The Native and the Refugee
A Screening of Short Films and Discussion
Filmmakers and producers Matt Peterson and Malek Rasamny present an original and powerful multi-media project that brings together the spaces of the Indian reservation and Palestinian refugee camp, from Pine Ridge and Akwesane to Ain al-Hilweh and Aida. Using archival material, short-films and interviews, the project explores the centrality of these spaces for Native and Palestinian struggles in ways that illuminate how people organize politically around questions of land and territory in relation to communal conceptions of autonomy.
Moderated by Frances Negrón-Muntaner, filmmaker and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University.
With special guests, Audra Simpson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University and Nidal Bitari, founder of the Palestinian Association of Human Rights in Syria.
Director/Producer, Matt Peterson's films and videos have screened at Anthology Film Archives, Eyebeam, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, International House Philadelphia, Millennium Film Workshop, MoMA PS1, and at scattered microcinemas and universities across North America and Europe. In 2014 he completed a feature film on the Tunisian insurrection, Scenes from a Revolt Sustained,with a production grant from the Doha Film Institute. His writings on film have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Death+Taxes, Evergreen Review, Idiom, The L, and New York Press. He co-edited, with Barney Rosset & Ed Halter, From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader (Seven Stories Press, 2016). He was a member of the collectives Red Channels and the 16 Beaver Group, and is currently part of a commune in New York called Woodbine.
Director/Producer, Malek Rasamny is a researcher and artist based in both New York and Beirut. He has worked at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, New York, and was a founding member of the Red Channels film collective, the Ground Floor Collective, and the LERFE space in Harlem, where he collaborated with New York based artists at the intersection of urban youth culture, transnational activism, and collective experimentation. His writings on film have been featured in The Daily Star, the largest English language daily newspaper in the Middle East, and he was interviewed by the Canadian arts magazine FUSE about his work in Red Channels.
Moderator Dr.Frances Negrón-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, and scholar. Her career spans multiple disciplines and practices; including cinema, literature, cultural criticism, and politics. Her work focuses on a comparative exploration of coloniality in the Americas, with special attention to the intersections between class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. She is the recipient of Ford, Truman, Scripps Howard, Rockefeller, and Pew fellowships as well as a Social Science Research Council and Andy Warhol Foundation grants. She is the editor of several books, including Puerto Rican Jam: Rethinking Nationalism and Colonialism; None of the Above: Puerto Ricans in the Global Era, and Sovereign Acts.
Special guest Dr. Audra Simpson, is the author of the praised Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States published by Duke University Press in 2014. Simpson presented the Keynote address at the 7th International Conference of Critical Geography in Ramallah, Palestine in July 2015.
Special guest Nidal Bitari is from the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, outside Damascus. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in political sociology from Damascus University. He is the founder of the Palestinian Association of Human Right in Syria.
Cosponsors
Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.
Free and open to the public.
Thursday October 29, 2015
7PM
World Room, 3rd Floor
Pulitzer Hall, Journalism School
Columbia University
2950 Broadway at 116th Street