Garrett Bradley: Interior/Exterior
October 18, 7 p.m. | Ukrop Auditorium, Robins School of Business
Re-Imagining Black Cinema: 3 Films by Oscar-Nominated Garrett Bradley, followed by a Q&A with the audience led by Sonja Bertucci and Jeremy Drummond
October 19, 10 a.m.-12 noon | Keller Hall, Visual and Media Arts Practice Gallery
Studio Visit with Student Filmmakers!
(Please contact Prof. Bertucci at sbertucc@richmond.edu if you are interested in presenting your work!)
Garrett Bradley is an artist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker who works across narrative, documentary, and experimental modes of filmmaking. In 2020, Bradley presented her debut documentary feature film Time, which was nominated for over 57 awards and won 20 times; among other notable achievements, she is the first black woman to win the best U.S. Documentary Directing award at the Sundance Film Festival.
J.P. Sniadecki: A Cinema of Encounter
October 27, 12-1:15 p.m. | Keller Hall, Visual and Media Arts Practice Gallery
Film Masterclass with J.P. Sniadecki
October 27, 7 p.m. | Ukrop Auditorium
Screening of CHAIQIAN/DEMOLITION (2008) by JP Sniadecki followed by Q&A with the audience led by Jeremy Drummond and Sonja Bertucci
J.P. Sniadecki’s works are in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and have been exhibited at the Whitney Biennale, the Shanghai Biennale, the Shenzhen Biennale, and the Guggenheim, as well as at international film festivals such as Berlin, BFI London, Locarno, New York, AFI, San Francisco, Rotterdam, Viennale, IDFA, Mar del Plata, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, and more. He is on the editorial board of the Chinese Independent Cinema Observer, founder of the Buffett Institute’s Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group, and a Professor in the Radio, TV, Film Department at Northwestern University, where he directs the MFA in Documentary Media program.
Student Curated Film Evening with Helen Mei and Jeff Tsai
Shoplifters (2018)
November 3, 7 p.m. | Ukrop Auditorium, Robins School of Business
Shoplifters (2018) is a Cannes award-winning Japanese film directed by Koreeda about a makeshift family living in the suburbs of Tokyo. The family, composed of social outcasts, adopts a consistent lifestyle of shoplifting and bonds through social reciprocity over blood. Upon unexpected exposure to the police, the reasons and secrets behind their obscure existence are revealed. In resonance with this year’s theme — “reimagining communities,” Shoplifters subverts traditional perceptions of familial ties found in the social margins of Japan.
Helen Mei is a sophomore student from Shanghai, China, who plans to double major in psychology and rhetoric & communication studies. She also intends to minor in film studies after taking her first film course at UR. Helen is an active Davis Scholar on campus.
Jeff Tsai is a sophomore student from Kaohsiung, Taiwan, intending to major in biology, and minor in film studies and visual arts. In 2022, Jeff produced his first student documentary, Blackthorns, for the Women’s Support Center in Yerevan, Armenia. He is an active Davis Scholar on campus.
Reframing Indigenous Communities in Cinema Symposium
Held in conjunction with the 7th Annual Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival in Richmond, the symposium reinvigorates conversations about telling stories of Indigenous communities.
Imaging Indigenous Cinema
November 6, 7 p.m. | Ukrop Auditorium
Imaging Indigenous Cinema: An Evening with Experimental Filmmaker Sky Hopinka
Screening of Hopinka’s short films followed by a discussion with the artist and professors Jeremy Drummond and Sonja Bertucci.
November 7, 12-1:30 p.m. | Keller Critique Room
Sky Hopinka: In Conversation with UR students
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) is a renowned contemporary Indigenous filmmaker whose work explores memory, language, and place. While his films intertwine personal stories with larger contexts, they are meditative with their use of imagery and soundscapes. Hopinka was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington, and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fiction forms of media. His work has played at various international festivals including Sundance, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor, Courtisane Festival, Punto de Vista, and the New York Film Festival. He has received numerous awards and fellowships and is currently the 2022 Mac Arthur Fellow.
