6:00 PM Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, Yale University

April 12, 2018

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8:00 PM Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, Yale University

April 12, 2018

How do film and politics intersect? Can a work of film be considered activism? Join us on the opening night of the Yale Student Film Festival for a screening of the ‘80s satire Broadcast News (dir. James L. Brooks) and a discussion with New York Times critic Wesley Morris.

Wesley Morris is an award-winning critic-at-large for the New York Times. In 1997, he graduated from Yale University, where he had been a film critic for the Yale Daily News. Before joining The Times, he worked at Grantland as a staff writer and Sportstorialist columnist and was a film critic at The Boston Globe from 2002 to 2013. In 2012, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his criticism at The Boston Globe. Since 2016, Morris and colleague Jenna Wortham have hosted the New York Times culture podcast Still Processing.

1:00 PM Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, Yale University

April 13, 2018

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4:00PM Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, Yale University

April 13, 2018

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7:30 PM Yale Law School Room 120, Yale University

April 13, 2018

The Yale Student Film Festival and Yale Law School present a screening of Bill Moyers’ documentary RIKERS: An American Jail. After the film, we will have a panel discussion about the making of the film, the experience of incarceration, and the legal action that has been taken. This is an exciting opportunity to bring the conversation around the Close Rikers movement to campus and to have a lively discussion about documentary, storytelling, and activism. 

The panel will be moderated by Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine and Yale Law School. On the panel, we are thrilled to welcome Cadeem Gibbs, a community organizer who was formerly incarcerated on Rikers’ Island, Miriam Gohara, a clinical associate professor at Yale who has spent sixteen years representing death-sentenced clients in post-conviction litigation, and Judy Doctoroff, RIKER’s executive producer and an Emmy-award winner.

1:00 PM Center for Collaborative Arts and Media Room 102, Yale University

April 14, 2018

With Linda Hoaglund

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In 1945, when Japan surrendered to the Allies following its catastrophic defeat in World War II, the country lay in ruins. Because the military government had refused to surrender even as U.S. planes firebombed sixty-five of its cities and atomic bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, postwar daily life for Japanese civilians remained a constant struggle, as people scrounged for materials to rebuild their homes and bartered on the black market for food. The postwar also ushered in seven years of occupation by the U.S. military, which settled into 250 military bases across Japan, breeding corruption and humiliating local populations. Although the occupation formally ended in 1951, the U.S. has always retained the right to keep military bases throughout Japan under the terms of the U.S Japan Security Treaty.

Over the course of the extended postwar era, Japanese film directors turned to these bleak realities to inspire their movies and audiences rewarded them by flocking to the newly built theaters, hungry for entertainment that spoke to the level of their privations. Ironically, through stories of poverty, political turmoil, occupation and corruption, filmmakers helped usher in Japan’s golden age of cinema. Working with miniscule budgets on tight schedules, the screenwriters and film directors deployed humor and compassion, outrage and irony to tell stories in every conceivable genre from melodrama, yakuza yarn, science fiction, pitch black comedy and even musicals.

In War and Memory in Postwar Japanese Cinema, director/producer Linda Hoaglund ‘79 will explore how master directors such as Kobayashi Masaki, Imamura Shohei, Honda Ishiro, Kurosawa Akira and Fukasaku Kinji devised original approaches across a wide range of genres to unflinchingly face their hobbled nation and hold the militarists accountable for their war crimes while conjuring riveting narratives and timeless entertainment. Hoaglund will introduce scenes from a range of films to highlight the ingenuity and passion postwar directors deployed to capture their country’s postwar predicaments. Hoaglund will also show clips from her own film, ANPO: Art X War, which reveals how Japan’s prominent artists portrayed the democratic uprising against the U.S. military bases that swept Japan in 1960.

4:00 PM Whitney Humanities Center Auditorium, Yale University

April 14, 2018

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