Indebted to all women
Trailer
Synopsis
Abortion in El Salvador is punished with 20-40 years in prison. Indebted to All Women wants to give voice to those women suffering and struggling to change one of the most restrictive law in the world for sexual and reproductive rights.
FILM INFORMATION
Release Year: 2020
Runtime: 60 minutes
Director(s): Roi Guitián, María Lobo
Language: Spanish
Subtitles: English
Featured GUEST Interviewee
María Lobo is one of the directors of Indebted to All Women. She is interested in communication as a tool for participation and for social change. She works as an educator in projects that promote media literacy, active citizenship and inclusion.
Always close to Journalism, she also produces, writes and directs documentaries, reports and other content addressed to defend human rights and social justice.
Never Going Back
Trailer
Synopsis
When Explorer left Honduras, she left everything behind. In the middle of the night, she didn’t have the chance to ask where she was going, but she’s never afraid, her father is always there taking care of her. This Honduran family travelled to Mexico looking for a safe place. A place where their two daughters could grow, and their lives weren’t on the line. This is a brief chapter of this family’s journey to protect their daughters’ lives and their innocence.
FILM INFORMATION
Release Year: 2020
Runtime: 65 minutes
Director(s): Janette A. López
Language: Spanish
Subtitles: English
Alice Street
Trailer
Synopsis
Two Oakland artists, Pancho Peskador, a Chilean studio painter, and Desi Mundo, a Chicago-born aerosol artist, form an unlikely partnership to tackle their most ambitious project to date, a four-story mural in the heart of downtown Oakland. Their site is situated at a unique intersection where Chinese and Afro-Diasporic communities face the imminent threat of displacement and gentrification. Prior to painting, the mural faces numerous obstacles: complex negotiations with profit-minded property owners, satisfying a community of diverse residents, and resolving the artists’ own aesthetic conflicts.
As the mural takes shape on the wall, Oakland’s unique cultural legacies come to life through historical flashbacks. Past exclusionary policies replay themselves in the present as gentrification threatens to uproot long-term residents. The mural is fraught with its own challenges. A disgruntled neighborhood resident launches a vendetta against the artists, unleashing a blizzard of letters to city officials and newspapers. Simultaneously, the property owner of the mural site schemes to demolish it and construct the city’s largest luxury condo. Nonetheless, Desi and Pancho conclude the mural with great fanfare and a vibrant celebration.
Three months later, news comes that another forthcoming condominium development will obscure the mural, which has become a source of neighborhood pride. Despite last-ditch opposition to the condominium, it receives city approval, effectively dooming the mural. Meanwhile, the city unveils its urban planning process for the downtown district. Ultimately displaced, the mural becomes a spark for the community to rally to protect cultural arts, and coalescing the community resistance to gentrification.
FILM INFORMATION
Release Year: 2020
Runtime: 60 minutes
Director(s): Spencer Wilkinson
Language: English
Subtitles: n/a
Featured GUEST Interviewee
After a decade working with gang-involved and homeless youth in the California Bay Area, Spencer Wilkinson founded Endangered Ideas in Oakland, to focus on stories of resilience. In 2018, he directed the feature-length "ONE VOICE: The Story of the Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir" which premiered at the Mill Valley Film Festival, was a "Best Movie of the East Bay" in 2019 and featured on PBS' "Truly CA" 2020 season.
He is the director and producer of ALICE STREET which premiered in 2020. KQED Arts describes ALICE STREET as “set in just a few city blocks, it’s a story about intractable loss as well as collective refusal, depicting artists’ role in grassroots activism that builds power by bridging communities.” ALICE STREET won the Audience Choice Award for Feature Documentary at the Oakland International Film Festival.
From Durban To Tomorrow
Trailer
Synopsis
From Durban To Tomorrow is set as the International Aids Conference - the largest health conference in the world - comes to Durban, South Africa again in 2016, after first taking place there in 2000. The 2000 conference was a watershed, and led to huge breakthroughs in access to AIDS treatment globally. In the film, we visit five activists and learn about their work in South Africa, Guinea, Spain, Hungary, and India, to ensure access to treatment and quality health care for people who are most vulnerable and marginalized. We hear their hopes and visions for the future, their sense of what is possible, and their calls to a renewed commitment to the fight for universal health care.
FILM INFORMATION
Release Year: 2020
Runtime: 40 minutes
Director(s): Dylan Mohan Gray
Language: English, Hungarian, Spanish French, Hindi
Subtitles: English
Featured GUEST Interviewee
Dr. Patricia Connick is a family physician based in Calgary, Alta. In addition to being a clinical lecturer in the University of Calgary’s Department of Family Medicine, she also practises at the Mosaic Refugee Health clinic. She provides primary care to refugees and also teaches medical students and family medicine residents.