In Media Rez: Indigenous Interventions in Cinema
November 13, 4:30 p.m. | Humanities Commons
Keynote lecture by Professor Kiara Vigil, Amherst College
Dr. Vigil’s keynote lecture meditates on various flashpoints in the cultural history of film and media on Turtle Island. It emphasizes Indigenous engagements with film, as viewers, actors, cultural critics, and creative producers. Focused primarily on events in the 20th century Dr. Vigil considers the intersections between acting and activism by examining how Native Americans have successfully navigated the politics of representation in Hollywood and beyond.
Kiara M. Vigil (she/her) is the dean of new students and associate professor of American studies and education studies at Amherst College. Her research and teaching focuses on Native American and Indigenous studies. Her first book, Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880-1930 (Cambridge UP) was published in 2015. Since then, she has had work appear in several peer-reviewed journals and books. Her research continues to engage with questions of sovereignty and representation with a focus on Native Americans as actors and activists, including her great grandfather, as well as, the cultural imprint made by the rare Indigenous newspaper Iapi Oaye (1871-1939), printed in Dakota — the language of her ancestors.
Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival
November 17-19 | Virginia Museum of History and Culture
The PRFF brings the most recent Indigenous cinema to Richmond, Virginia. It offers UR students and the Richmond community an opportunity to explore this filmmaking in its broad variety in moderated conversations with the filmmakers.
Full program available here: pocahontasreframed.com
Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant
January 26, 3 p.m. | Camp Concert Hall, Modlin Center for the Arts
A book talk and film screening of Dear Corky (2022) with Curtis Chin, followed by Q&A and a book signing reception.
A co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, Curtis Chin served as the non-profit’s first executive director. He went on to write for network and cable television before transitioning to social justice documentaries. Chin has screened his films at over 600 venues in sixteen countries. He has written for CNN, Bon Appetit, the Detroit Free Press, and the Emancipator/Boston Globe. A graduate of the University of Michigan, Chin has received awards from ABC/Disney Television, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and more. His memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, was recently published by Little, Brown, and Company in fall 2023. His essay in Bon Appetit was selected for the Best Food Writing in America in 2023.
Symposium: Hollywood & the Asian American Imagination
February 20-22, 2024
This symposium seeks to trace historically how Asian Americans enter the Hollywood imagination and how they are (mis/under)represented. As Asian Americans develop a voice and visual presence in Hollywood, how do they imagine, represent, and perform themselves as Asian Americans on or off-screen, speaking to Hollywood and its global audience?
“A Thousand Deaths”: Anna May Wong’s Death Acts
February 20, 12-1:15 p.m. | Humanities Commons
A keynote lecture by Professor Yiman Wang, University of California, Santa Cruz
Yiman Wang is professor of film & digital media, and Kenneth R. Corday Family Presidential Chair in Writing for Television & Film (2022-2025) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Remaking Chinese Cinema: Through the Prism of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hollywood (2013). Her NEH-supported monograph, To Be an Actress: Labor and Performance in Anna May Wong’s Cross-Media World, is forthcoming in 2024 from the University of California Press. She has published numerous articles in journals and edited volumes on topics of Chinese cinema, independent documentary, ethnic border-crossing stardom, ecocinema, animation, film remakes, and adaptation. She is the editor of a special issue of Feminist Media Histories on Asian Feminist Media, co-editor of an InFocus Dossier of the Journal of Cinema and Media on Queering Asian Media Studies, and co-editor of the Global East Asian Screen Cultures book series published by Bloomsbury.
Cinematic Representations of East Asian American Women
February 22, 12-1:15 p.m. | Humanities Commons
A keynote lecture by Professor Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University
Using the three interlocking concepts of yellow peril, yellow fever, and techno-Orientalism, this illustrated keynote lecture reveals the manifestation of “yellow fever” in the depiction of Asian American women and suggests ways to identify tacit forms of misogynistic racism as well as strategies for inclusion.
Alexa Alice Joubin is the inaugural recipient of the bell hooks Legacy Award and holder of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award. The bell hooks Award is named after the late feminist writer, who unfortunately passed away during the pandemic. The bell hooks Award recognizes Alexa’s achievements in “dismantling intersectional systems of oppression” through her “groundbreaking work that speaks to our moment in history and our hope for the future.” In 2018 she co-authored a book entitled Race (Routledge). In 2021, she wrote a book on Shakespeare and East Asia (Oxford University Press). The book examines adaptations on stage and on screen throughout East Asia, and uncovers an exciting history of cultural exchange. She has published 23 books on race, gender, cultural globalization, film, and theatre studies. She teaches at George Washington University, where she is professor of English; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; theatre; international affairs; and East Asian languages and literatures and the Co-director the Taiwan Education and Research Program. You can follow her work at ajoubin.org.
