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The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

In the 1960s, change was coming to America, ready or not. A new revolutionary culture was emerging, and those seeking to drastically transform the system believed radical change was not only feasible, but imminent.  For a short time, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense put itself at the vanguard of that change. Whether they were right or wrong, good or bad, the group and its leadership remain powerful and enduring figures in our popular imaginationnearly 50 years after the Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California.The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is a feature documentary that includes eyewitness accounts from the first members who joined the organization, rank-and-file members in cities like Chicago, Oakland, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as the voices of lawyers, journalists, scholars, police officers, and former FBI agents.

Opens at Film Forum on September 2

Filmmaker(s): Stanley Nelson
Country of Production: US
Year: 2015
116 min
Language(s): In English
Genre: Documentary
Filmmaker Bio(s):

Stanley Nelson

Director, Producer, Writer

Stanley Nelson is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, MacArthur “genius” Fellow, and member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in August 2014. THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION is Nelson’s 8th film to premiere at Sundance Film Festival.

Film Website: 

The Black Panthers film website

Presented in partnership with: 

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Concerns over race and policing that The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution raises are still very much alive in the United States, as witnessed with widespread public protests over police mistreatment of African Americans, triggered by recent police killings of unarmed black men. Human Rights Watch has long documented racial disparities in the US criminal justice system—from arrest to sentencing—and have actively pressed for reforms, including advocating for regulations and legislation, that aim to collect better data about policing and reduce incidents of profiling by law enforcement. We have also reported on the FBI's inappropriate targeting of particular ethnic and religious communities for surveillance similar to that depicted in the film, especially when it comes to terrorism investigations. Such practices often foster mistrust of law enforcement in the very communities where law enforcement officials need to build trust. 

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The Dream of Shahrazad

Filmmaker Francois Verster explores how music and storytelling can serve as an outlet for citizens to process political upheaval. Using the metaphor of Shahrazad–the princess in the classic tale of The 1001 (Arabian) Nights who saves lives by telling stories to the murderous Sultan Shahriyar–and filmed before, during, and after the so-called Arab Spring, the film weaves together a web of music, politics, and storytelling to explore the ways in which creativity and politics coincide in response to oppression. A series of unforgettable characters all draw their inspiration from The 1001 (Arabian) Nights, including a conductor who uses Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade suite as a tool for Istanbul political education, a young female Lebanese internet activist, a visual artist who finds his own "dream of Shahrazad", and a Cairo theater troupe who turn the testimonies of mothers of the Egyptian revolution martyrs into storytelling performances. This richly kaleidoscopic film is at once observational documentary, concert film, political meditation, and visual translation of an ever-popular symphonic and literary classic.

Filmmaker(s): 

Francois Verster

Country of Production: 

South Africa/Egypt/Jordan/France/The Netherlands

Year: 

2014

107m

Language(s): 

In English, Arabic and Turkish with English subtitles

Genre: 

Documentary

Filmmaker Bio(s): 

Francois Verster

Director, Producer, Camera, Editor

Francois Verster is a multiple-award winning independent documentary filmmaker based in Cape Town, South Africa.  His films generally follow “creative” observational approaches to social issues and have all won local and international awards and been broadcast around the world. He has taught documentary directing and film studies and his films have been used in various seminars on the intersection between creative documentary and social activism.

Film Website: 

The Dream of Shahrazad website

Presented in partnership with: 

Alwan for the Arts

Like The Dream of Shahrazad, Human Rights Watch has followed events in the Middle East and Turkey before, during, and since the Arab uprisings. Human Rights Watch has documented human rights abuses related to government reactions to mass protests in a number of countries, including arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, as well as abuses related to freedom of expression, association, and assembly.

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What Tomorrow Brings

What Tomorrow Brings follows one year in the life of the first all-girls school in a remote, conservative Afghan village. The film traces the inter-connected stories of those who bring the school to life: students, teachers, village elders, parents, and school founder Razia Jan. While the girls learn to read and write, their education goes far beyond the classroom to become lessons about tradition and time. They discover their school is the one place they can turn to understand the differences between the lives they were born into and the lives they dream of leading.

