Sponsored by The Research Cluster for the Study of Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict and the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Films and videos featured in this year's festival foreground the role of independent film and video by women of color in dismantling colonial imaginaries and recovering histories of resistance. Because 1998 marks several anniversaries of U.S. colonial expansion (the 100th anniversary of the annexation of Cuba, Guam, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Eastern Samoa as well as the 150th anniversary of the annexation of half of Mexico's territories in what is now known as the Southwest), the theme Sovereign Images frames our discussion of how colonized peoples resist and survive colonial domination and imperial rule through the production of counter memories and transformative imaging practices.
The 1998 Women of Color Film and Video Festival will also honor veteran filmmakers Renee Tajima-Pena and Julie Dash, as well as feature visual artist Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, all of whom will be present to discuss their own odysseys in the history of women of color visual production in the U.S. The Saturday Women of Color Film and Videomakers Workshop will also celebrate emergent filmmakers and put these multiple generations of critical creativity together in dialogue.
with Julie Dash, Renee Tajima-Pena and other veteran filmmakers.
Spaces Limited -- Reservations Required
Contact Maylei Blackwell
(408) 459-3349
Presentation by Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie
(Seminole, Muskogee, Dine)
"Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant"
The UCSC Women of Color Film and Video Festival is now in its seventh year and has established itself as a crucial venue for independent exhibition and dialogue. Past festivals have focused on both established and emergent filmmakers, citizenship, belonging, displacement, indigeneity, queer-ness, diaspora, (in)migration, desire and diverse genealogies of complex politicized identities. The Festival has a history of combining film exhibition, scholarship, pedagogy, and lively discussion on such charged and crucial issues as the dismantling of affirmative action, diverse forms of resistance, racialized legislation in California, and the ways in power is organized and mediated through social categories of race, class, gender and sexuality. Over the past seven year's each annual organizing committee has taken up an individual theme as a vantage point from which to examine and discuss the aesthetic, social and political grounds upon which Women of Color are imaged as well as the modes of production, circulation, distribution and reception of those images. These discussions have not assumed an easy relationship to the category, Women of Color, but have interrogated, invented new understandings, and innovated the means through which the political projects of Women of Color are continually renegotiated and recrafted.
In 1992 the festival was founded by Margaret Daniel, who was the festival director for the first three years. The First Annual Woman of Color Film and Video Festival, "The Colors of Her Language," was founded on her notion that, "If you can conceive of an image of your cultural reality but do not see it reflected around you, then create it." As Daniel noted in that year's program, "film is a medium which has the capability to encompass a variety of academic disciplines and to transform them." The 4th Annual Festival, "Out of Bounds/Subversive Geographies," marked a critical departure from the festival's first three years as it grew and transformed through the vision of collective organization by members of the Research Cluster for the Study of Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict. Through the dedication, passion and labor, the festival continues and has had the honor of previewing a number of celebrated works before they were shown in national festivals. It was also the first festival to host a discussion with the co-producers and co-directors of the Audre Lorde Documentary Project. The festival has been important in creating a space where women of color film and video makers, students, community members, artists, film scholars, cultural critics and media arts personnel can meet and engage each other in an open dialogue and innovative format. Over the seven years of the festival, we have welcomed dozens of women of color filmmakers and scholars to both present and discuss their work. Among them are: Ada Gay Griffin, Michelle Parkerson, Lourdes Portillo, Renee Tajima, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Celine Salazar Parrenas, Dawn Suggs, Desi del Valle, Joyce Lee, Phyllis J. Jackson, Lok C. Siu, Mary Guzman, Ela Troyano, Crystal Griffith, Sydney Cliffton, Osa Hidalgo de la Riva, Frances Negron-Muntaner, Lily Ng, Madeleine Lim, Etang Inyang, H. Len Keller, La Trice Dixon, Tina Rizzo, Arlene Bowman, Kagendo Murungi, Iris Morales and young teenage filmmakers who are part of the video revolution have come to present their work throughout the years. This year's Festival committee continues this vital project.
The theme of this year's festival is Sovereign Images to mark and contest two anniversaries of U.S. imperial expansion: the 1848 annexation of half of Mexico's territories in what is now the U.S. Southwest and the 1898 annexations of Cuba, Eastern Samoa, Guam, Hawai'i, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Given our political context in California, we call attention to the violent histories which inform U.S. relations with colonized peoples both within and beyond U.S. borders. This year's festival will feature films and videos that foreground the role of independent film and video by women of color in dismantling colonial imaginaries and recovering histories of resistance. The program provides a forum for discussion on how we are able to resist and survive colonial domination through the production of counter memories and transformative imaging practices, such as the work of Hulleah J. Tsinhnanjinnie's "Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant." We look to films like Ana Maria Garcia's La operacion, M. Trinh Nguyen's Xich-lo, and Lourdes Portillo's Despues del terremoto because they engage directly with the legacies of U.S. funded military invasions and geopolitical interventions. Alongside these works, we present Julie Dash's Illusions and Ramona Diaz's Spirits Rising to highlight the roles of mass media and popular culture in the construction of women of color identities.
This year we are pleased to be featuring veteran filmmakers Julie Dash and Renee Tajima-Pena as well as visual artist Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, who will help us to frame a retrospective of the festival's history and a longer tradition of film and videomaking by Women of Color. We also honor and support emergent film and videomakers through The Women of Color Film and Videomakers Workshop on Saturday morning which we hope will put multiple generations of critical creativity together in dialogue. As part of the UCSC Women of Color in Conflict and Collaboration Research Cluster and the faculty sponsorship of Angela Davis, our vision is to provide a space for watching works by film and video artists and to locate these works through broad issues of production, distribution, exhibition and the racialized/gendered contexts we live in through conversations with filmmakers, scholars, and the audience.
The 1998 Festival Programming Committee Return to Cluster Home Page Return to Film Festival Home Page Return to Catriona's Home Page