ICA Summer International Film Festival 2008
"TRANSNATIONAL JOURNEYS"

Stanford's Division of International, Comparative & Area Studies is pleased to present its summer international film festival. These five international films depict life-changing journeys taken in different parts of the world. Travelers and migrants test fate as they pursue a better life or search for the truth, while others are swept away by impersonal global forces.

The films will be introduced by scholars with expertise in the region depicted in the film. A question-and-answer session will follow each film.

The films will be presented on five consecutive Wednesday evenings, beginning August 6. All screenings take place at 7 pm on the Stanford Campus (see individual listings below for details) and are free and open to the public.

Aug. 6, THE TAKE (Canada/Argentina, 2005)
Aug. 13, JEWISH LUCK ("Yidishe Glikn," Russia, 1925)
Aug. 20, KORYO SARAM: THE UNRELIABLE PEOPLE (US/Kazakhstan, 2006)
Aug. 27, PIECES D'IDENTITES ("Pieces of Identity," Congo/Belgium, 1998)
Sept. 3, HOTEL RWANDA (US, 2004)

Co-sponsored by CREEES, CEAS, IPS, African Studies, LAS, the Taube Center, The Abbasi Center, and the Stanford Film Lab.

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THE TAKE (Canada/Argentina, 2005, 84 mins)
In Spanish with English subtitles
Introduced by Tomas Crowder, Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish, Soca University, and Kristi Wilson, Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition, Soca University

Wed., August 6, 7:00 pm
Building 200, room 305
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In suburban Buenos Aires, thirty unemployed auto-parts workers walk into their idle factory, roll out sleeping mats and refuse to leave. All they want is to re-start the silent machines. But this simple act - the take - has the power to turn the globalization debate on its head. Armed only with slingshots and an abiding faith in shop-floor democracy, the workers face off against the bosses, bankers and a whole system that sees their beloved factories as nothing more than scrap metal for sale. With THE TAKE, director Avi Lewis, one of Canada's most outspoken journalists, and writer Naomi Klein, author of the international bestseller No Logo (2002), champion a radical economic manifesto for the 21st century.

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JEWISH LUCK ("Yidishe Glikn," Russia, 1925, 90 minutes)
In Yiddish and Russian with English subtitles
Introduced by Amelia Glaser, Assistant Professor of Russian Literature, University of California at San Diego

Wed., August 13, 7:00 pm
Building 260 (Pigott Hall), room 113
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This classic of Soviet cinema is an adaptation of Sholom Aleichem's story, "Menachem-Mendel the Matchmaker," and combines fantasy, document and comedy. The main character is a luft-mentsh who wanders the land in search of new get-rich-quick schemes and learning accidental lessons along the way. It is also the film debut of the Yiddish State Art Theatre actor, Solomon Mikhoels, who was considered the greatest living Yiddish actor and director of his time. The fiction writer Isaac Babel penned the film's original Russian subtitles. JEWISH LUCK is a wonderful document from early twentieth-century Ukraine, and, despite its effort to portray the misery of pre-Revolutionary Jewish life, offers wonderfully detailed images from Jewish Berdichev. The film follows the hapless main character as he looks for luck, traveling from his hometown to Odessa. The film concludes with an almost ethnographic staging of an outdoor Jewish wedding. In one of the highlights of his adventure, Menachem Mendl dreams of exporting a shipload of Jewish brides from Eastern Europe to America. While he never actually sets sail, the film represents a moment in which all roads seemed open, but true fortune might be found shockingly close to home.

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KORYO SARAM: THE UNRELIABLE PEOPLE (US/Kazakhstan, 2006, 60 mins)
In English, Korean, and Kazakh with English subtitles
Introduced by Steven Lee, Acting Assistant Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley

Wed., August 20, 7:00 pm
Building 260 (Pigott Hall), room 113
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In 1937, Stalin began a campaign of massive ethnic cleansing and forcibly deported everyone of Korean origin living in the coastal provinces of the Far East Russia near the border of North Korea to the unsettled steppe country of Central Asia 3700 miles away. This story of 180,000 Koreans who became political pawns during the Great Terror is the central focus of this film.

KORYO SARAM (the Soviet Korean phrase for Korean person) tells the harrowing saga of survival in the open steppe country and the sweep of Soviet history through the eyes of these deported Koreans, who were designated by Stalin as an "unreliable people" and enemies of the state. Through recently uncovered archival footage and new interviews, the film follows the deportees' history of integrating into the Soviet system while working under punishing conditions in Kazakhstan, a country which became a concentration camp of exiled people from throughout the Soviet Union.

Today, in the context of Kazakhstan's recent emergence as a rapidly modernizing, independent state, the story of the Kazakhstani-Koreans situated within this ethnically diverse country has resonance with the experience of many Americans and how they have assimilated to form new cultures in our world of increasingly displaced people.

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PIECES D'IDENTITES ("Pieces of Identity," Congo/Belgium, 1998, 93 mins)
Introduced by the Center for African Studies, Stanford University

Wed., Aug. 27, 7:00 pm
Building 260 (Pigott Hall), room 113
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Winner of the most prestigious award in African cinema in 1999, PIECES D'IDENTITES is the timeless story of an old king, his beautiful daughter, and the prince charming who rescues them. Although critics might label PIECES D'IDENTITES as "escapist" entertainment, Ngangura's simple fable raises troubling issues of identity facing people of African descent in the ever-widening Diaspora of the late 20th century.

Mani Kongo, king of the Bakongo, sets out alone on a quest for his long-lost daughter, Mwana, whom he sent to Belgium to study medicine many years before. As soon as he enters the Westernized world he finds his identity challenged. Eventually, he is robbed, homeless and penniless and is tricked into pawning his royal regalia, literally his "pieces of identity," to an unscrupulous art dealer.

While Mani Kongo only loses his identity temporarily, the younger generation in the film is adrift in Europe without ever having had one. Examples include Chaka-Jo, Mwana's eventual rescuer. A cabdriver, Chaka-Jo is trapped between white and black, the son of an unknown Belgian father abducted from his Congolese mother and placed in a Belgian orphanage.

In the film, Ngangura suggests that an African Renaissance could be catalyzed through the return of young Africans educated in the West, who would rebuild the continent.

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HOTEL RWANDA (US, 2004, 121 mins)
Introduced by Eric Morris, Practitioner-in-Residence, Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies, Stanford University

Wed., Sept. 3, 7:00 pm
Building 260 (Pigott Hall), room 113
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Ten years ago some of the worst atrocities in the history of mankind took place in the country of Rwanda--and in an era of high-speed communication and round the clock news, the events went almost unnoticed by the rest of the world. In only three months, one million people were brutally murdered. In the face of these unspeakable actions, inspired by his love for his family, an ordinary man summons extraordinary courage to save the lives of over a thousand helpless refugees, by granting them shelter in the hotel he manages.