Canadian filmmaker to visit

Canadian filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin visits April 6

Documentary filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin will present her most recent work, "Our Nationhood," at Cornell Cinema April 6 at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. The film chronicles the determination of the Listuguj Mi'gmaq people in their standoff with the Quebec government over logging rights on their ancestral territory. Courtesy of Cornell Cinema

Cornell Cinema welcomes Canadian filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin Tuesday, April 6, at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre for a screening of her latest film, "Our Nationhood." Obomsawin, a member of the Abenaki Nation, is one of Canada's most distinguished documentary filmmakers and has made more than 20 uncompromising documentaries on issues affecting aboriginal people in Canada. "Our Nationhood" chronicles the determination of the Listuguj Mi'gmaq people in the face of yet another standoff with the Quebec government, this time over access to logging on their ancestral territory.

"With multiple strands of engagement in the Mi'gmaq language, French and English, Obomsawin presents the ancestral voice of reason amidst Québécois assertions of colonial authority," said N. Bird Runningwater from the Sundance Film Festival. "What resonates most are the voices and images of the children who are the beneficiaries of this resistance and the fight for acknowledgment of inherent rights as first nations."

Tickets for the program are $6 general; $5 students and seniors; and $4 Cornell graduate students. For more information call 255-3522 or visit http://cinema.cornell.edu.

Obomsawin's visit is co-sponsored with the Central New York Programmer's Group and Akwe:kon residence hall.

Haitian history film series

Throughout the month of April, Cornell Cinema, the Pentangle Film Program, the Latin American Studies Program and the Committee on U.S.-Latin American Relations will present a wide range of films, both documentaries and features, addressing various phases in Haiti's tumultuous history. The films are being screened in conjunction with the midmonth conference, "The Haitian Revolution in Global Contexts: A Bicentennial Celebration," April 16-17. The conference is part of the Africana Studies and Research Center's commemoration of the bicentenary of the Haitian Revolution and is being presented in collaboration with the Society for the Humanities, Departments of History, Anthropology, Comparative Literature, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art and Cornell Cinema. The two-day international conference will address the significance and legacy of the slave uprisings of Saint Domingue. The film series will include Gillo Pontecorvo's follow-up film to "The Battle of Algiers" (screening April 19), "Burn!" which was inspired by C.L.R.James' book The Black Jacobins and treats the Haitian slave revolt as a metaphor for the Vietnam War; Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck's "Man by the Shore," which is set in Haiti in the early '60s during the outset of François Duvalier's reign of terror; Jonathan Demme's "Haiti Dreams of Democracy," an impressionistic portrait of the Caribbean country as it celebrated its first anniversary of life without Baby Doc; Katharine Kean's chronicle of the 1991 military coup, "Rezistans"; "Looking for Life," a view of Haiti's battered local economy as seen through the lives of two women; and Jonathan Demme's latest documentary, "The Agronomist," which tells the true and moving story of Jean Dominique, a Haitian radio journalist and human rights activist who was assassinated in 2000.

For more information about the conference, visit http://www.asrc.cornell.edu/haiti_spring_2004.html.

Haitian history series

"Looking for Life," April 4

"Burn!" April 5 and 6

"Haiti Dreams of Democracy," April 8

"Rezistans," April 14

"The Man by the Shore," April 15

"The Agronomist," April 23, 24 and 27

April 1, 2004