Beyond Protest: A Cinema of Black Quiet
March 18, 4:30 p.m. | Humanities Commons
Kevin Quashie, Professor of English, Brown University
Michael Boyce Gillespie, Associate Professor of Cinema Studies, NYU
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Associate Professor of English, Brown University
Peter Lurie, Associate Professor of English, University of Richmond
A panel on contemporary Black cinema inspired by the work of Professor Kevin Quashie.
In the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement and its prompting by the widespread — and justified — rage over social injustice and systemic racial violence, thinkers from both within and outside of academe have shifted their gaze from the legacy of Civil Rights protest and defiance. Inwardness, reflection, vulnerability, love — these too are the provenance of human experience and community-building.
This panel takes its title as well as its interpretive cue from Kevin Quashie and his book, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. As one description of the study offers, “Quiet is a metaphor for the inner life, and as such, enables a more nuanced understanding of black culture.” The nuance that Dr. Quashie pursues invites our own reflection on Black expressive culture and experience. The session allows him and two other highly influential scholars — Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman and Michael Boyce Gillespie — to comment on these questions in the realm of cinema. Each of the speakers have published widely in the area of African American culture. Their presentations offer a timely and unique opportunity for the University community to engage their thinking and shape our own.
The talks will each last roughly twenty minutes and will lead to an open discussion with audience members.
Be Water, My Friend
April 4, 4:30 p.m. | International Commons
A book talk with Shannon Lee, followed by Q&A and a book-signing reception
Shannon Lee is the chair of the Bruce Lee Foundation, the CEO and owner of the Bruce Lee Family Companies, and the daughter of the legendary martial artist and cultural icon Bruce Lee. Shannon’s overall mission is to provide access to her father’s wisdom and practices through education and entertainment and be a cause of healing and unity in the world. She is the creator of Camp Bruce Lee and other programs and community initiatives through the Bruce Lee Foundation, focusing on youth mental wellness and community healing through the legacy of mind, body, and spirit teachings of her father Bruce Lee. Shannon also hosts the Bruce Lee Podcast and serves as the executive producer of HBOMax’s Warrior. Her first book, Be Water, My Friend, offers insight into how to use her father’s philosophies toward a more fluid, peaceful, and fulfilling life.
Changing Perspectives: Reflections on Contemporary German Film
Zuhur’s Daughters (2021)
April 5, 3-5 P.M. | Humanities Commons
Film screening of Zuhurs Töchter (Zuhur’s Daughters) (2021) & community conversation.
This documentary follows the experiences of two trans* teenagers from a Syrian refugee family in Germany. Lohan’s and Samar’s journeys to be at home in their bodies and in their new country are complicated by cultural differences, gender expectations, and social pressures. Over a three-year period, the directors gain the trust of the family and the two sisters, and the result is a film that provides an intensely personal, complex, and honest portrait of the family’s interactions as Lohan and Samar transition and assert their place in society.
Film introduction by Kathrin Bower (pronouns: she/her, professor of German studies and film studies). Facilitation of community conversation after the screening by Casey Butler (pronouns: they/them, associate director of LGBTQ+ and campus life, Student Center for Equity and Inclusion).
Light refreshments will be provided. Event is free and open to the public.
The Ordinaries (2022)
APRIL 6, 3-5:30 P.M. | UKROP AUDITORIUM, ROBINS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Film screening of The Ordinaries (2022) & discussion.
In this extraordinary debut feature, Sophie Linnenbaum constructs a meta-cinematic world where the social hierarchies are determined by a character’s place in the story. The privileged group consists of main characters who live in elegant houses and enjoy the pleasures of light and color, while supporting characters are lower on the social ladder, and outtakes are relegated to the dimly lit black-and-white slums. Linnenbaum uses these power structures of cinematic narrative as an allegory for the forces of prejudice, exclusion, and exploitation in society, while drawing attention to the importance of visibility in shaping and instituting change.
Film introduction by Kathrin Bower, professor of German studies and film studies, and students from FMST/LLC 265 German Cinema, with discussion after the screening.
Light refreshments will be provided. Event is free and open to the public.