Khmer Studies Forum Screening: A River Changes Course

Watch Trailer Director: Kalyanee Mam
Awards: Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance

This film is being screened as part of Ohio University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies’ Khmer (Cambodian) Studies Forum. The screening is co-sponsored by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the School of Film at Ohio University.

For more info about the Khmer Studies Forum, please visit: www.seas.ohio.edu/ksf2013.html

Twice a year in Cambodia, the Tonle Sap River changes course, while the river of life flows in a perpetual cycle of death and rebirth and of creation and destruction. Working in an intimate, verite style, filmmaker Kalyanee Mam (Director of Photography for the Oscar-winning documentary INSIDE JOB), spent two years in her native homeland following three young Cambodians struggling to overcome the crushing effects of deforestation, overfishing, and overwhelming debt. A breathtaking and unprecedented journey from the remote, mountainous jungles and floating cities of the Cambodian countryside to the bustling garment factories of modern Phnom Penh, A RIVER CHANGES COURSE traces a remarkable and devastatingly beautiful story of a country torn between the rural present and an ominous industrial future.

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Running Time: 83 Minutes83 MIN
Not Rated

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Cultures of Incarceration Series: Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians

Watch Trailer Director: Benjamin J. Harbert
Cast: Quincy Jones, Otis Williams, Yves Bourgeois

This screening is part of the “Cultures of Incarceration Series”, presented by the Center for Law, Justice and Culture at Ohio University.  “Cultures of Incarceration” is a three-film series showing at the Athena this spring and features three titles: THE HOUSE I LIVE IN, INTO THE ABYSS, and FOLLOW ME DOWN: PORTRAITS OF LOUISIANA PRISON MUSICIANS.

Following the screening of “Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians” will be a live discussion with the director, Benjamin J. Harbert.

Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians

FOLLOW ME DOWN is a feature-length documentary about music in prison. Shot over the course of two years in three Louisiana prisons, Georgetown ethnomusicologist Ben Harbert weaves together interviews and performances of extraordinary inmate musicians–some serving life sentences, some new commits and one soon to be released. The result, in essence, is a concert film, but instead of bright lights and big stages, these musicians rap in the fields while picking okra, soothe themselves with R&B in lockdown and create a cappella gospel harmonies. With unprecedented access and Harbert’s insistence on letting the music speak for itself, the film offers an unexpected look at prison life, pushing viewers to reach their own conclusions about criminality, regret, redemption, and the humanity in us all.

 

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Running Time: 104 Minutes104 MIN
Not Rated
This Film is Wheelchair Accessible

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Cultures of Incarceration: Into the Abyss

Watch Trailer Director: Werner Herzog
Cast: Werner Herzog, Richard Lopez, Michael Perry
Awards: Winner of BFI Grierson Award

This screening is part of the “Cultures of Incarceration Series”, presented by the Center for Law, Justice and Culture at Ohio University.  “Cultures of Incarceration” is a three-film series showing at the Athena this spring and features three titles: THE HOUSE I LIVE IN, INTO THE ABYSS, and FOLLOW ME DOWN.

Into the Abyss

In his fascinating exploration of a triple homicide case in Conroe, Texas, master filmmaker Werner Herzog probes the human psyche to explore why people kill—and why a state kills. In intimate conversations with those involved, including 28-year-old death row inmate Michael Perry, Herzog achihieves what he describes as “a gaze into the abyss of the human soul.” Herzog’s inquiries also extend to the families of the victims and perpetrators as well as a state executioner and pastor who’ve been with death row prisoners as they’ve taken their final breaths. As he’s so often done before, Herzog’s investigation unveils layers of humanity, making an enlightening trip out of ominous territory.

