21c and LFS Present Monthly Film Series with Visiting Filmmaker Mimi Pickering

Tuesday, November 17, 2009
7pm: Chemical Valley (1991, 58 mins.) & Anne Braden: Southern Patriot (work in progress, 20 mins.)
9pm: Hazel Dickens: It's Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song (2000, 60 mins.)
In Gallery 2, off the Atrium
Free and open to the public


The Al Smith Fellowship Filmmaker Tour continues in November with three films by award-winning documentary filmmaker and director of Appalshop's Community Media Initiative (CMI), Mimi Pickering. Pickering's documentaries often feature women as principle storytellers, focus on injustice and inequity, and explore the efforts of grassroots people to deal with community problems and work for positive solutions. The stories are told primarily through the voices and images of those most directly involved or affected by the issues.

Three films by the filmmaker will be screened. Chemical Valley (1991) chronicles one of the worst industrial accidents in history when a toxic gas leaked from Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India on December 3rd, 1984. The film begins with the tragic event, which claimed the lives of 3500 people, but then follows the lasting effects that continue to this day, exploring issues of job blackmail, environmental racism, and the citizen’s right to know.

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot explores the extraordinary life of the Kentucky native: an organizer, activist, journalist, writer, teacher, feminist, and mentor. The film is clips from a work in progress, with the final to be released in Summer of 2010, that depicts the remembrances and reflections of a historical figure who worked for six decades to end racism.

Hazel Dickens: It's Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song is a portrait of a pioneering woman who has lived the songs she sings. The documentary traces Dickens' growth as a singer-songwriter from church ballads, to union rallies, and to gigs at honky-tonks. In 2001, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Dickens a National Heritage Fellowship, the nation's highest honor folk and traditional arts.

About Mimi Pickering

As director of CMI, Mimi Pickering leads digital storytelling trainings and works with grassroots groups and public interest organizations to develop and implement communication strategies in support of social and economic justice organizing and policy change. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two Kentucky Arts Council Fellowships, as well as media production grants from the American Film Institute and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.

           

The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports this screening of the Al Smith Fellowship Filmmaker Tour with federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.

About LFS

21c is proud to partner with the Louisville Film Society in the continuing Monthly Film Series since August of 2007. LFS is a publicly supported non-profit organization. Support comes from memberships, event admission, advertisement, contributions, donated materials, and services. For more information about the LFS, please visit visit www.louisvillefilm.org.

21c Monthly Film Series is funded by: