Newhouse School of Communications
Newhouse School to co-sponsor Illuminating Oppression: Seventh Annual Human Rights Film Festival
September 2, 2009
"Illuminating Oppression: Seventh Annual Human Rights Film Festival" will feature award-winning documentaries by independent filmmakers from Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America, South Asia and West Asia. The festival will open on Thursday, September 10 at 7 p.m. with “Behind Forgotten Eyes.” Directed by Anthony Gilmore, the film examines the forgotten casualties of World War II—Korean women who were abducted and forced into a brutal and systematic form of sexual slavery by the occupying Japanese Imperial Army. The film’s co-director, Ryan Seal, will lead a discussion following the screening.
The festival will continue at 7 p.m., Friday, September 11, with films that examine the predicament of refused asylum seekers in the United Kingdom and tell the extraordinary story of Christian and Muslim women in Liberia who banded together to fight for peace in their shattered country. On Saturday, September 12, films will be shown at 1, 4 and 7 p.m., concluding with “The Sari Soldiers,” which chronicles the courageous efforts of six Nepalese women caught up on opposite sides of a civil war amid a government crackdown on civil liberties.
All films will be shown in SU’s Life Sciences Complex Auditorium, Room 001, and are free and open to the public. A complete listing is available on the Syracuse Symposium web site at http://syracusesymposium.org.
The film festival is co-sponsored by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, the South Asia Center at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Institute for Global Affairs, and the South Asian Students Association in collaboration with Breakthrough, an international human rights organization that promotes values of equality, dignity and justice.
The festival kicks off the 2009 Syracuse Symposium, a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival celebrating interdisciplinary thinking, imagining and creating, organized and presented for The College of Arts and Sciences by the SU Humanities Center. The 2009 event, which celebrates “Light,” features 13 lectures and keynote addresses, three performances and three exhibitions. A complete schedule of events is available at http://syracusesymposium.org.
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Media contact:
Wendy S. Loughlin
(315) 443-2785
wsloughl@syr.edu