 “A disquieting, heartbreaking look at American crime and punishment.”-Sheri Linden, Hollywood Reporter

 

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Running Time: 107 Minutes107 MIN
PG-13 Rated
This Film is Wheelchair Accessible

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Cultures of Incarceration Series: The House I Live In

Watch Trailer Director: Eugene Jarecki
Writer(s): Eugene Jarecki and Christopher St. John
Cast: Nannie Jeter, David Simon
Awards: Winner of the 2012 Sundance Grand Jury Prize

This screening is part of the “Cultures of Incarceration Series”, presented by the Center for Law, Justice and Culture at Ohio University.  “Cultures of Incarceration” is a three-film series showing at the Athena this spring and features three titles: THE HOUSE I LIVE IN, INTO THE ABYSS, and FOLLOW ME DOWN.

The House I Live In

As America remains embroiled in conflict overseas, a less visible war is taking place at home, costing countless lives, destroying families, and inflicting untold damage on future generations of Americans. Over forty years, the War on Drugs has accounted for more than 45 million arrests, made America the world’s largest jailer, and damaged poor communities at home and abroad. Yet for all that, drugs are cheaper, purer, and more available today than ever before.

“A model of the ambitious, vitalizing activist work that exists to stir the sleeping to wake.”–Manohla Dargis, New York Times

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Running Time: 108 Minutes108 MIN
Not Rated
This Film is Wheelchair Accessible

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Wrong

Watch Trailer Director: Quentin Dupieux
Writer(s): Quentin Dupieux
Cast: Jack Plotnick, Todd Giebenhan, Eric Judor
Awards: Nominated for Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival

Dolph Springer (Reno 911’s Jack Plotnick) awakens one morning to find he has lost the sole love of his life – his dog, Paul. Desperate to reunite with his best friend and to set things right, Dolph embarks on a journey which spirals into the realm of the absurd. On his quest, he drastically alters the lives of several severely bizarro characters, including a promiscuous pizza delivery girl (Entourage’s Alexis Dziena), a mentally unstable, jogging-addicted neighbor, an opportunistic French-Mexican gardener, an eccentric pet detective (Steve Little of HBO’s Eastbound And Down) and most mysterious of all, an enigmatic pony-tailed guru, Master Chang (William Fichtner) who imparts his teachings to Dolph on how to metaphysically reconnect with his pet. From fearless cinematic surrealist Quentin Dupieux, the director behind the head-exploding Rubber, Wrong is a wholly original and hilariously hallucinatory universe all its own.

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Running Time: 94 Minutes94 MIN
Not Rated

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John Dies at the End

Watch Trailer Director: Don Coscarelli
Writer(s): Don Coscarelli and David Wong
Cast: Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes, Paul Giamatti

We’re talking about a drug that promises an out-of-body experience with each hit. On the street they call it Soy Sauce, and users drift across time and dimensions. But some who come back are no longer human. Suddenly a silent otherworldly invasion is underway, and mankind needs a hero. What it gets instead is John and David, a pair of college dropouts who can barely hold down jobs. Can these two stop the oncoming horror in time to save humanity? No. No, they can’t. Based on the novel by author David Wong, John Dies at the End was adapted and directed by horror auteur Don Coscarelli.

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Running Time: 99 Minutes99 MIN
R Rated

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Divan Presented by Director Pearl Gluck

Watch Trailer Director: Pearl Gluck
Language: In English with Hungarian and Yiddish with English Subtitles

On March 20th at 8:00, please join us for a screening of “Divan”, presented by the director of the film and Ohio University School of Film professor, Pearl Gluck. Free admission. This event is co-sponsored by Ohio University’s School of Film and Hillel.
As a teenager, filmmaker Pearl Gluck left her Orthodox Jewish clan in
Brooklyn for secular life in Manhattan. Many years later, Pearl’s father has
one wish: that she marry and return to the community. Pearl, however,
takes a more creative approach to mend the breach. She travels to Hungary
to retrieve a turn-of-the-century family heirloom: a couch upon which
esteemed rabbis once slept. En route for the ancestral divan, Pearl
encounters a colorful cast of characters who provide guidance and
inspiration, including a couch exporter, her ex-communist cousin in
Budapest, a pair of Hungarian-American matchmakers and a renegade
group of formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews. Nimbly clever and intensely
illuminating, DIVAN is a visual parable that offers the possibility of
personal reinvention and cultural re-upholstery.

