Community Cinema

The Cincinnati Film Festival is a Community Cinema screening partner. During the 2012 CFF, we introduced free screenings via Community Cinema to Cincinnati area. Community Cinema brings the important documentaries you’ll see on PBS’s award winning documentary series, Independent Lens, to over 100 cities nationwide to inspire dialogue and action on important issues of our time. All films in the Community Cinema program are broadcast on your local PBS affiliate, like Cincinnati Educational Television – CET, a media partner of the Cincinnati Film Festival. Check out the Independent Lens schedule on CET.

Representatives from Cincinnati CISV and Cincinnati Youth Collaborative will be on hand for the post-film discussion.

Synopsis: Amlan Ganguly empowers children to become activists and educators, with powerful results. The Revolutionary Optimists follows him as he attempts to replicate his work in the brick fields outside the city, where children live and work in unimaginable conditions.

Using street theater, puppetry, and dance as their weapons, the children in Calcutta’s slums have cut their neighborhoods’ malaria and diarrhea rates in half, and turned former garbage dumps into playing fields. Now, pushing at the limits of optimism, Amlan is attempting to take his work into the brickfields outside Calcutta, where spend their days making and carrying bricks using methods unchanged by centuries.

The Revolutionary Optimists proposes a workable solution to intractable problems associated with poverty, including preventable diseases and ineffectual governance. Ganguly’s story suggests that education and child empowerment are crucial keys to lifting entire societies out of hopelessness.

The Island President lifts the issue of global warming out of the theoretical and into the personal. President Mohamed Nasheed is trying to prevent 385,000 people from drowning. His nation of 1,200 low-lying islands, the Maldives, is sinking into the Indian Ocean as sea levels rise due to global warming. Climate change experts say that some of the islands will be submerged within 20 years, threatening the lives of the largely impoverished inhabitants as well as inundating the lavish resorts that dot the islands. Nasheed’s unprecedented contingency plan is to move his entire population to a new homeland. As he conducts serious discussions about this with Sri Lanka and Australia, Nasheed is doing all he can to prevent this looming disaster by trying to convince world leaders to halt global warming.

The Island President is a little like a non-fiction Mr. Smith Goes to Washington elevated to the world stage. The filmmakers received exclusive access to follow President Nasheed as he prepared over several months for the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit in December. The terms of the 1997 Kyoto Treaty on Climate Change were about to expire, and leaders from around the world converged on Copenhagen to hammer out a new treaty with renewed urgency. Go behind the scenes with President Nasheed as he tries to convince world leaders to finally take serious action against looming danger of climate change. The stakes couldn’t be higher for President Nasheed, who may be faced with the last chance to save his homeland, and the world.

Post-film discussion panelists include William Messer, and a representative from Civic Garden Center.

Tracing the fascinating evolution and legacy of Wonder Woman, from the birth of the comic book superheroine in the 1940s to the blockbusters of today, Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines looks at how popular representations of powerful women often reflect society’s anxieties about women’s liberation.

Post-film discussion panelists include: comic artists Michael Altman; creator of Super Mom comic Scott Bachmann; and national Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker and Artist in Residence at NKU, Rachel Lyon.

Whitney M. Young, Jr. was one of the most celebrated — and controversial — leaders of the civil rights era. The Powerbroker: Whitney Young’s Fight for Civil Rights follows his journey from segregated Kentucky to head of the National Urban League. Unique among black leaders, he took the fight directly to the powerful white elite, gaining allies in business and government, including three presidents. Young had the difficult tasks of calming the fears of white allies, relieving the doubts of fellow civil rights leaders, and responding to attacks from the militant Black Power movement.

Thank you to our partners for this event:

Filmmaker Byron Hurt explores the upsides and downsides of soul food, a quintessential American cuisine. Soul Food Junkies explores the history and social significance of soul food to black cultural identity and its effect on African American health, good and bad. Soul food will also be used as the lens to investigate the dark side of the food industry and the growing food justice movement that has been born in its wake.

You can see a listing of the upcoming films at:
http://communitycinema.org/films

Community Cinema Cincinnati schedule: http://communitycinema.org/city/cincinnati-ohio