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Geography Via Film Series 
Sponsored by:
University of Kentucky’s
Department of Geography, Appalachian Center,
and Latin American Studies Program
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Overview:
PARTICIPATORY DOCUMENTARIES AS CRITICAL GEOGRAPHIES
This project, envisioned as an annual series, was born of a simple frustration.
The academic field of Human Geography is asking the vital questions: researchers and teachers are interrogating the economic, geopolitical, social, and environmental repercussions of what’s called ‘globalization,’ corporatization and privatization. They are investigating the worldwide phenomenon of migrations, displacements, and tourism—and the complex identities therein—as well as the socio-spatial dynamics of labor and resource exploitation. Human geography is also studying how various social and political transitions are taking place—literally—in cities, towns, rural areas, villages, neighborhoods, and households around the world. How are communities articulating their economic needs or their collective “cultural” principles? How are they, at various scales, navigating ecological crises or threats to social justice? How is all of this playing out spatially, in how people understand public places, local spaces, borders, and natural resources?
And yet, as is so often the case in modern academia, good questions are being asked and then answered within the relatively insular confines of respective academic disciplines and even sub-disciplines—without much communication or conversation with people in the larger communities, or even in other areas of study. Many scholars within and outside the university institutions are ready—and have begun—to expand the boundaries of these intellectual inquiries, moving toward scholarship that transgresses disciplinary divides as well as even the reified box of textuality itself. Could documentaries work—along with texts and other beyond-textual genres—as means of approaching the complex spatialities of everyday life and the particularities of place? Does a theory or idea have to be textually based or expressed to be legitimate? Can intellectually valid critical geography take place beyond the academic realm? If so, how can scholars, like us, within the academic realm engage with and learn from such work and theorists?
This project attempts to pry apart these questions and to join into a larger movement within Geography and in academia to broaden the social theory conversation- to move away from talking about or at this community or that people and towards talking with this community or that group of people. Indeed, this is complicated objective, and we look forward to discussions and debates as to whether it is feasible, and, if so, how it could happen.
The Geography Via Film project, then, is an inquiry into different methods and methodologies. The potentiality exists that this could develop into geographic encounters with other media in the future, including visual, aural, and performance art. (It's like a reading group, but with film.) It is also an attempt at correspondence—via films and through post-films discussion. These kinds of correspondence are critical to Geography as a whole.
We decided upon the initial forum of participatory documentary because it is such a powerful medium—used all over the world—wherein film-makers articulate the various social, political, or environmental obstacles their own respective communities are facing. This perspective is quite rich, and locally rooted, yet the final product is necessarily crafted to reach other places and viewers around the world. As geographers have already begun to show us, there is a mobility inherent to film/video…from the process of the medium itself (moving images), to the DVDs circulated via libraries and websites, and, even….to the facinatingly local-global network-scale of YouTube.
Film is a tool for collective expression, conversation, and empowerment, and increasingly video-makers have become teachers. Films comprise larger and larger components of curricula across the disciplines, but the ubiquity and diversity of videos also serve as mainstream conveyors of information and ideas. Film/video, more so than other media, offer the possibility of the encounter (especially when combined with such innovative technology as Skype or teleconferencing). Even though spatial distance can relegate us (especially those lacking access to mobility) to our own isolated parts of the world to deal with our own issues (issues that have global reach, including environmental degradation, food security, and human rights abuses, etc.), we should use the resources that facilitate dialogue across and through borders and boundaries, reinvigorating our inter-local dialogic imagination to the fact that we are sharing this planet in time with billions of others.
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The Gist
A post-textual, interdisciplinary, inter-local film series and corresponding conversation on the subjects of space, place, people, and power.
Each semester, a few Geography graduate students are invited to select a specific theme to investigate collectively in a series of documentaries and independent films that address key questions in critical geography—such as how to understand and participate in the complex process of decolonizing knowledge, learning, and teaching and how to involve cross-disciplinary and non-academic voices and perspectives into our rich, ongoing debates on the meanings of development, sustainability, peace, security, justice, and education itself.
Each gathering—grounded in the film screening—will have a discussant or two who introduce the context of the video, as well as the community who made the documentary or film. Ensuing conversation will be led by one of the film-makers themselves, either as a guest speaker, or a large-screen Skype teleconference with the audience. These post-film discussions will be oriented toward the central thematic questions of the semester's series, and perhaps even culminate in a consensus or non-consensus. It will be written or filmed and that will serve as a sort of response to the community group that made the film—thereby aiming for a correspondence and dialogue of sorts.
