Ithaca Premiere

2019 > Belgium/Netherlands > Directed by Bas Devos
With Saadia Bentaïeb, Laurent Kumba, Jovial Mbenga
A 58-year-old cleaning woman, a Muslim immigrant in Brussels, falls asleep on the last train, and must make her way back home on foot at night, encountering various individuals in the night-time city. This is the simple set-up for "a delicate miniature that's magnificently humanist, occasionally amusing and shot in a palette of rich, saturated nighttime hues, ... a small movie that is actually really great." (Hollywood Reporter) Subtitled. More at www.cinemaguild.com/theatrical/ghosttropic.html
1 hr 25 min.

We will start taking reservations one week in advance of a film's first playdate. Requests received before that time will not be processed.

Indonesia will be among the first nations to initiate a climate-based migration: transitioning its rapidly sinking, flood-prone capital from densely-populated Java to Borneo, one of the richest and most imperiled cultural and biodiversity hotspots on Earth. The new capital will be situated across a vast landscape where indigenous and migrant communities and corporations collectively practice subsistence, commercial, and extractive land uses and livelihoods across a shared landscape that also holds key endangered species habitat. This historic migration will spur rapid, wide-ranging, and intersecting effects on the surrounding social, economic, political, and ecological landscape.

Presenter: Wendy M. Erb, Visiting Scientist and American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, Lab of Ornithology, Cornell University

Register: https://cornell.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5xDR-FoFTBujNzwWH1jZSg

Part of the series "Migrations: A Global, Interdisciplinary, Multi-Species Examination"

Speaker: Bin Xu, Associate Professor, Sociology, Emory University

Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory

In the 1960s and 1970s, about 17 million Chinese youths were mobilized or forced by the state to migrate to the rural areas and the frontiers. In his forthcoming book Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory (Cambridge), Bin Xu tells the story of how this “sent-down youth” (zhiqing) generation, including China’s top leaders, have come to terms with their difficult past in various forms of memory in the past 40 years, including personal life stories, literature, exhibits, museums, and commemorative activities. At the core of this lasting memory boom, however, is their struggle to deal with the tensions between two entangled aspects of memory: their desire to remember their youth and confirm their worthiness on the one hand, and their difficulty in evaluating the controversial send-down program and other political upheavals in the Mao years on the other.

Their memory is used by the state to construct an official narrative, which weaves the leaders’ “adversity-to-success” personal experiences into an upbeat story of “China dream” but avoids addressing the controversial event. The memory boom also marginalizes those zhiqing who are still suffering from the harmful impacts of the program and veils voices of self-reflection on their moral responsibility during the political upheavals in their formative years. This generation of “Chairman Mao’s children” are still caught between the political and the personal, past and present, nostalgia and regret, and pride and trauma.

Bin Xu is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. His research interests lie at the intersection of politics and culture, including collective memory, civil society, cultural sociology, and social theory. He is the author of The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford, 2017), which won the 2018 Best Book Prize for Culture and Honorable Mention for Asia from the American Sociological Association. His second book, tentatively titled Chairman Mao’s Children: Politics, Generation, and China’s Difficult Memory is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He is working on his third book The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (under contract with Polity Press). His research has appeared in leading sociological and China studies journals.

Faculty host: John (Jack) Zinda, Development Sociology

Ithaca Premiere

1979 > Taiwan/Hong Kong > Directed by King Hu
With Feng Hsu, Yueh Sun, Chun Shih
Buddhist spirituality suffuses this restored wuxia (martial arts) masterpiece from King Hu. Rival gangs compete to steal a priceless scroll from a monastery in "a remarkably photographed caper heist... [with an] emphasis on the intriguing battles of wits and minds." (Far East Film Festival) Subtitled. More at filmmovement.com/raining-in-the-mountain
2 hrs

We will start taking reservations one week in advance of a film's first playdate. Requests received before that time will not be processed.