This film screening is part of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective. In this documentary about labor tension in the coal-mining industry, director Barbara Kopple films a strike in rural Kentucky. After the coal miners at the Brookside Mine join a union, the owners refuse the labor contract. Once the miners start to strike, the owners of the mine respond by hiring scabs to fill the jobs of the regular employees. The strike, which lasts more…

Set in the psychedelic paradise of Pepperland, Yellow Submarine (1968) pits Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band against the Blue Meanies, enemies of fun and music. Director George Dunning and art director Heinz Eidelmann employ a constantly-shifting array of ’60s pop art settings in this revolutionary animated feature, which has inspired directors ranging from Terry Gilliam to John Lasseter. On its 50th anniversary, the film retains its ability to dazzle from its opening scene to the sing-a-long final credits. Artist…

Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown (2018) chronicles the “high-femme performances” in the Los Angeles-based underground black-lesbian strip club Shakedown. The New Yorker claims that “Shakedown is neither an experimental art film nor an anthropology of gay, black femme performance in L.A. Rather, Weinraub sought to capture a moment and turn it into cinema.”The film chronicles the explicit performances and personal relationships of the party’s dancers and organizers in the early 2000s, revealing that Shakedown was more than a strip club; as one…

The production of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (Roma città aperta, 1945) began only months after the end of the Nazi occupation of Rome and the arrival of Allied forces during the Italian campaign of World War II. The film triangulates the tension of the German occupation through a rich cast of characters: children, landlords, clergy, military men, unwed mothers, cabaret girls, collaborators, resistance fighters, and subversives of all kinds, and of course the city itself. Filmed with both professional and non-professional…

Past and present, trauma and eros, the personal and the collective all intermingle in this groundbreaking film from French New Wave director Alain Resnais and visionary novelist Marguerite Duras. Centering on a short, intense affair between a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) unfolds in a rebuilt and modernized Hiroshima. As the central couple explore their powerful attraction, their trysts are interrupted by memories of the war and the surrounding traces of atomic mass…

Ghana’s Electric Dreams presents the planning and wide-ranging impact of the Akosombo Dam, Ghana’s most ambitious development project. The film visits sites affected by the hydroelectric dam and by the broader vision of modernization that it represents. Historical footage and interviews with Ghanaians reveal the complexity and contradictions, unintended consequences, social inequities, rural/urban divides, and gender differences that underlie this confluence of energy, power, and creativity in the West African country. Rudo Sanyanga (International Rivers Network, Africa Program Director), R. Lane Clark (director/producer),…

Gulabi Gang (2012) is set in the badlands of Bundelkhand in central India, a place of dust, oppression, and resistance. This film follows the Gulabi Gang, an unusual group of rural women led by the energetic and charismatic Sampat Pal. They travel long distances to fight for the rights of women and Dalits. Often they encounter apathy, corruption, and even ridicule. Sometimes whole villages connive against them to protect the perpetrators of violence. While we see Gulabi Gang members struggling against gender violence and state corruption,…

Directed by celebrated Chinese auteur Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, Hero) and based on Nobel Prize-winning author Mo Yan’s novel, Red Sorghum is a landmark in contemporary Chinese cinema and culture. The film blends the stories of three generations of a family with their region’s journey through feudalism, war, and revolution. After several years as a cinematographer, Zhang Yimou chose Mo Yan’s novel for his directorial debut. In the film, he crafts an evocative rural landscape, and lead actors…

Based on Edmundo Desnoes’ novel and presented here in a new 4k restoration, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) is a fictional meditation on disillusionment in post-revolutionary Cuba. Left behind by his wife and family, the protagonist Sergio elects to remain in Havana following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, an historical moment that the film chooses to reflect on through Sergio’s unmoored, flâneur-like lifestyle and anomie. The Cuban capital engulfs Sergio and simmers beneath the social and political…

