Santa Cruz Documentary Film & Video Festival Including selections from the Margaret Mead Traveling Film & Video Festival Sunday, October 1 CRIMES AND PUNISHMENT UCSC Media Theater Zyklon Portrait (dir. Elida Schogt. 1999. 13 min.). Zyklon B is a crystal that produces the deadly gas used in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. In this short film, impressionistic imagery, family photographs, and home movies are hauntingly set against a narrative that alternates between familial intimacy and the voice of authority. The Specialist: Portrait of a Modern Criminal (dir. Eyal Sivan. 1999. 128 min.). In 1961, American filmmaker Leo T. Hurwitz was invited by the Israeli government to document in its entirety the 350-hour trial of Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for the transport of "racial deportees" to the Nazi death camps between 1941 and 1945. Director Sivan uses his unprecedented access to this unreleased footage to craft a riveting, vérité-style courtroom drama. Monday, October 2 MAKING BABIES Louden Nelson Community Center And Baby Makes Two (dir. Judy Katz and Oren Rudavsky. 1999. 59 min.). Over the course of two years, the directors followed eight single women in a New York City support group who were determined to have children on their own, without husbands or lovers. The film captures their joys and disappointments as they pursue international adoption and alternative insemination. The Child the Stork Brought Home (dir. Gillian Goslinga-Roy. 2000. 60 min.). An unflinching examination of the dynamics of a California surrogacy contract, this intimate film follows an infertile couple and surrogate mother from embryo transfer through the birth of a baby girl and its emotional aftermath, and shows the ethical and emotional complexity of this most controversial of reproductive arrangements. Tuesday, October 3 IN THE FACE OF GLOBALIZATION Louden Nelson Community Center Why Cybraceros? (dir. Alex Rivera. 1998. 5 min.). This short film imagines a future where everyone telecommutes in a fantasy scheme in which the United States imports Mexican labor while the workers themselves stay home south of the border. Performing the Border (dir. Ursula Biemann. 1999. 42 min.). In this experimental video essay, Mexican women living and working in the border town of Ciudad Juarez talk about their experiences at the low-wage end of the high-tech industry. The Cow Jumped Over the Moon (dir. Christopher Walker. 1999. 52 min.). This film shows how U.S. government agencies provide crucial information to the nomadic Fulani of Mali about where to move their herds during severe drought. The implications of this technology are discussed by scientists, herdsmen, and an environmental advocate. Showdown in Seattle: Five Days That Shook the WTO (Collaborative production. 2000. 60 min.). Produced on location during the WTO meeting in Seattle and simultaneously satellitecast across North America, this innovative film shows how collaboration between media artists and other social activists is producing new forms of social protest and new media practices. Wednesday, October 4 ROMA ("gypsies") IN CINEMA Louden Nelson Community Center Black and White in Color (dir. Mira Erdevicki-Charap. 1999. 59 min.) follows Vera Bila, an internationally renowned Romani singer who has achieved fame by blending traditional Romani and popular musical trends. Moving from the townships of eastern Slovakia to the Paris Opera House, this unsentimental portrait contrasts Bila's day-to-day hardships with her celebrated public life. American Gypsy: A Stranger in Everybody's Land (dir. Jasmine Dellal. 1999. 80 min.) centers around the civil rights battles of Jimmy Marks, an outspoken leader of America's 1 million Roma. Combining extraordinary archival film with contemporary footage, this is a stunning work that offers convincing and sensitive insight into everyday Roma life in the U.S. Thursday, October 5 TRANSGENDER IDENTITIES Louden Nelson Community Center Woubi Chéri (dir. Phillip Brooks and Laurent Bocahut. 1998. 62 min.). Told through portraits of its witty and thoughtful protagonists, this film celebrates the gender pioneers who are demanding the right to a distinct African homosexuality, including Barbara, a magnetic transsexual from Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, who says: "The third millennium will be about a mix of modern and traditional, different ways of life and sex." Paradise Bent (dir. Heather Croall. 1999. 51 min.) suggests there is a truly Samoan way of seeing the world when it comes to gender. This engrossing film looks at the Samoan fa'afafines: boys who are raised as girls and have an important place in domestic life. Today, the growing influence of Western ideas of gender and the arrival of the drag scene threaten the accepted role of the fa'afafine. These tensions are played out through the personal story of Cindy, focusing on her everyday life and her relationship with a representative of the Australian High Commission. Friday, October 6 STORIES OF TRAVEL Louden Nelson Community Center Papapapá (dir. Alex Rivera. 1997. 27 min.). Filmmaker Alex Rivera likens his father to a potato in this exuberantly creative film that mixes animation, home movies, and celebrity interviews to show the common destinies of people and vegetables. For Here or To-Go? (dir. Bann Roy. 1998. 24 min.) deftly and with great sensitivity examines the dilemmas of South Asian professionals in southern California as they struggle to reconcile their new lives with the expectations of family and friends in India. A Portrait of Mr. Pink (dir. Helena Appio. 1998. 15 min.) presents the inspirational Mr. Pink, who left Jamaica for Britain in the 1950s and who shares with us his music, wisdom, and the extraordinary house he created in southeast London. Battu's Bioscope (dir. Andrzej Fidyk. 1999. 58 min.). With an old Soviet projector, two assistants, a few white cloth sheets, and untold miles of celluloid film, Mr. Battu moves out of the projection booth and onto the road, taking "Bollywood" films made by India's film industry to villagers across his native country. Fidyk's beautifully shot film is moving and unsettling. Saturday, October 7 REMEMBERING VIETNAM UCSC Media Theater Riding the Tiger (dir. John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson. 1999. 34 min.) presents multiple disembodied voices--farmers, soldiers, villagers, American journalists--reflecting on their experiences during the war. Their recollections are set against shocking archival footage and numbing contemporary images, presenting both a chronology and a visual essay that evoke the horrors and futility of the U.S. war in Vietnam. The Cu Chi Tunnels (dir. Mickey Grant. 2000. 60 min.) takes us into the elaborate network of underground tunnels built by the people of Cu Chi province in North Vietnam. Viet Cong documentary cameramen and women worked alongside guerillas to produce extraordinary footage of love, life, and death in the tunnels. Grant has produced a spellbinding work in which this rare archival film is "echoed" by present-day interviews with the survivors of the tunnels. Return to Front Page