March 30, 2005
Tia Lessin
"Making Controversial Documentaries"
- Lecture & Clip Screening
5:30 PM Wechsler Theater, Mary Graydon Center
Tia
Lessin, a New York-based documentary
filmmaker, received the 2002 Sidney Hillman Award for her work
as producer and director of Behind the Labels, a film
about sweatshops in Saipan that was shown on the Oxygen cable
channel, before Congress and in theaters nationwide. Lessin was
the supervising producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary
film Bowling for Columbine and associate producer of
the Academy Award-nominated Shadows of Hate. She has
twice been nominated for Emmy Awards for her work in television.
She co-produced Michael Moore's latest film Fahrenheit 9/11.
April 10, 2005
Peter Raymont
7:45 PM, Harold and Sylvia Greenberg Theater,
4200 Wisconsin Avenue NW
Tickets: $10 include reception
Co-sponsored by the Center as part of the
School of Communication Reel Journalism Festival, which runs
April 8-10.
Documentary Filmmaker, journalist and
writer Peter Raymont
produced and directed over 100 documentary films during a 33-year
career. His films have taken him to Ethiopia, Nicaragua, India,
Rwanda, the High Arctic and throughout North America and Europe.
He is the recipient of 35 international awards including the Canadian
Genie for Best Documentary for The World Is Watching
(1988), a critical examination of the role and responsibility
of the international media reporting from Nicaragua, and Gemini
Awards for his 6-hour fly-on-the-wall series on the business of
hockey, The New Ice Age (1998); Arctic Dreamer: The
Lonely Quest of Vilhjalmur Stefansson (2003) and The
World Stopped Watching (2004).
Raymont's films are often provocative
investigations of "hidden worlds" in politics, the media
and big business, as well as Native, social and human rights issues.
His films are broadcast on numerous TV networks around the world.
His career began in 1971 at the National Film Board of Canada
in Montreal where he worked as an editor, director and producer
for 7 years. While at the NFB, he also taught film and video production
in the Canadian Arctic. In 1978, Raymont moved to Toronto and
established his own independent film and television production
company, Investigative Productions.
With his new company White
Pine Pictures, in partnership with Lindalee Tracey, Raymont
has recently completed Bhopal: The Search for Justice
and The Undefended Border (3 X 1 hr), following the work
of Canadian Immigration Officers post 9/11. His next films include
an examination of the truth behind the nuclear tragedy in Chernobyl,
making the 20th anniversary of the disaster and Black Death documenting
the work of Canadian doctors and nurses fighting the AIDS disaster
in Lesotho.
Films
The World Is Watching (1987,
58 min.)
Who decides what's news? How do they decide?
How much of what we see and read is fact Fiction? And what of
the men and women in the field; are foreign correspondents allowed
to tell all that they see, or are they just employees, mouth-pieces
fro an invisible editorial line? This thought-provoking documentary
by filmmaker Peter Raymont examines these issues by focusing
on several journalist working in Nicaragua during the negotiations
surrounding the Arias Peace Plan in November 1987. Features
AU SOC's Artist in Residence Bill Gentile, formerly of Newsweek.
More
on the film>>
The
World Stopped Watching (2004, 58 min.)
Shot in Nicaragua in late 2002 and early
2003, The World Stopped Watching is a sequel to the
award winning documentary film The World Is Watching
- a cinema verité examination of foreign news coverage
of a climactic moment in the US-financed Contra war against
Nicaragua’s revolutionary government. Both Raymont
and Gentile will lead discussion following the screening. More
on the film>>
