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 3 Films

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

  • thumbnail of scanned text  Mon. 9/29 July '64
    54 minutes, closed captions, 2006
    The night of Friday, July 24th, 1964, started off normally enough in Rochester, New York, stiflingly hot and humid; but by the next morning no one would look at race relations in the North the same again. July '64 takes a penetrating look at the underlying causes of the urban insurrections that swept through Black communities like wildfires that summer and in years since. [download handout (MS-Word document)]

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    Also: Nosotros Venceremos [We Shall Overcome]. 11 min. Made 1967, premiere 1971. Photographer Jon Lewis.
    Courtesy of the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project.
    Using his still photographs from 1966, photographer Jon Lewis created a video showing the indomitable spirit of the Delano Grape Strike, which lasted for seven months. The farmworkers sing "Nosotros venceremos," "Solidaridad pa' siempre" ["Solidarity Forever"], "De Colores," and "Huelga General" ["General Strike"]. We hear excerpts from the plan made for a general strike in Delano, California, a revolution of the poor seeking bread, justice, and dignity; we see the march to Sacramento, which grew as the workers marched; the arrival of 10,000 farmworkers at the capitol building, and the introduction of Cesar Chavez, who announces the first union contract for farmworkers in the United States. [download handout (MS-Word document)]
  • thumbnail of scanned text    Tues. 9/30 Aimé Césaire: Une Voix pour L'Histoire, une parole pour le XXIème siècle, Part 2
    55 minutes, English subtitles, 1994
    2ème Partie: Au rendez-vous de la conquête: Where the Edges of Conquest Meet moves to Paris in the 1930s where Césaire, Leopold Senghor (first president of Senegal) and the French Guyanese poet Léon Damas developed the concept of negritude, a worldwide revindication of African values. John Henrik Clarke and Howard Dodson of the Schomburg Center discuss the profound impact of Black American culture - jazz, the Harlem Renaissance and authors like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Claude McKay - on this primarily Francophone movement. [download handout (MS-Word document)]

  • thumbnail of scanned text  Wed. 10/1 Revolution '67
    83 minutes, closed captions, 2007
    Revolution '67 focuses on the explosive urban rebellion in Newark, New Jersey, in July 1967, to reveal the long-standing racial, economic, and political forces which generated inner city poverty and perpetuate it today. Newark residents, police, officials, and urban commentators, including writer/activist Amiri Baraka, journalist Bob Herbert, prominent historians, and '60s activist Tom Hayden, recount the vivid, day-to-day details of the uprising. But they also trace those traumatic days back to decades of industrial decline, unemployment, job and housing discrimination, federal programs favoring suburbs over cities, police impunity, political corruption, and a costly, divisive overseas war. Americans should not have been surprised when race wars exploded, turning cities into combat zones, bringing Vietnam back home. [download handout (MS-Word document)]

  • thumbnail of scanned text  Thurs. 10/2 Berkeley in the Sixties
    118 minutes, 1990
    1990 Academy Award Nominee, Best Documentary Feature
    Six years in the making and with a cast of thousands, Berkeley in the Sixties recaptures the exhilaration and turmoil of the unprecedented student protests that shaped a generation and changed the course of America. Many consider it to be the best filmic treatment of the 1960s yet made. [download handout (MS-Word document)]