Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 16, 2001

Volume 29, Number 22

Film series focus on the banned and Brazilian

Two film festivals with international themes open this week.

Forbidden films of communism

The Council on European Studies at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies is hosting a film festival titled "Supporting Their Own Downfall: Forbidden Films from the Twilight of Communism" on Friday and Saturday, March 23 and 24.

Funded by the council's federal grant, the festival was conceived in cooperation with Rajko Grlic, the Ohio Eminent Professor of Film at Ohio University in Athens. Grlic is himself a prominent Croatian film director and author of the CD-Rom "How To Make Your Movie."

The six films in the series were made by the official film industries in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia during the last two and a half decades of communism. Most were either banned or ostracized because of their content. The films also include Grlic's own documentary about the January 2000 elections in Croatia, which takes an ironic look at the post-communist period. All the films will be screened in Rm. 101 of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High St. (See Calendar, page 9, for specific titles and times.)

In conjunction with the series, Grlic will host a roundtable discussion on the forbidden films of communism at 10 a.m. on Saturday. He will be joined by Yugoslav film director Dusan Makavejev, whose "WR: Mysteries of the Organism" will be screened during the festival; Ivo Banac, the Bradford Durfee Professor of History and chair of the Council on European Studies; and John K. MacKay, assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

All the events are open to the public free of charge.

Brazil film series

"Tudo é Brazil/It's All Brazil," the fifth annual Brazilian film festival sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, will kick off this week with a documentary by Orson Welles.

Designed to show the diversity of Brazilian culture, the series features a wide variety of films.

The first film, titled "It's All True," portrays the hard life of Brazilian fishermen during the 1940s. It will be screened at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, March 21. Like all the films in the series, it will be shown in Rm. 211 of Mason Laboratory, 9 Hillhouse Ave. Each film will be preceded by a short presentation by a Yale faculty member.

Other featured films will include a documentary about French photographer Pierre Verger-Messenger, who devoted his life to studying the reciprocal cultural influences between Bahia, Brazil and the Benin and Nigerian regions in Africa; a feature film about playwright and "crypto-Christian" António José da Silva, who fled to Brazil to escape persecution during the Inquisition in Portugal; a look at Brazil during the days of colonial rule; and the story about one of Brazil's most famous outlaws, Lampião.

All the films have English subtitles, and are free and open to the public.

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'Cities and Buildings' pays tribute to urban works . . .

Forum to explore fate of U.S. 'melting pot'

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Grants will support Yale researcher's study on how to quell the 'voices' . . .

Women under 60 more likely to die after heart attack, says study

Renowned nuclear physicist to discuss 'Science, Technology and Politics'

'A Taste of Inequality' explores issues still on feminist frontline

Love songs will be dramatized in workshops

New fund will support activities for teachers of religious studies

New ways of funding environmental enterprises to be examined

Film series focus on the banned and Brazilian

Innovation is focus of this year's Spring Teaching Forum

Annual Pride Week celebration will feature talks, comedy night and film

Campus Notes