January 6, 2011: MOUNTAINS THAT TAKE WING: ANGELA DAVIS & YURI KOCHIYAMA

Our  first film of the new year focuses on two woman who spent a lifetime fighting for social justice.

MOUNTAINS THAT TAKE WING – ANGELA DAVIS & YURI KOCHIYAMA features conversations that span thirteen years between two formidable women whose lives and political work remain at the epicenter of the most important civil rights struggles in the US. Through the intimacy and depth of conversations, we learn about Davis, an internationally renowned scholar-activist and 89-year-old Kochiyama, a revered grassroots community activist and 2005 Nobel Peace Prize nominee’s shared experiences as political prisoners and their profound passion for justice. On subjects ranging from the vital but largely erased role of women in social movements of the 20th century, community empowerment, to the prison industrial complex, war and the cultural arts, Davis’ and Kochiyama’s comments offer critical lessons for understanding our nation’s most important social movements and tremendous hope for its youth and the future.

A Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Angela Y. Davis is an internationally acclaimed scholar, professor, author and activist. Her parents were teachers and activists, and as a child growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, she witnessed and experienced the brutality of the Jim Crow regime of intolerance, violence and hatred. In 1969, she was fired from her Assistant Professor position in UCLA’s Philosophy Department because of her political activism and membership in the Communist Party, but was rehired after public protest. A year later, her involvement in the campaign to free the Soledad Brothers lead to a warrant for her arrest and placement on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Once captured, international campaigns to “Free Angela Davis” lead to her eventual release and acquittal on all charges. Davis remains a staunch advocate for prison abolition and has developed powerful critiques of the criminal justice system. Her books include If They Come in the Morning, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Women, Race and Class, Women Culture and Politics, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Are Prisons Obsolete? Abolition Democracy, and Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation.

Born on in 1921, Yuri Kochiyama is a dedicated 89 year-old grassroots organizer, activist and an archivist of the Civil Rights Era. Nominated for a 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, she is best known for her political involvement with Malcolm X, the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, the Asian American Movement and campaigns to release U.S. political prisoners. After her experience in World War II’s Japanese-American “internment camps,” Kochiyama was primed for activism. In 1960, when she and her husband moved with their large family into public housing in New York’s Harlem, she worked on neighborhood educational struggles and rapidly became a respected community activist and organizer. She met Malcolm X in a courthouse after she’d been arrested in a labor protest. She joined his organization of Afro-American Unity and supported a Pan Asian perspective by collaborating with the Hibakusha (Japanese Atom Bomb survivors) and having a strong Anti-Vietnam War stance. Despite her frail health, Kochiyama remains undaunted in her efforts to free U.S. political prisoners; her personal correspondence has sustained hundreds of men and women-many of whom she has helped gain freedom. Kochiyama devotes her life to progressive causes and is an inspiration to young people and activists around the globe.

The Filmmakers
C. A. (Crystal) Griffith is an independent filmmaker and Associate Professor of Film and Media Production in the School of Theatre and Film at Arizona State University (ASU). Griffith was raised in Washington, D.C., sojourned in Barcelona, Spain and is a graduate of Stanford University (BA) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (MFA). Griffith’s film credits include JUICE (1992), award-winning PBS and BBC documentaries such as A LITANY FOR SURVIVAL: THE LIFE AND WORK OF AUDRE LORDE (cinematographer), BRANFORD MARSALIS: THE MUSIC TELLS YOU (camera operator) and DEPECHE MODE 101 (both directed by D.A. Pennebaker), EYES ON THE PRIZE I & II, St.Clair Bourne’s MAKING ‘DO THE RIGHT THING’ and music videos from Tracy Chapman and Public Enemy to The Rolling Stones.

H. L. T. Quan (Ph.D. University of California-Santa Barbara) is an Assistant Professor of Justice & Social Inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, and an Affiliate Faculty in African/African American Studies, Asian Pacific American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research centers on race, gender, and economic and political thought. She is currently writing a book about savage developmentalism and its tendentious propensity to secure order and capitalist expansion. This study investigates foreign policy conducts by Japan in military Brazil, the United States in occupied Iraq, and China in Sudan amidst humanitarian disasters. She is also working on a collaborative project on the historical and political development of Black capitalism in the United States, a 17-city comparison.

All screenings are followed by lively discussions moderated by program director Floyd Webb or local scholars, screenwriters and directors.

Screenings occur the first Thursday of every month at
ICE Theaters Chatham 14
210 W. 87th Street
Chicago, IL