LACS Film Series

‘Icaros: a vision’ is a story about fear and the release from fear – the fear of illness and of death, but also the fear of life and living. It’s about the possibility of living through one’s fear – which is what the Amazonian plant Ayahuasca is good at getting you to do. Centered on the nightly ceremonies that are the main feature of shamanic retreats, Icaros revels in darkness, replicating a shamanic journey. Set in the Peruvian Amazon among the Shipibo-Conibo community, the film is also driven by the conviction that acknowledging the power of plants is the best way to change the jeopardized future of the Amazon – itself like a dying patient.

Directors:

Matteo Norzi: Artist, designer, filmmaker and indigenous rights activist, currently serving as Executive Director at Shipibo Conibo Center in New York City. Co-founder of Cobino Productions with Leonor Caraballo and Abou Farman, which aims to promote the creativity and knowledge of the Amazonian Shipibo Conibo communities through a range of media.

Leonor Caraballo: Worked as a photographer and video artist between Buenos Aires and New York. She won a number of fellowships and grants, including the Latin American Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and an Eyebeam Art and Technology Center residency. Aspects of the film are based on co-director Leonor Caraballo’s true experiences. Although she dedicated herself to the project until the very end, sadly she died before she could see the film finished.

There is an installation of the Shipibo-Conibo artist Celia Vasquez Yui at the Johnson Museum right now, so we recommend visiting the exhibit before going to the screening.

Presented by Kanopy

There'll be free pizza!

Join us on Zoom to practice your Quechua skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public.

Join Quechua Conversation Hour on Zoom!

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies funds international graduate student research!

Research travel grants provide international travel support for graduate and professional students to conduct short-term research or fieldwork outside the United States. Global PhD Research Awards fund fieldwork for 9 to 12 months of dissertation research.

Contact einaudi_center@einaudi.cornell.edu for more information.

Register for the information session.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

Two of Latin America’s most forceful dissident voices will explore the power and limits of fiction and other forms of creative expression in a public online conversation organized by Ithaca City of Asylum and co-hosted by the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program (LACS).

Sergio Ramírez Mercado (born 1942) is Nicaragua’s best-known living writer. He has produced novels, short stories, and journalism and has won many international awards, including the Cervantes Prize, the highest honor in the world of Spanish literature. He was also a key figure in the 1979 revolution that toppled the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. He served as vice president under the Sandinista government from 1985 to 1990 before splitting with the group and becoming a leading voice of opposition from the left. He was forced into exile in 2021 and was stripped of his citizenship in February 2023. He will be joining from Spain, where he now lives.

Ramírez will be joined in conversation by Pedro X. Molina, an internationally acclaimed political cartoonist who fled Nicaragua in 2018 and settled in Ithaca with the help of Ithaca City of Asylum. Molina has won a host of prestigious awards for his cartooning and his promotion of human rights, including the 2023 Vaclav Havel Award for Creative Dissent. He continues to contribute six cartoons and one strip per week to the online Nicaraguan news outlet Confidencial, and his work is published regularly in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He was an Artist Protection Fund fellow in residence at LACS.

Philip Lorenz, an associate professor of literature at Cornell, will moderate. The event is made possible by funds from the Statewide Community Regrants program from the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of the office of the Governor and NYS Legislature, and from Tompkins County, administered by the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County.

Come to the LRC to practice your language skills and meet new people. Conversation Hours provide an opportunity to use the target language in an informal, low-pressure atmosphere. Have fun practicing a language you are learning! Gain confidence through experience! Just using your new language skills helps you learn more than you might think. Conversation Hours are are open to any learner, including the public. Campus visitors and members of the public must adhere to Cornell's public health requirements for events.