Filmmaker(s): Beth Murphy
Country of Production: Afghanistan/US
Year: 2015, 90m
Language(s): In English and Dari with English subtitles
Genre: Documentary

Filmmaker Bio(s): 

Beth Murphy

Director, Producer

Beth Murphy founded Principle Pictures in 1999 to do what she loves doing most: meeting inspiring people, telling great stories, and using media as a catalyst for good. She has directed, produced, written and in some cases narrated nearly 20 documentary films for national and international media outlets.

Film Website: 

Principle Pictures website

Presented in partnership with: 

Rotary District 7950 with the support of DG Valerie Perry

Much of Afghanistan's future will depend on whether its girls can read or not. What Tomorrow Brings is both an indictment of how tenuous access to education still is in Afghanistan and a moving depiction of Afghan girls and their teachers pursuing learning at all costs. —Heather Barr, senior researcher, Women's Rights Division

Afghanistan's Taliban government banned girls from school. When the Taliban was toppled in 2001, the new Afghan government and its donors began the enormous project of recreating an educational system for girls. Fourteen years later, millions of girls attend school, but the project is far from complete. Less than half of Afghan girls are in school, and dropout rates are extremely high. Girls struggle to study in the face of attacks on schools, students, and teachers by insurgents, poverty, child marriage, and a lack of skilled teachers, safe buildings, books, and even basic facilities – at a moment when donor funding and interest is fading fast.

Human Rights Watch video on Military Use of Schools

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Life Is Sacred

Violence is part of everyday life in Colombia, where the military, guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug cartels have been fighting for decades, and hundreds of thousands of people have been killed. But the unorthodox presidential candidate Antanas Mockus and his enthusiastic young activist supporters attempt to reverse the vicious cycle with an imaginative and positive election campaign. As mayor of Bogotá, dressed in a Superman costume and with an indomitable trust in the good of his fellow citizens, he took on towering crime rates and people's bad traffic habits. But his idealism is both his strength and his weakness in an aggressive political system in which he struggles to restore people’s faith in being able to make a difference. Can good ideas and an idealistic drive alone change a political culture where violence is rampant? This is the portrait of an inspiring man and a powerful youth movement, whose stories are relevant far beyond Colombia's borders. 

Filmmaker(s): Andreas Dalsgaard

Country of Production: Denmark

Year: 2014, 104 min

Language(s):  In Spanish with English subtitles

Genre: Documentary

Filmmaker Bio(s): 

Andreas Dalsgaard

Director

Andreas M. Dalsgaard graduated from the National Film School of Denmark as a fiction film director in 2009. In 2012 Dalsgaard finished the documentary/fiction hybrid called “Traveling with Mr. T” (co-directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont – premiered at CPH:DOX in November 2012) which is also produced by Signe Byrge Sørensen for Final Cut for Real. In 2013 Andreas M. Dalsgaard started ELK Film, a production collective. Most recently Andreas M. Dalsgaard finished “Life is Sacred”, produced by Anne Köhncke and Signe Byrge Sørensen, Final Cut for Real.

Film Website: 

Life is Sacred film website

Presented in partnership with: 

Cinema Tropical

El Museo del Barrio

Colombia has been embroiled in an internal armed conflict for the past five decades. Civilians continue to suffer serious abuses by guerrillas, as well as by paramilitary successor groups that emerged after an official paramilitary demobilisation process a decade ago. Violence associated with Colombia's conflict has forcibly displaced more than 5.7 million Colombians, and upward of 200,000 continue to flee their homes each year, generating the world's second largest population of internally displaced persons. The Colombian government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas have been engaged in peace talks in Cuba since 2012 and at time of writing had reached an agreement on three of the six items on the negotiating agenda.