This Saturday, June 12th Freedom Riders has its New York premieres at BAMcinemaFest. For more information, visit BAMcinemaFest.
Freedom Riders was produced and directed by Stanley Nelson, produced by Laurens Grant and edited by Lewis Erskine and Aljernon Tunsil. It will be broadcast on PBS as part of American Experience during 2011, the 50th anniversary of the freedom rides.
The film chronicles the story of the Freedom Riders - an interracial group of young people who traveled the South in 1961 challenging segregation by demanding access to terminal restaurants, waiting rooms, buses and trains. Tracing the civil rights movement before it became The Civil Rights Movement, the film explores the stories behind these courageous actions.
Congratulations to the team and Firelight Media on an amazing, important film. Check out this exclusive NY premiere, and the rest of the offerings of the BAMcinemaFest:
Last Thursday, we attended Arts Engine’s Media That Matters IMPACT sessions in conjunction with the Media That Matters 2010 online film festival premiere.
You can watch all the films from this year’s festival, which cover topics like the crisis of the uninsured, the harmful impacts of bottled water, anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic, community reactions to the Sean Bell murder in New York City, homelessness in the UK and more:
http://www.mediathatmattersfest.org/
At the third IMPACT session offered on Thursday: EDUCATE, educators talked about how they have used films from the previous seasons of Media That Matters in their classrooms.
Kim Allen, a teacher at a predominantly white high school, uses the film Vision Test by Wes Kim, to facilitate a discussion among her students about white privilege:
Melanie Folstrom teaches a social justice class to high school students aged 16-21 at a transfer school in Brooklyn. Using a graphic organizer, Melanie has her students brainstorm about what groups have privilege and which are oppressed when it comes to race, class, gender, religion and sexual orientation. She uses the film Perversion of Justice from Media That Matters 8 to spark a discussion of the prison industrial complex - and what groups are privileged or oppressed within it:
Maria Hantzopoulos, who teaches aspiring teachers at Vassar College uses the short narrative film Immersion from last year’s fest to engage her students in a discussion of bilingual education and high-stakes testing:
