Tuesday,
October 14 at 7pm
Scribe Video
Center Producers’ Forums
Stories
of New Orleans - Past, Present and Future
with
Lolis Eric Elie and Tina Morton & Roxanna Walker-Canton
in person
Belly
of the Basin - Philadelphia Premiere
dir. Tina Morton
& Roxanna Walker Canton, US, 2008, video, 55 mins, color
What
happens to marginalized people displaced by a natural disaster
and flood? Winner of Best Documentary at the Hollywood Black
Film Festival, Belly of the Basin is an emotionally
gripping, and beautifully photographed documentary which
highlights the unheard and unimaginable stories of African-American,
Latino, and Native American (Houma Nation) women, men and youth
who survived Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. One woman says
that they were left to die. One man says that no one cares about
the little man. One child says that she just wants to
go home. Through these individual stories the film poses questions
about the value of human life in relationship to race, class,
and politics. Filmmaker Michelle Parkerson writes "visually
moving, gritty and inspiring, Belly of the Basin bears
witness to the human toll, political maneuvering and spiritual
resilience."
followed
by
Faubourg
Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans
dir. Lolis Eric
Elie & Dawn Logsdon, US, 2008, video, 70 mins, color
 Lolis
Eric Elie, the award-winning New Orleans newspaperman takes
us on a tour of the city - his city - in what becomes a reflection
on the relevance of history folded into a love letter to the
storied neighborhood of Faubourg Treme. Elie interviews residents,
artists, scholars to uncover Treme’s prominent place in the
national struggle for civil rights.
Progressive and racially mixed from its founding in the late
1700s, Treme represented the largest community of free Black
people in the antebellum Deep South.
Shot
before the Katrina tragedy by two native New Orleanians - one
black, one white - writer Lolis Eric Elie and filmmaker Dawn
Logsdon, but edited afterward, Faubourg Treme does
not just commemorate, it reminds us that American society still
confronts the same battles that the residents of Treme have
waged through two centuries - demands for economic justice,
voting rights, equal education, decent public services, in short,
full citizenship for all people.
Roxana
Walker-Canton
is an independent filmmaker and Assistant Professor of New Media
at Fairfield University where she teaches media production with
an emphasis on social activism. Her work focuses on the politics
of space, place, and land as they relate to African American
history and culture. Recent works include Ghetto
Cotton Dreaming, a
narrative shot in rural Bulloch County, Georgia and Point
of No Return, a short
experimental video about the slave dungeons in Ghana.
Tina
Morton is a media
activist, video oral historian, and Assistant Professor of Radio,
Television & Film at Howard University. Deeply committed
to facilitating members of community groups in telling their
own stories, Tina has taught various organizations in Philadelphia
how to use media for social activism including The
Taking of South Central...
Philadelphia as part of Scribe’s Precious Places. Her
award winning documentary, Severed Souls, chronicles
community memory of the execution of Corrine Sykes, a 20-year-old
North Philadelphia resident wrongly executed for murder and
the first African American woman to be legally executed in PA.
Lolis
Eric Elie is an award-winning metro columnist and accomplished
author. For the past five years, he has chronicled the heartbeat
of New Orleans' neighborhoods for The
Times-Picayune. He is currently writing Of
Bondage & Memory, a book on the enduring legacy
of the slave trade on two continents. He is editor of Cornbread
Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing, producer
for the Smithsonian Institute's Jazz Oral History Project and
a current Soros Katrina Media Fellow awarded by the Open Society
Institute.
Producers’
Forums are supported by the National Endowment for the Arts,
Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the
Arts and the Independence Foundation.
|