Also, snacks and drinks shall be provided, as well as extra credit for contributing undergraduates. :)
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THE INAUGURAL SERIES, Spring 2009
"Inter-local Dialogues: Across the Americas"
This inaugural Geography Via Film series aims to address documentaries as the rich, critical geography texts they are—integrating the making and watching and discussing of such documentaries as part of what it means to be geographically educated, both inside and outside of the classroom setting. It aims to bridge communities across the Americasfacing comparable problems—economic, political, social, or environmental exploitation—as well as comparable opportunities and heritages.
This series address the question of place, power, and knowledge across North, Central, and South America. It makes space in academic discussions and curriculum for heretofore de-legitimatized knowledges, such as those regarding the power struggles based in indigenous cosmovisions, alternate ecological epistemologies, subsistence-as-resistance agriculture, and the politics of renewing traditional artistic and musical crafts.
Each of the three communities featured in this series- Appalachia, US; Q’eros of Peruvian Andes, and Oaxaca, Mexico- is linked by the geographical focus on the Americas. These places share a debilitating and simplistic classification of being “poor” or “underdeveloped”— terms that perhaps hide more than they explain. (A topic of discussion we can get into after the film!) Yet, each of these regions also carries renowned treasuries of ecological and cultural resources.
Who gets to speak for these regions? How have they been represented in Geography text books? To what effect? How can the conversation and the perspectives be broadened—so as to LISTEN to voices oft-unheard? Isn’t it time for an inter-disciplinary, inter-local dialogue?
Everyone is invited to join in this conversation.
 Film Series |
Bin Yah: There's No Place Like Home
BIN YAH: There's No Place Like Home
Wednesday November 11
5-7 pm
WT Young Library
www.binyah.org
The Geography Via Film series continues!
Universidad de la Tierra
Next up are two new documentaries made by about our colleagues at the Universidad de la Tierra, in Oaxaca, Mexico. Our department has a few key ties with this community-based, radical-democracy education project (Oliver Freohling, Tad, Lauren Martin among other students and faculty who have worked with them). They have a fine website at www.unitierra.org. The screening is next
*Wednesday, October 21st, from 3-5pm in Student Center 230*
After the films (which will engage indigenous rights, political resistance, food sovereignty, urban gardens, native corn activism [they are key advocates in the Sin maiz, no hay pais campaign], community-education models, and other good subjects), there will be a Skype Q-A with film-makers and with Gustavo Esteva--a "de-professionalized" economist, scholar, and activist who has been boldly pioneering critical and post-development theory for decades.
Please feel free to come, bring (or send) your students, and circulate the word to others on campus and in the community at large.
And email with any questions, suggestions.
garrett (tggraddy@uky.edu)
Join us for the semester's final Geography Via Film Series screening of...
The Least of These
As the semester winds down, please join us to view & discuss a film that explores family detention at the T. Don Hutto Residential Center. Operated by the largest private prison company in the US, the facility houses immigrants awaiting asylum hearings or deportation proceedings.
The Least of These leads viewers to consider how core American rights and values should apply to immigrants--particularly children.
Topics of discussion to include local immigrant rights, abuses, and justice, including the recent tragedy of Ms. Ana Romero. Post-film dialogue will be led by the documentary's film-makers (joining us via Skype), immigrant rights leaders from the Kentucky Center for Immigration Rights and Reform (KCIRR), and UK scholars.
MONDAY, MAY 4th, 6-8pm
WT Young Library Gallery
Free & open to the public. Refreshments provided.
Generously co-sponsored by UK's Latin American Studies Program & Geography Department
Geography Via Film
The Inaugural Series: The Americas
Tinkuy film
Monday, March 3, 2009
6-8pm: Film screening & post-film discussion via international teleconference with film-makers
WT Young Library Gallery
Refreshments provided
Created in the stunning Vilcanota Range of the Southern Andes of Peru, 'Tinkuy' brings us to a world in the process of emerging from the clouds. Atop craggy passes and in valleys still free from roads, alpacas outnumber people, condors carry good fortune on enormous wings, and families subsist on potatoes they collectively coax from vertical mountain slopes. Within this landscape is the Community of Q'eros, comprised of five indigenous communities balanced on the edge of the sierra and the fertile jungle below. From their perch at 14,000 feet, the Q'eros believe that they are the last existing population directly descended from the Incas, attributing their survival of the Spanish Conquest to protection provided by their sacred mountains, the Apus.
