Films screen on Mondays at 7 pm
Total Denial
16 September/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM
Directed by Milena Kaneva, 74 min., 2006.
For almost twenty years, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) and now the re-named State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), has enforced a brutal, repressive military dictatorship in Burma. Total Denial is the story of how fifteen villagers from rural Burma brought, and won, a suit in U.S. courts against oil giant UNOCAL for collaborating with the SLORC and SPDC to commit human-rights abuses in Burma. We will join hundreds of communities across the U.S. and world who will all be watching the film simultaneously with support from Earth Rights International.
The Road to Guantanamo
1 October/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM
Directed by Matt Whitecross and Michael Winterbottom, 95 min., 2006
This film is the story of the Tipton Three — Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul – who were three young British men from Tipton who were captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 and detained at Guantánamo Bay, without charge or legal representation, until 2004. The documentary footage is juxtaposed with dramatizations of their experiences by actors, raising questions about how to represent violence and detention in the present moment. “… a wrenching and dismaying account of cruelty and bureaucratic indifference” – A.O. Scott, New York Times
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
8 October/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM
Directed by Rithy Panh, 101 min., 2003.
During the Cambodian genocide (1975-1979), approximately 1.7 million people were killed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. In S-21, two survivors and a dozen former Khmer Rouge fighters return to Tuol Sleng, one of the most notorious Khmer Rouge interrogation centers and today a genocide museum, to revisit the past. “Cinema at its most intellectually honest and morally necessary” – Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post
Chicken Run
29 October/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM
Directed Peter Lord and Nick Park, 84 min., 2000.
Back in the PCON film series by popular demand and with support from PETA (liberation begins at the dinner table), Chicken Run is an animated tale of arbitrary detention and resistance on a chicken farm in England. Led by the plucky hen Ginger, the chickens plot to escape their coop-prison. Chicken Run asks us to confront the un-exceptional nature of arbitrary detention.
Death and the Maiden
12 November/27 Persson Hall /7:00 PM
Directed by Roman Polanski, 103 min., 1994.
In an unnamed Latin American country following a transition from a military dictatorship to democracy, fate brings a torture survivor and her torturer together one evening. The survivor interrogates her former torturer and tries to discover “the truth” about what took place under the military regime. Death and the Maiden forces us to confront the legacies of arbitrary detention and how it wreaks havoc with justice.
Films screen on Mondays at 7 pm