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Spring Sustainability Series: THE HAND THAT FEEDS

Watch Trailer Director: Rachel Lears, Robin Blotnick

At a popular bakery café, residents of New York’s Upper East Side get bagels and coffee served with a smile 24 hours a day. But behind the scenes, undocumented immigrant workers face sub-legal wages, dangerous machinery, and abusive managers who will fire them for calling in sick. Mild-mannered sandwich maker Mahoma López has never been interested in politics, but in January 2012, he convinces a small group of his co-workers to fight back.

Risking deportation and the loss of their livelihood, the workers team up with a diverse crew of innovative young organizers and take the unusual step of forming their own independent union, launching themselves on a journey that will test the limits of their resolve. In one roller-coaster year, they must overcome a shocking betrayal and a two-month lockout. Lawyers will battle in back rooms, Occupy Wall Street protesters will take over the restaurant, and a picket line will divide the neighborhood. If they can win a contract, it will set a historic precedent for low-wage workers across the country. But whatever happens, Mahoma and his coworkers will never be exploited again.

“A crowd pleaser… a captivating David & Goliath story.” Anthony Kaufman, Indiewire

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Running Time: 87 minutes87 MIN
This Film is Wheelchair Accessible

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WONDERSTRUCK

Watch Trailer Director: Todd Haynes
Writer(s): Brian Selznick
Cast: Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams, Oakes Fegley

Based on Brian Selznick’s critically acclaimed novel Ben and Rose are children from two different eras who secretly wish their lives were different. Ben longs for the father he has never known, while Rose dreams of a mysterious actress whose life she chronicles in a scrapbook. When Ben discovers a puzzling clue in his home and Rose reads an enticing headline in the newspaper, both children set out on quests to find what they are missing that unfold with mesmerizing symmetry.

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Running Time: 117 minutes117 MIN
PG Rated
This Film is Wheelchair Accessible

Alive with the magic of pictures and the mysteries of silence, this is an uncommonly grownup film about children, communication, connection and memory.

David Rooney
Hollywood Reporter
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Holiday Film Series: SCROOGED

Watch Trailer Director: Richard Donner
Writer(s): Mitch Glazer, Michael O'Donoghue
Cast: Bill Murray, Karen Allen, John Forsythe

Apart from the rest of the afternoon family films, this is a special “grown-up” screening of Bill Murray’s Scrooged on the night of December 10th. The price of admission will be a minimum donation of one canned or non perishable food good per ticket. The food items will be donated to Athens city food pantries and other hunger relief programs.

In this modern take on Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” Frank Cross (Bill Murray) is a wildly successful television executive whose cold ambition and curmudgeonly nature has driven away the love of his life, Claire Phillips (Karen Allen). But after firing a staff member, Eliot Loudermilk (Bobcat Goldthwait), on Christmas Eve, Frank is visited by a series of ghosts who give him a chance to re-evaluate his actions and right the wrongs of his past.

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Running Time: 101 minutes101 MIN
PG-13 Rated

Despite the juicy, on-the-edge craziness, Murray is able to layer his outrageous histrionics with an inner sensibility, making his ultimate transformation not only believable but Christmas-cheer uplifting.

Duane Byrge
Hollywood Reporter
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SOUTHSIDE WITH YOU: Last Day Thursday, September 15th

Watch Trailer Director: Richard Tanne
Writer(s): Richard Tanne
Cast: Tika Sumpter, Parker Sawyers, Vanessa Bell Calloway

*CaptiView® Closed Caption & Audio Description devices are available for this film. All showings on Mondays will feature Open Captions.*

One afternoon during the summer of 1989, two young lawyers named Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama go on their first date in the South Side of Chicago.

Southside with You is a sweet, intelligent, well-crafted, wonderfully romantic, no-frills re-imagination of the first date between Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson, when both were young stars on the rise but neither possibly could have imagined they’d one day take up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for eight years.”- Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times

“Tanne’s impressive accomplishment rests in not having been intimidated by his protagonists’ stature, thereby opening the door for him to create a living and breathing picture of two people spending a few hours together, offering select details about their lives and personalities, probing, questioning, pushing things a bit on his side and her pushing back on the other.” -Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter

“Richard Tanne’s writing-directing debut deepens into a pointed, flowing conversation about the many challenges (and varieties) of African-American identity, the need for both idealism and compromise, and the importance of making peace with past disappointments in order to effect meaningful change in the future.”- Justin Chang, Variety

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Running Time: 84 mins. 84 MIN
PG-13 Rated

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Holiday Film Series: MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET

Watch Trailer Director: George Seaton
Writer(s): George Seaton, Valentine Davies
Cast: Edmund Gwenn, Maureen O'Hara, John Payne
Awards: WINNER - Academy Awards: Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Original Story

Starting November 26th and running through December 17th, Ohio University’s Athena Cinema will be showing afternoon screenings of popular holiday family films every Saturday! The price of admission will be a minimum donation of one canned or non perishable food good per ticket. The food items will be donated to Athens city food pantries and other hunger relief programs.

In this 1947 classic, a nice old man who claims to be Santa Claus is institutionalized as insane, when a young lawyer decides to defend him by arguing in court that he is the real thing.

 

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Running Time: 96 minutes96 MIN

It is light, it is charming, it is delightfully funny and completely captivating. It is all that, and something more.