When the Q'eros speak of the outside invasions today, however, they note that they are losing the power to call upon the Apus as their ancestors did. Instead, young Q'eros are looking to each other to advocate for their community and stop the bulldozers, the miners, and the helicopters full of bioprospectors. They seek protection from these modern invasions by increasing community organization and engaging with outside institutions through petitions and meetings. The arrival of the video camera, and eventually the knowledge to be able to use it independently, has opened broad avenues of access for their activism. Through online distribution, they hope that an international reach will make the camera a tool of political representation, access, and a means of recruiting support from sympathetic and powerful audiences on a global scale.
One of these young Q'eros is Fredy Flores Machaca, a twenty-three year old campesino, community advocate, filmmaker, and our guide throughout our journey in Q'eros. For three weeks Fredy leads us over passes and through valleys to the five communities of Q'eros, initiating discussions about the forces threatening the nation while at the same time introducing the concept of using film--and one day self-produced film--to support the communities in their efforts. Among the issues raised: the two roads that are approaching the communities from opposite directions; the imminent tourism that is sure to accompany these roads; the gold and petroleum mines that are beginning to operate on community land; the traditional customs that are disappearing, and related to this, the exodus of community members to nearby towns where they can pursue modern lifestyles. In this way, the film both creates and records a community dialogue at a crucial moment in the Q'eros' interaction with the outside world, allowing the voices of the communities to guide its focus and its message.
As an infamously closed community, the very fact that the Q'eros allow these discussions to be documented by outside filmmakers is an indication of the changing times. Both the Q'eros and the audience, however, are aware that permission to film has been granted with the expectation that the product will support the nation's efforts to advocate for itself. Further expressing their commitment to this goal, the filmmakers lead video production workshops in each of the communities they visit with the objective of empowering the Communities of Q'eros to one day produce its own films. We watch as Fredy, both filmmaker and indigenous Q'ero, teaches basic filming and computer skills to his campanarios and explains to them the potential that film has as a political tool and as a means of preserving traditional customs and values that are quickly disappearing. Thus while the filmmakers, their technology and the video workshops are an intrusion of the outside world in themselves, we understand that the Q'eros are already using some of these outside forces to strengthen the community and their voices. Similarly, community members talk of the improved quality of life that tourism and the roads will provide: access to sugar, salt, and other staples, as well as an income to supplement their subsistence lifestyle.
As community members discuss their future and interact with the newly introduced technology, the tasks ahead seem enormous. Are the Q'eros naive or wise in welcoming tourists, roads, and even the filmmakers? Will the Communities of Q'eros have the political strength and cohesiveness it needs to direct development toward its best interests? Like the filmmakers, we are caught within the process of change that is coming to Q'eros. The Q'eros have allowed us into their isolated communities so that they might be heard, but what will we do with their words? In the Quechua language that is spoken in Q'eros, 'tinkuy' means "a meeting of two worlds." The process of creating 'Tinkuy' fully embodies this word by bringing together of technology and tradition, but so does distributing its finished product to a global audience. Despite their wariness of outsiders, the Communities of Q'eros has decided to take its chances by agreeing to make this film. The potential for its benefit is huge; the alternative of remaining silent is almost certainly worse.
Up The Ridge Film
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
5-6pm: Refreshments & Social Hour
6-8pm: Film screening & post-film discussion with invited guest & film co-producer Amelia Kirby
WT Young Library Auditorium
Up the Ridge is a one-hour documentary (also available in other lengths) produced by Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby. In 1999, Szuberla and Kirby were volunteer DJ’s for the Appalachian region’s only hip-hop radio program when they received hundreds of letters from inmates transferred into nearby Wallens Ridge, the region’s newest prison, built to prop up the shrinking coal economy. The letters described human rights violations and racial tension between staff and inmates. Filming began that year. Through the lens of Wallens Ridge State Prison, the documentary offers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts. The film explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences. Connections exist, in both practice and ideology, between human rights violations in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and physical and psychological abuse recorded in U.S. prisons.
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