Millie and the Lords tells the story of Milagros Baez, a young, working class under-confident Puerto Rican woman whose life is changed for the better when she begins to learn about the Young Lords Party and her rich Puerto Rican history. This event is part of Hispanic Heritage Month.
Spanish director Sebastián, his executive producer Costa and all his crew are in Bolivia, in the Cochabamba area, to shoot a motion picture about Christopher Columbus, his first explorations and the way the Spaniards treated the Indians at the time. Costa has chosen this place because the budget of the film is tight and here he can hire supernumeraries, local actors and extras on the cheap. Things go more or less smoothly until a conflict erupts over the privatization of the water supply. The trouble is that one of the local actors is a leading activist in the protest movement.
Not Rated (103 minutes)
To create his film Rebirth of a Nation, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, remixed D.W. Griffith’s 1915 epic film The Birth of a Nation. His re-telling
of this overtly racist story depicted in the Reconstruction-era United
States hurtles Griffith’s images into the 21st century. The original film
was based on a novel and theater play by Thomas Dixon entitled The Clansman. By applying DJ technique to cinema, Miller’s new film parallels, deconstructs and remixes the original. He likes to think of it as “film as found object” in the same sense that artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol and David Hammons, among many others, have fostered creative investigations into the idea of found objects, cinema and “appropriation art.”
A young Pakistani man is chasing corporate success on Wall Street. He finds himself embroiled in a conflict between his American Dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family’s homeland.
China, 1999. Childhood friends Liangzi and Zhang are both in love with Tao, the town beauty. Tao eventually decides to marry the wealthier Zhang. They soon have a son he names Dollar… From China to Australia, the lives, loves, hopes and disillusions of a family over two generations in a society changing at breakneck speed.
The Black Maria Film Festival was founded in 1981 as a tribute to Thomas Edison’s development of the motion picture at his laboratory, dubbed the “Black Maria” film studio, the first in the world, in West Orange, NJ. Now in its 37th year, the festival attracts and showcases the work of independent filmmakers internationally. The festival is a project of the Thomas A. Edison Media Arts Consortium, an independent non-profit organization in residence at New Jersey City University’s Department of Media Arts. Unlike other major film festivals, the Black Maria Festival is not presented in only one location. Instead, the winning films are presented at universities, museums, libraries and cultural centers across the country all year.