Dr. Connick is a medical aid worker with the Canadian Red Cross Emergency Response Unit (ERU) and worked in Jordan at a Syrian refugee hospital in 2014, and in Nepal following the 2015 earthquake, She was in Ecuador after the 2016 earthquake, where she worked in mobile clinics, providing healthcare to people in rural areas. Most recently, Dr. Connick worked at the cholera clinic in Mozambique following the 2019 hurricane. She has a special interest in global health, specifically in child/maternal health and skin diseases.
Dr. Connick obtained her MD from the University of Calgary, where she also completed her family medicine residency. In 2007, she completed her Diploma in Tropical Medicine (DMTH) in Lima, Peru, a dermatology diploma from Cardiff University in Wales in 2017, and a Professional Certificate in Skin Cancer Medicine in Melbourne 2020.
Sockeye Salmon, Red Fish
Trailer
Synopsis
Sockeye, a species of wild salmon, is born in Kamchatkan waters and spends its entire life in the Pacific Ocean. Only once does it return to fresh waters - to give offspring, start the circle of life, and die. It is an inexhaustible resource that feeds billions of people on the planet, restored every year! But soon, we may find ourselves facing the unimaginable: humans will exhaust the inexhaustible!
FILM INFORMATION
Release Year: 2020
Runtime: 51 minutes
Director(s): Dmitriy Shpilenok, Vladislav Grishin
Language: Russian
Subtitles: English
Featured GUEST Interviewee
Misty MacDuffee is a conservation biologist with a focus on fisheries ecology in salmon ecosystems. For the past 15 years, she has undertaken various types of field, laboratory, technical and conservation assessments in the salmon-bearing watersheds of the BC coast. She has a particular interest in the role of salmon as critical food sources for wildlife and incorporating their needs into salmon management decisions. She is also interested in historic stock assessment and run reconstructions in salmon watersheds.
The application of her work is to implement ecosystem considerations in fisheries management. This often requires her engagement with management, dialogue and stakeholder forums that affect fisheries and wildlife policy.
Servitude
Trailer
Synopsis
Many Brazilians think that slavery ended with the signing of the Golden Law. But the relations of slave labor exploitation continue to this day. It is estimated that at this very moment there are 369 thousand Brazilians living and working as slaves. Through the testimony of modern abolitionists and rural workers who were victims of contemporary slavery, Servitude (Servidão) investigates the slavery mentality of Brazilian society that dates back to 5 centuries. Narrated by Negra Li, Servitude is a resounding record of one of the greatest ills in Brazil.
FILM INFORMATION
Release Year: 2020
Runtime: 72 minutes
Director(s): Renato Barbieri
Language: Portuguese
Subtitles: English
Featured GUEST Interviewee
Renato Barbieri is the Creative Director in GAYA Films, a production company located in Brasília. He is a film director, producer and screenwriter. His directorial debut was in 1983, in the production company “Olhar Eletrônico”, in São Paulo. Renato was also the director of Jornal de Vanguarda, in the television network Band. His award-winning works include Cora Coralina – Todas as Vidas, Atlântico Negro – na Rota dos Orixás, Do Outro Lado da Sua Casa, As Vidas de Maria, Lendas Animadas, A Invenção de Brasília, Malagrida, Bianchetti, and others. He is a curator in the project Teste de Audiência and a director in CONNE (an association of production companies and producers from the Central-West, North and Northeast regions in Brazil).
SAFE HAVEN
Trailer
Synopsis
SAFE HAVEN weaves together the powerful stories of U.S. war resisters who sought safe haven in Canada during both the Vietnam and Iraq wars. The film explores the intersection of these two groups of men and women during the Iraq war as many Vietnam era resisters participated in a movement to support the younger generation. SAFE HAVEN shows the reality and the myth of Canada as a welcoming country to those seeking protection. It delves into the decision making of people deciding to leave home and escape military service. People who found safe haven, and those who were forced home discuss their lives on both sides of the border.
FILM INFORMATION
Release Year: 2020
Runtime: 78 minutes
Director(s): Lisa Molomot
Language: English
Subtitles: None
Featured GUEST Interviewee
Alison Mountz is the producer of Safe Haven. She is a geographer and Canada Research Chair in Global Migration at Wilfrid Laurier University. She first moved to Canada from the United States in 1998, and has spent much of her adult life crossing and researching the border between the two countries. She explores how people migrate across borders, access migration and asylum policies, survive detention, resist war, and create safe havens. Alison’s monographs include Seeking Asylum: Human Smuggling and Bureaucracy at the Border (University of Minnesota); Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States (California, with Jenna Loyd); and The death of asylum: hidden geographies of the enforcement archipelago (Minnesota). Mountz directs Laurier's International Migration Research Centre and edits the journal Politics & Space.