An Interdisciplinary Conference
at the University of Texas at Austin
October 10th-12th, 2008

Film Festival  

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SEPTEMBER 15-OCTOBER 9:

Celluloid for Social Justice:
The Legacy of 1968 in Documentaries

A Pre-Conference Mini-Film-Series
Honoring the 40th Anniversary of California Newsreel

This film series is free and open to the public.
All films will be shown in CALHOUN 100, starting at 7:00 pm with a brief introduction.

Download List of Films to be shown.

Week 2 Films

Film Fest Home | Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

  • thumbnail of scanned text    Mon. 9/22 Aimé Césaire: Une voix pour l'histoire, une parole pour le XXIème siècle, Part 1
    55 minutes, English subtitles, 1994
    1ère Partie: L'île veilleuse. In Part 1: The Vigilant Island, Césaire shows us his pays natale - its volcano, beaches and colonial towns - a tropical crossroad where Europe, Africa and America meet. From this cultural core, Césaire, his wife Suzanne and philosopher René Menil founded the seminal literary review Tropiques in 1939, which influenced Caribbean intellectuals like Wifredo Lam, René Depestre and Frantz Fanon. After WWII, Césaire served as mayor of Fort-de-France and Martinique's representative to the French National Assembly. He discusses the difficulty of balancing the life of a poet with that of a practical politician for over 50 years. [download handout (MS-Word document)]

  • thumbnail of scanned text    Tues. 9/23 Hughes' Dream Harlem
    61 minutes, 2002
    Langston Hughes was one of the most prominent figures of the Harlem Renaissance and is often referred to as Harlem's poet laureate. This film shows how Hughes successfully fused jazz, blues and common speech to celebrate the beauty of Black life. Hughes' Dream Harlem presents a vision of the esteemed poet in present-day Harlem and makes an important case for Hughes' impact on hip-hop and the spoken-word community. [download handout (MS-Word document)]

  • thumbnail of scanned text  Wed. 9/24 Freedom on My Mind
    110 minutes, 1994
    Nominated for an Academy Award, winner of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians awards for best documentary, this landmark film tells the story of the Mississippi freedom movement in the early 1960s when a handful of young activists changed history.
    When Bob Moses, a young Harvard student filled with gentle determination, came to Mississippi in 1961 to head up the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee's voter registration drive, a black man could be convicted of "eye rape" for looking at a white woman; all African Americans were denied the right to vote. The first man to accompany Moses to the courthouse to register, a farmer named Herbert Lee, was later shot dead by a state legislator. [download handout (MS-Word document)]

  • thumbnail of scanned text  Thurs. 9/25 Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power
    53 minutes, closed captions, 2005
    Robert F. Williams was the forefather of the Black Power movement and broke dramatic new ground by internationalizing the African American struggle. Negroes with Guns is not only an electrifying look at an historically erased leader, but also provides a thought-provoking examination of Black radicalism and resistance and serves as a launching pad for the study of Black liberation philosophies. Insightful interviews with historian Clayborne Carson, biographer Timothy Tyson, Julian Bond, and a first person account by Mabel Williams, Robert's wife, bring the story to life. [download handout (MS-Word document)]

  • thumbnail of scanned text  Also: Clips from Huelga! [Strike!]. 24 min. 1966.
    Courtesy of LeRoy Chatfield, Director of the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project.
    First Luis Valdez, co-founder of El Teatro Campesino [The Farmworkers' Theater] with Augustin Lira in fall 1965, takes us on a tour of a typical migrant worker camp, with which he is familiar from personal experience. He asks what farmworkers should do in order to get out of camps like this? Next we see representatives of the National Farm Workers Association, founded by Cesar Chavez in 1962, convincing strikebreakers who are in the fields picking grapes to leave their job and sign union authorization cards. Next we see striking farmworkers march hundreds of miles in March 1966 to the California state capitol, Sacramento, with the theme "pilgrimage, penitence, and revolution." Then we see a nonviolent protest against strikebreakers, bused in from Mexico by DiGiorgio Corporation with police protection to break a farm labor strike. Finally we see the performance by El Teatro Campesino of a satirical skit about a farmowner who tries to make a fool of a farmworker. The group performed from the union hall stage at the Friday night union meetings after September 1965 and from a flat-bed truck every night during the March to Sacramento. El Teatro also traveled to college campuses to promote the cause of the striking farmworkers. [download handout (MS-Word document)]