Kate Cameron
New York Daily News
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MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

Watch Trailer Director: Kenneth Lonergan
Writer(s): Kenneth Lonergan
Cast: Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler

In Manchester by the Sea, the latest film from award-winning writer and director Kenneth Lonergan, the life of a solitary Boston janitor is transformed when he returns to his hometown to take care of his teenage nephew. The story of the Chandlers, a working-class family living in a Massachusetts fishing village for generations, Manchester by the Sea is a deeply poignant, unexpectedly funny exploration of the power of familial love, community, sacrifice and hope. After the death of his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler), Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is shocked to learn that Joe has made him sole guardian of his nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Taking leave of his job, Lee reluctantly returns to Manchester-by-the-Sea to care for Patrick, a spirited 16-year-old, and is forced to deal with a past that separated him from his wife Randi (Michelle Williams) and the community where he was born and raised. Bonded by the man who held their family together, Lee and Patrick struggle to adjust to a world without him. In his first film since 2011’s acclaimed Margaret, Lonergan once again proves himself a powerful and visionary storyteller as he seamlessly weaves past and present together, crafting a tension-filled tale that deftly eschews sentimentality in favor of penetrating emotional insight and deeply affecting human relationships.

“A beautifully textured, richly enveloping drama about how a death in the family forces a small-town New Englander to confront a past tragedy anew.” – Justin Chang, Variety

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Running Time: 137 minutes137 MIN
R Rated

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THE TRIALS OF SPRING

Watch Trailer Director: Gini Reticker
Awards: Winner of Best Socially Responsible Content at New Media Film Festival

When a young Egyptian woman travels from her village to Cairo to add her voice to the tens of thousands of Egyptians demanding an end to 60 years of military rule, she is arrested, beaten, and tortured by security forces and later punished and imprisoned by her family for daring to speak out. Unbreakable, she sets out in a search for freedom and social justice in a country in the grips of a power struggle, where there is little tolerance for the likes of her. Buoyed by the other activists she meets along the way, Hend Nafea’s story mirrors the trajectory of the Arab Spring—from the ecstasy of newfound courage to the agony of shattered dreams.In the end, despite crushing setbacks, it is resilience that sustains the hope for reform even in the darkest hours of repression.

“Amid the backdrop of countless stories about the oppression of women in the Middle East and North Africa, however, Nafea insists her story is about the strength of Egyptian women.”— Kia Makarechi, Vanity Fair

This ONE NIGHT event is being shown as part of International Education Week and the Kennedy Lecture Series and is sponsored by the Women’s Center, the Multicultural Center, and the Center for International Studies, International Student Union, the LGBT Center, Political Science Majors’ Association, Pi Sigma Alpha, the American Association of University Women – Student Affiliate Group, Campus Involvement Center, SAC, and BSCPB.

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Running Time: 90 minutes90 MIN

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ANOTHER KIND OF GIRL COLLECTIVE with Laura Doggett

Watch Trailer Director: Marah Al Hassan, Khaldiya Jibawi, Raghad Al Khatib, Walaa Al Alawi, Bushra Al Masri, Rafif Al Fadel, Muna Al Hariri

Only two years into the war, over 3,500 journalists had traveled through the Camp Za’atari to tell stories of the Syrian people who were forced out of their country to live in exile in Jordan. The stories told were somewhat black and white and largely tragic. In response to the mainstream media reporting of the refugee experience, two workshops were organized to give Syrian girls living as refugees in Jordan’s camps and urban areas cameras and the chance to tell their own stories.

The workshops, one in Jordan’s Za’atari Refugee Camp and the other in the city of Irbid in northern Jordan, engaged Syrian girls in artistic and technical training in photo and video to reflect on and tell their own stories in first person. With cameras, microphones and pens in hand, the girls set out to document their everyday lives – how it looks, feels and sounds from the ground, at the heart of their world.

For these girls, storytelling offers the possibility not just to change the trajectories of their own personal stories but to offer this possibility of change to other girls, and to give alternative ways of seeing to people in their communities and to the world beyond.

The workshops were developed and facilitated by documentary filmmaker/educator Laura Doggett with documentary animator/educator Tasneem Toghoj. Laura Doggett will be present during the screening and will participate in a talkback with the audience following the film.

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THE WIND WILL CARRY US

Watch Trailer Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Writer(s): Abbas Kiarostami
Cast: Behzad Dorani, Noghre Asadi, Roushan Karam Elmi
Language: Persian (English subtitles)

Three engineers from the city travel to a small Kurdish village to document the villagers’ mourning for a 100-year-old woman who is still alive, but whose health is failing. Haunting and visually stunning, The Wing Will Carry Us is an absorbing abstract meditation on life and death and the divisions between tradition and modernity. The film will be preceded by by a short introduction.

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Running Time: 118 mins. 118 MIN
PG Rated

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SPOTLIGHT: Free Screening Featuring Marty Baron!

Watch Trailer Director: Tom McCarthy
Writer(s): Tom McCarthy, Josh Singer
Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams
Awards: 2016 Academy Awards: Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, & Best Editing

*Closed captioning, assistive listening, and audio description devices are available for this film.*

SPOTLIGHT tells the riveting true story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe investigation that would rock the city and cause a crisis in one of the world’s oldest and most trusted institutions. When the newspaper’s tenacious “Spotlight” team of reporters delves into allegations of abuse in the Catholic Church, their year-long investigation uncovers a decades-long cover-up at the highest levels of Boston’s religious, legal, and government establishment, touching off a wave of revelations around the world.

The film will be introduced by Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post and former Boston Globe editor depicted in the film. This event is sponsored by the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. Admission to this event is free!

“It’s not a stretch to suggest that Spotlight is the finest newspaper movie of its era, joining Citizen Kane and All the President’s Men in the pantheon of classics of the genre.” – Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

Spotlight is a masterpiece.” -Brian Truit, USA Today

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Running Time: 128 minutes128 MIN
R Rated

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