Join us Sunday, March 29th at 7:00 p.m. for a special event screening of two documentaries by Ohio University alumna Robin Smith to celebrate Ohio Goes to The Movies and Vietnam Veterans Day!
Admission is FREE – Tickets are required
A reception with filmmaker Robin Smith will take place at The Athena from 6:00-7:00 p.m
We were asleep when the telegram arrived. Two Marines in uniform, feeling out of place in Athens, Ohio, stood nervously on our front porch. Mom’s face must have betrayed her deepest fear. The colonel, my father’s friend, rushed in.
“Jane, he’s only missing!”
Words filled with hope, to comfort a wife too young to be a widow.
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Robin Smith will introduce two powerful films chronicling her family’s search for answers about the fate of Colonel Robert N. Smith (USMC) whose plane was shot down over North Vietnam in 1969.
About the films
He’s Only Missing (1978, 30 min)
This film explores the “state of limbo” Robin and her family were experiencing not knowing if their loved one was dead or alive.
Letting Go (1995, 12 min)
Two decades later the first shred of information about what had happened emerged. Robin traveled with a CBS News crew to her father’s crash site in Vietnam and uncovered answers that had eluded the family for years.
About the Speaker
Robin Smith is an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker with 48 years of professional experience. A graduate of Ohio University (BFA ’72) and the School of Public Communication at Boston University (MS ’78), her first documentary was a personal story about her father, a fighter pilot declared Missing in Action in 1969 during the Vietnam war. CBS bought rights to the film, and in 1978 and she began a career in broadcast journalism on CBS News Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt.
In 1990, she established a nonprofit production company to collaborate with educators, artists, and innovative program leaders in the creation of documentary shorts and public awareness videos. Examples of video|action’s award-winning work can be found at www.videoaction.org.
Robin Smith is currently a member of the Chaddock + Morrow College of Fine Arts Leadership Council and a Trustee on the Ohio University Foundation Board.
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A smart and sharp comedy, AMERICAN FICTION has been highly praised by critics and is considered by many to be Jeffrey Wright’s finest performance in a career full of stellar roles. Featuring a fantastic supporting cast that includes Tracee Ellis Ross, Sterling K Brown, and John Ortiz, AMERICAN FICTION has not only won numerous awards on the independent film festival circuit, but has also been nominated for Best Picture by both the Golden Globes and The Critic’s Choice awards councils.
Nerissa Young is a professor of instruction in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. She grew up on a family farm in southern West Virginia. In her classes, Young frequently discusses the effects of stereotypes in news and advertising and the traumatic effects of “isms” in different cultures. She grew up watching the TV show “The Dukes of Hazzard” and will discuss the show’s significance — its popularity led to the feature film — as a bridge between the rural comedies and films of the 1950s and 1960s and the smarter rural series and films of the 1980s up to the present. She agrees with a statement she once heard, “Just because we talk slow doesn’t mean we are.”