In a digital universe where live streamers earn up to $200K a month, can virtual relationships replace real-life human connection? People’s Republic of Desire (2018) follows two online stars who rise from obscurity to fame and fortune in China. The film journeys through their live streaming showrooms, which become gathering places for hundreds of millions of viewers, including wealthy patrons who lavish performers with digital gifts and poor migrant workers who worship them. The two subjects are brought together in…

At a moment of historic volatility in American politics, insurgent candidates Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amy Vilela, Cori Bush, and Paula Jean Swearengin decided to fight back and embarked on a journey that would change their lives and their country forever. Knock Down the House (2019) follows the grassroots campaigns of these four ambitious women as they challenge powerful incumbents in the 2018 congressional race. Despite their lack of political experience and corporate donations, these women work to redefine community values and…

Since his ALS diagnosis in 2016, activist Ady Barkan and his family have struggled to keep up with insurance paperwork, doctors’ bills, and prescription drugs. Rather than diminish his voice, these experiences have emboldened Barkan to expand his initiatives in new directions. He co-founded the Be A Hero PAC, wrote an autobiography titled Eyes to the Wind, and launched himself into ambitious media projects. This event focuses on Barkan’s video short series Uncovered: Health Care Conversations with Ady Barkan, which…

When D. B. Norton (Edward Arnold), an oil magnate with political ambitions, takes over a city newspaper and begins firing employees by the dozen, columnist Ann Mitchell (Barbara Stanwyck) fights back, penning a fake letter from a jobless “John Doe,” who in protest against the state of the world threatens to commit suicide by jumping off the City Hall roof. After the letter becomes the talk of the town, Mitchell and her editor hire a washed-up baseball player (Gary Cooper)…

In 2010, pioneering Chinese filmmaker Wu Wenguang founded the Memory Project. Housed in the Caochangdi Workstation in an art district on the outskirts of Beijing, the project’s purpose is to teach documentary production skills to aspiring amateur filmmakers, who then travel to their familial villages to collect oral histories about some of the most tumultuous periods of the twentieth century, including the Great Famine and Cultural Revolution. To date, the Memory Project has collected over a thousand interviews and produced…

Drawing on period footage from England’s Imperial War Museum and BBC radio interviews with World War I soldiers, director Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) deploys state-of-the-art digital restoration technology to reanimate some of the world’s earliest war footage. Released in commemoration of the war’s centennial and dedicated to Jackson’s own grandfather who fought in the war, the film is an astonishing portal to the past that offers viewers a surprisingly intimate view of the everyday lives of…

In Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988), Barbara and Adam Maitland (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) find themselves trapped as spirits haunting their old home after their untimely death in a car accident. To make matters worse, the residence has now been sold to the unbearable Deetze family (Catherine O’Hara, Jeffrey Jones, and Winona Ryder). When the Maitlands have little success in scaring the new residents away, they turn to rogue “bio-exorcist” Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), an unpredictable spirit whose “help” quickly turns…

Stars of Jazz aired weekly on KABC-TV in Los Angeles from June 25, 1956 to December 29, 1958, with additional national broadcasts on the ABC network. Hosted by musician and actor Bobby Troup, the series offered viewers the highest possible caliber of live jazz performers and performances. During the civil rights struggle, the series frequently presented and lauded African-American artists. To enhance the contemporary viewing and listening experience of this historic series, several original Stars of Jazz kinescopes were scanned…

With Jennifer Baichwal (director/writer) A cinematic meditation on humanity’s massive reengineering of the planet, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2019) concludes a trilogy of films that began with Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and continued with Watermark (2013). The film follows the research of an international body of scientists, the Anthropocene Working Group who, after nearly ten years of analysis and investigation, argue that the Holocene Epoch gave way to the Anthropocene Epoch in the mid-twentieth century as a result of profound and lasting human…

When Alice Guy-Blaché completed her first film in 1896, she was not only the first female filmmaker, but one of the first directors ever to make a narrative film. Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché tells the largely forgotten story of her rise from Gaumont secretary to her appointment as head of production a year later, and her illustrious 20-year career in France and in the United States, as the founder of her own studio and as writer,…