Eau Claire Progressive Film Festival

04/18/2008 - 12:00am
04/27/2008 - 12:00am

Screenings of many rarely-seen progressive films. A project of the Progressive Media Network. More details soon. Call 715-836-4369 for more information or visit the web site.

 Hibbard Humanities Hall Room 100, UW Eau Claire

Friday April 18, 8 pm: No End in Sight

Iraq’s descent into chaos: the inside story from the ultimate insiders.  The first film of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq’s descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality and anarchy, offering an insider’s tale of wholesale incompetence, recklessness and venality after the fall of Baghdad in 2003.  Exposes how the errors of U.S. policy created the insurgency and chaos in Iraq.    NR/102 minutes/2007.

Saturday April 19, 5 pm: Hacking Democracy

A nonpartisan, clear-eyed look at the secrecy, cronyism, and incompetence of elections in present-day America.  The film the Diebold corporation doesn’t want you to see, this revelatory journey follows tenacious Seattle grandmother Bev Harris and her band of extraordinary citizen-activists as they set out to answer one simple question: How does America count its votes? Starkly revealing a broken system riddled with secrecy, incompetent election officials, and electronic voting machines that can be programmed to steal elections.  NR/81 minutes/2006.

Saturday April 19, 8 pm: La Haine [Hate]

A gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically in the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’ outskirts.  Gives human faces to France’s immigrant populations, with their bristling resentment at their social marginalization slowly simmering until it reaches a climactic boiling point.  A work of tough beauty, a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of it’s country’s ongoing identity crisis.  NR/97 minutes/1995.

Sunday April 20, 5 pm: Fires on the Plain

An agonizing portrait of desperate Japanese soldiers stranded in a strange land during World War II in one of the most harrowing anti-war films ever made.  Focusing on a convincing descent into psychological and physical oblivion, following an increasingly debased cross section of Imperial Army soldiers, wandering aimlessly in an unfamiliar Philippine landscape, who eventually give into the most terrifying craving of all.  Grisly yet poetic, one of the most powerful works from one of Japanese cinema’s most versatile of filmmakers, Kon Ichikawa.  NR/104 minutes/1959.

Sunday April 20, 8 pm: Inland Empire

David Lynch’s most thoroughly bizarre, complexly challenging, and fully avant-garde feature-length film, picking up where Mulholland Drive left off and pushing far past.  "Dark as pitch, as noir, as hate, by turns beautiful and ugly, funny and horrifying, the film is also as cracked as Mad magazine, though generally more difficult to parse . . . "– Manohla Dargis, New York Times  "Strange, electrifying, terrifying, beautiful . . ."–Glenn Kenny, Premiere magazine
R/179 minutes/2006.

Monday April 21, 8 pm: Black Gold

This mesmerizing documentary tells the dark back-story of coffee, from the raw bean to your to-go cup.  Do you know where your latté comes from?  Follow Ethiopian coffee co-op manager Tadesse Meskela as he travels the world seeking fair trade policies for his growers in the exploding international coffee market.  NR/78 minutes/2006.

Tuesday April 22, 8 pm: Half Moon

Mamo, an iconic Kurdish musician in the twilight of his life and failing health, must lead a dozen of his sons to Iraq for a concert–"a cry of freedom"–to celebrate the fall of Saddam Hussein and the end of the repression of Kurdish music.  Their plan is to drive across the border between Iranian and Iraqi Kurdistan, but the road will be long and winding and the local wise man has predicted calamity.  On their quest, the men will encounter the most sublime visions alongside the most horrendous brutality–primarily meted out by border guards.   NR/107 minutes/2006.

Wednesday April 23, 8 pm: Killer of Sheep

Charles Burnett’s masterpiece of African American filmmaking, set in the Los Angeles community of Watts, focusing on Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb from the toll of working in a slaughterhouse.  Frustrated by money problems, he finds solace in moments of simple beauty as Burnett combines lyrical moments with neorealist style in his directorial debut.  Chosen for the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress and named one of the 100 Essential Films by the National Society of Film Critics.   NR/81 minutes/1977.

Thursday April 24, 8 pm: The Price of Sugar

Exposes the tragic, near slave-like conditions of Haitian plantation workers in the Dominican sugar industry.  Narrated by Paul Newman, the film is a disturbing, emotionally affecting, and yet optimistic look at this largely unknown atrocity.  The crew put its own life at risk to capture incriminating footage that will change forever the way we look at our dinner table.  NR/90 minutes/2007.   

Friday April 25, 8 pm: King Corn

A feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives our fast-food nation.  Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, best friends from college on the East Coast, move to the Midwest heartland to learn where their food comes from.  With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, nitrogen fertilizers, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil.  But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat–and how we farm.  NR//88 minutes/2007. 

Saturday April 26, 5 pm: Titicut Follies

From direct cinema/cinema verité master Frederick Wiseman, a stark and graphic portrayal of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts that documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers, and psychiatrists.  "Titicut Follies is a great work, a near-masterpiece not just of the documentary form, but of moviemaking in any category.  It’s a film that transcends the time and place of its manufacture, and it should be seen not just by documentarians and film students but by anyone interested in the movies as a medium capable of powerfully presenting the human condition." – Ray Greene, Village View.  NR/84 minutes/1967.

Saturday April 26, 8 pm: Belfast, Maine

From direct cinema/cinema verité master Frederick Wiseman, a film about ordinary experience in a beautiful old New England port city that focuses on daily life with particular emphasis on the work and the cultural life of the community.  "An immensely rich and immeasurably valuable microcosm of American life at the end of the twentieth century . . .  It reminds us, movingly, of the persistent strength and beauty of the natural world, which is made to serve the economy; and it pays tribute to the courage and good will of people who go out, day after day, to ease what suffering they can."  –Stuart Klawans, The Nation.  NR, 1999, 248 minutes.

Sunday April 27, 5 pm: La Commune, Paris, 1871, Part One [The Paris Commune]

Explores that famous, brief, romantic, and tragic period when poor and working-class Parisiens rose up against and seized power from the bourgeois French national government, which fled the capital and re-established itself in Versailles.  Inside a giant warehouse director Peter Watkins assembles a cast of over 200 non-professional actors to re-create the events of March, 1871–the rise and fall of the Paris Commune.  Including strikingly deliberately anachronistic devices, and persistently mixing past and present, while steadfastly revolutionary in form as well as content, Watkins’ audacious masterpiece forces us to confront notions of a safe or objective reading of the past, and also to reflect, inevitably, upon the present.  NR/2001/A Total of 345 minutes; A Break Will Take Place Between Parts One and Two.


Sunday April 27, 8 pm: La Commune, Paris, 1871. Part Two [The Paris Commune]Explores that famous, brief, romantic, and tragic period when poor and working-class Parisiens rose up against and seized power from the bourgeois French national government, which fled the capital and re-established itself in Versailles.  Inside a giant warehouse director Peter Watkins assembles a cast of over 200 non-professional actors to re-create the events of March, 1871–the rise and fall of the Paris Commune.  Including strikingly deliberately anachronistic devices, and persistently mixing past and present, while steadfastly revolutionary in form as well as content, Watkins’ audacious masterpiece forces us to confront notions of a safe or objective reading of the past, and also to reflect, inevitably, upon the present.  NR/2001/A Total of 345 minutes; A Break Will Take Place Between Parts One and Two.