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Running Time: 77 Minutes77 MIN
Not Rated

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Science on Screen®: SMALL, BEAUTIFULLY MOVING PARTS

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The Effects of Modern Technology on Human Interaction

Join us for a free screening of Small, Beautifully Moving Parts with guest presenter and digital media expert, Molly Wright Steenson, Professor of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin. Also join us for a conversation and Q&A with co-director and OU Film Professor Annie J. Howell.

About the film

When technophile Sarah Sparks (Anna Margaret Hollyman) becomes pregnant, her uncertainties about motherhood trigger an impulsive road trip to the source of her anxiety: her long-estranged mother living far away and off-the-grid. A SXSW premiere and winner of the Sloan Feature Film Prize, Annie J. Howell and Lisa Robinson co-direct this comic coming-of-parenthood tale for the internet age.

About the speakers

Annie J. Howell is a screenwriter and director. Her first film, co-written and co-directed with Lisa Robinson, SMALL, BEAUTIFULLY MOVING PARTS (starring Anna Margaret Hollyman), premiered at SXSW in 2011 and went on to play over thirty festivals, including the Hamptons, Mill Valley, Denver, and RiverRun. The film received the Sloan Feature Film Prize, presented at the Hamptons, and the Audience Award at RiverRun, and went on to play in art house theaters across the nation to positive reviews from Variety, Huffington Post and NPR.

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Biography provided by Steenson’s official website:

“I’m Molly Wright Steenson and I’m a designer, writer, speaker, and professor whose work focuses on the intersection and implications of design, architecture, and artificial intelligence. I’m the author of Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017), which examines architecture’s interactions with computation, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence.

My book Architectural Intelligence is an architectural history of digital design and a digital history of architecture, with deep case studies on the work of Christopher Alexander, Richard Saul Wurman, Nicholas Negroponte, and Cedric Price, and the ways that their work influenced the development of contemporary digital design practices, including information architecture and interaction design. My second book Bauhaus Futures, co-edited with Laura Forlano and Mike Ananny, is a collection about what would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were around today, and will appear in 2019. Both books are on MIT Press.”

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Science on Screen® is an initiative of the Coolidge Corner Theatre, with major support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Science on Screen program pairs films with a short talk with a scientist or technology expert. The free Science on Screen events are fun and engaging, offering dynamic speakers an unexpected jumping point to teach their field of expertise in a way that is accessible to a diverse audience.

 

Free admission to this event is provided by Arts for OHIO.

 

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Running Time: 73 Minutes73 MIN
Not Rated
This Film is Wheelchair Accessible

"Small, Beautifully Moving Parts" is a tiny, sweet gem.

Joe Neumaier
The New York Daily News
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Stand Up Guys

Watch Trailer Director: Fisher Stevens
Writer(s): Noah Haidle
Cast: Al Pacino, Alan Arkin and Christopher Walken

Val (Al Pacino) is released from prison after serving twenty-eight years for refusing to give up one of his close criminal associates. His best friend Doc (Christopher Walken) is there to pick him up, and the two soon re-team with another old pal, Hirsch (Alan Arkin). Their bond is as strong as ever, and the three reflect on freedom lost and gained, loyalties ebbed and flowed, and days of glory gone by. But one of the friends is keeping a dangerous secret- he’s been put in an impossible quandary by a former mob boss, and his time to find an acceptable alternative is running out. As the sun rises on the guys’ legendary reunion, their position becomes more and more desperate and they finally confront their past once and for all.

 

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Running Time: 9595 MIN
R Rated

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Free film screening: Sam Mink and Justin Kohlas

Director: Sam Mink and Justin Kohlas

Join us as we screen films by Sam Mink and Justin Kohlas Tuesday night at 8:00.  Sam, director of the trailer for last year’s Athens International Film and Video Festival, will screen “Coyotes”.  Following that we’ll see the premier of “Rather Be”, directed by Justin.

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Running Time: 60 minutes60 MIN

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