Busted: The Citizens Guide to Surviving Police Encounters is a film created by Flex Your Rights and realistically depicts the pressure and confusion of common police encounters. In an entertaining and revealing manner, BUSTED illustrates the right and wrong ways to handle different police encounters and pays special attention to demonstrating how you, the viewer, can courteously and confidently refuse police searches. Barrie Gewanter from the ACLU will be there with further information about police procedure and topics not covered in the video and to answer questions.

This event is free! Bring a friend!

La Americana is an intimate documentary following an undocumented immigrant’s journey from Bolivia to New York City and back, as she struggles to save the life of her ailing daughter. Her unforgettable story is woven into the current immigration crisis in the United States, putting a human face on this timely and controversial issue. Through interviews, reenactments and a sweeping cinema-verite narrative, La Americana takes its viewers on an international journey following the personal and political tragedy faced by one undocumented immigrant in New York City. The story begins several years ago, in the poorest country of South America.

When nine-year-old Carla falls gravely ill, her mother Carmen must leave her behind and make the dangerous and illegal journey to New York. Carmen hopes to earn enough money to support her ailing daughter realizing she may never see her again. Six years later, U.S. Congress proposes amnesty legislation that may allow the mother and daughter to reunite.  La Americana is Carmen’s story, and the story of millions of illegal immigrants forced to leave their families behind in order to provide them a better life. It is the story of a continent divided not by values, but by a physical and political barrier that separates families indefinitely, sometimes forever.

For immigrants themselves, the film empowers by giving voice to a common struggle. For native audiences, the film provides a chance to step into the shoes of the other. In this way, La Americana can both be a bridge within communities, as well as a call to action.

Join representatives from the ACLU and the Detention Task Force for this film screening and informative discussion. This unforgettable story puts a human face on the controversial issue of the immigration debate.

FREE TO THE PUBLIC

Join us for a presentation from local activists who traveled to spend time in Chiapas learning about Democracy from those who were willing to grab it out of the hands of politicians!

The event will be a multimedia presentation from the International Caravan for Observation and Solidarity with Zapatista Communities, Brigade to La Realidad, focusing on the history of the Zapatista movement, autonomous government, health and education.

On January 1st 1994, a rebel army called the Emiliano Zapata Liberation Front (EZLN) rose against the Mexican government in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatista movement has been organizing indigenous communities in the state of Chiapas in Mexico’s southeast for over 25 years, building local autonomy and improving daily-life conditions (for women, in health and education) in a “war against oblivion” as free trade threatens the livelihood of rural indigenous communities.

The Zapatista zone has around 32 rebel municipalities that refuse to recognise the Mexican or local state government. These municipalities send delegates to the council that organises the rebellion, the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee (CCRI). The Zapatistas are involved with a Peace Process. But in this process not even the CCRI can make decisions, instead each document produced by the talks, or any proposed change in tactics, must first be decided by all the communities. Right now some tens of thousands of people are making decisions in this way.

“The indigenous movement in which zapatismo is inscribed is not trying to return to the past, nor to maintain the unfair pyramid of society, just changing the skin color of the one who mandates and rules from above. The struggle of the Indian peoples of Mexico is not pointing backwards. In a linear world, where above is considered eternal and below inevitable, the Indian peoples of Mexico are breaking with that line and pointing towards something which is yet to be deciphered, but which is already new and better.”

FREE TO THE PUBLIC

In the summer of 2006, a broad-based, non-violent, popular uprising exploded in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Some compared it to the Paris Commune, while others called it the first Latin American revolution of the 21st century. But it was the people’s use of the media that truly made history in Oaxaca.

A 90-minute documentary, A Little Bit of So Much Truth captures the unprecedented media phenomenon that emerged when tens of thousands of school teachers, housewives, indigenous communities, health workers, farmers, and students took 14 radio stations and one TV station into their own hands, using them to organize, mobilize, and ultimately defend their grassroots struggle for social, cultural, and economic justice.

Filmmaker, Jill Freidberg, had already spent two years in Oaxaca, producing her previous film, Granito de Arena. She returned to Oaxaca, in 2006, and joined forces with Oaxacan media collective, Mal de Ojo TV, to tell the story of the people who put their lives on the line to give a voice to their struggle. Narrated almost entirely with recordings from the occupied media outlets, A Little Bit of So Much Truth delivers a breathtaking, intimate account of the revolution that WAS televised. Brilliantly conceived and executed.