April 4: Taller and Screening with Director Carlos Efraín Pérez Rojas

Carlos Efraín Pérez Rojas (Mixe) is a documentary videomaker who has focused his work on indigenous people, social movements, and human rights in Mexico. In 2005 he received the Reebok Human Rights Award, which honors activists under the age of 30, and included a grant to enable Pérez Rojas to continue his work. He was awarded a National Video Resources Media Arts Fellowship in 2002.

Taller, Noon, Location TBA
Join us for a screening of the short video "Mirando hacia dentro," and a discussion on documentary video making and the defense of human rights with director Carlos Perez. *Note: The taller will be conducted in Spanish.

Screening, 5-7 pm, McCormick Screening Room
Screening Dir. Carlos Perez's documentary Mëjk and its short companion video "Mood." The screening will be followed by a Q&A and discussion with the director.

About Mëjk 

Genaro Rojas — better known as “Naro” — takes us on a journey through the surreal and magical world of the Sierra Mixe in Oaxaca, Mexico. Naro enjoys dedicating time to adversities and fragments of daily life that may appear to lack any meaning, since he is able to explain how they form part of broader sociopolitical and philosophical contexts, an exercise he practices even when he teaches, dances, washes his clothes or gets a haircut. Following Naro through his daily life, the video provides insight into issues as diverse as Mexico's fraught education reform under President Peña Nieto and the social microcosm of Sierra Mixe's legendary bus drivers. 

April 6: Raíces de mi corazón; Dir. Gloria Rolando

Gloria Rolando is an Afrocuban filmmaker who focuses primarily on the African diaspora in the Caribbean. She has worked with Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos for more than 35 years, and heads an independent film-making group, Imágenes del Caribe in Havana. She is the second woman in Cuba to have made a feature film, Raíces de mi corazón, which was released in 2001. She is also known for her documentary films Oggun: An Eternal Presence, about Cuban Yoruba singer Lazaro Ros; My Footsteps in Baragua, a recounting of the history of an English-speaking West Indian community in Cuba; and Eyes of the Rainbow, a documentary on Assata Shakur, the Black Panther and Black Liberation Army leader who took refuge in Cuba. 

Screening, 5-7 pm, McCormick Screening Room
Raíces de mi corazón (from AfroCubaWeb):

Mercedes, a Cuban woman from Havana, begins to decipher her family secrets through the photo of her great-grandparents, María Victoria y José Julián. Between reality and the world of her dreams, she will learn about the ties this couple -- especially her great-grandfather -- had with the Independents of Color, a political party formed in 1908. The struggle of these black men and women to create a space for themselves in Cuban society at the beginning of the 20th century had a tragic outcome: the massacre of 1912. Many families suffered, but history imposed a silence, the same silence that surrounds Mercedes' great-grandparents.

April 7th: Presentation by Julio Ramos *A Department of Spanish & Portuguese Event

Julio Ramos is professor emeritus at UC-Berkeley. Professor Ramos has published widely on topics such as 19th and 20th century Latin American Literature, Cultural Theory, and Latin American film. Ramos is the author of Desencuentros de la modernidad en América Latina en el siglo XIX, one of the most important studies about modernity in the Western Hemisphere. Ramos is also a filmmaker, and has written about two Afro-Cuban directors featured at this year's festival: Gloria Rolando and Guillén Landrián.

Presentation "Detroit's Rivera: Work, Public Art, and Film"
HG 1010 5-7PM