produced as government propaganda, follows the story of the bomb through the two atomic attacks on Japan to the bomb's central role in the Cold War. Shown along with the famous "duck and cover" Civil Defense films are lesser-known clips, which possess a bizarre black humor when seen today, and it's easy to see why this film became a cult classic sometimes referred to as the "nuclear Reefer Madness." Atomic Café is at once clever and poignant, a canny and offbeat look at a significant period in American history.
Sponsored by CEWS.

November 11
Off to War 
Dir. Jon Alpert

On Oct. 12, 2003, 2,900 members of the Arkansas National Guard were officially notified that they would be spending the next year of their lives in Iraq. This is the largest mobilization of a National Guard brigade to a combat zone since World War II. Ninety of those citizen soldiers come from Clarksville, Ark.

Off to War follows these weekend warriors from Clarksville as they say goodbye to their civilian lives. They leave their turkey farms, churches, wives and children and prepare to go from one of the most peaceful places on earth to one of the most dangerous. Off to War follows the soldiers as they patrol the most dangerous neighborhoods in Baghdad, clear land mines, set up checkpoints, and build hospitals and schools for local citizens. This is the first time a media organization has been granted complete access to a group of soldiers, from the commencement of their mission to its completion. Off to War is the story of a real-life Band of Brothers and of the people back home who anxiously await their return. 

Jon Alpert has distinguished himself as an award-winning journalist. His 1977 award-winning piece on Vietnam entitled Vietnam: Picking up the Pieces, marked the first time an American TV crew had filmed in Vietnam since the war. Alpert was the first American TV reporter to enter Cambodia after the Vietnam War. His reports provided the initial documentation of Pol Pot's genocide and of Cambodia's impending famine.   During the hostage crisis in Iran, Alpert provided NBC with numerous exclusive reports. He was the last reporter to gain entry into the Embassy where the American hostages were being held, and he broke the news of the conflict between Iran and Iraq. From Iran he crossed through the desert and became the first television reporter to enter Afghanistan with the Mujahadin. When Fidel Castro came to address the United Nations, Alpert and his team were the only non-Cubans allowed access to Castro. He was in China during the Tiananmen Square Massacre and by posing as a tourist, reported from parts of the county off-limits to other reporters. Domestically, Alpert was the first reporter on national television to bring attention to the homeless epidemic plaguing our nation. He was the first correspondent to document the fiscal crisis affecting family farms in America.

Altogether, Alpert's work with NBC earned a total of seven National Emmy Awards, five Monitor Awards, the Clio Award, and the Gabriel Award.  His work over the past three decades has earned him many other honors and awards.
Sponsored by CEWS.

November 18
The Fourth World War
2004, Directed by: Richard Rowley and Jacqueline Soohen;  Big Noise Tactical Media. 

"The product of more than two years of filming on the inside of movements on five continents, The Fourth World War is a truly global film. Directed by the makers of This is What Democracy Looks Like and Zapatista and produced through a network of independent media and activist groups, it reports from the front-lines of conflicts in Mexico, Argentina, South Africa, Palestine, and Korea, documents antiglobalist activism from Seattle to Genoa, and reflects on the war on terror in New York, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It is the story of men and women around the world who have made resistance a part of their daily lives." - Harvard Film Archive.  Big Noise Tactical Media is a New York-based radical media group. Their past features have won top honors and hundreds of film festivals around the world.
Sponsored by CEWS.

DECEMBER

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