2015 Films

The 29th Annual Women’s History Month Film Series Schedule

Mondays, Feb. 23 – March 23, 2015

7:00-9:00 pm – 206 Kirkbride Hall

February 23: Anita: Speaking Truth to Power 

anita

In 1991, law professor Anita Hill testified before a Senate committee considering Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.  By recounting the sexual harassment she had endured from Thomas, she highlighted issues of power and sexual misconduct in the workplace that remain relevant in 2015.  In the years since her testimony, she has become an icon as a woman willing to stand up for justice and gender equality—to “speak truth to power.”

Speaker: Carole Marks, University of Delaware, Professor of Sociology

PLEASE NOTE: This film will be shown in Trabant Theatre (map)

March 2: Highway of Tears  

For decades, indigenous women along a lonely stretch of Canadian Highway 16 have been abducted, murdered, or simply gone missing, without much ever being done to identify the perpetrators.  This film traces the roots of systemic violence in endemic poverty, isolation, and high unemployment rates, and makes the case that all women’s lives matter!

Speaker: Justin de Leon, University of Delaware, Political Science and International Relations Doctoral Student, Co-founder Newark Bike Project

206 Kirkbride Hall

highway of tears

March 9: Tales of the Waria 

This documentary film intimately explores how a transgender community confronts issues of love, family and faith. Traveling to Indonesia, the world’s most populated Muslim country, the film shares the stories of several warias, biological men who identify as women and are a surprisingly visible presence in a culture normally associated with strict gender divides. 

Speaker: Laurent Widjaya, hotpot! Philly, the Visibility Project

206 Kirkbride Hall

March 16: Service: When Women Come Marching Home 

The film portrays the courage of several women veterans as they transition from active duty to civilian lives and the challenges they face addressing their invisible, as well as physical injuries, their struggles to receive benefits and care and their accomplishments as they return home. We watch these women wrestle with prosthetics, homelessness, post traumatic stress disorder and  sexual trauma. Women comprise 14% of today’s military forces and that number is expected to double in 10 years. Service introduces the issues faced by this wave of mothers, daughters, and sisters as they return home.

Speaker: Brigadier General Ruth Irwin, Delaware Army National Guard, retired

206 Kirkbride Hall

March 23: Saving Face

Saving Face Acid victim being treated by Dr. Mohammad Jawad

Every year hundreds of people — mostly women — are attacked with acid in Pakistan. Recently honored with a Best Documentary Short Oscar®, Saving Face follows several of survivors of acid attacks in their fight for justice, and reveals the work of a Pakistani plastic surgeon who has returned to his homeland to help them restore their faces. Saving Face analyzes the under-reporting of acid violence against women because of cultural and structural gender inequalities in Pakistan. The documentary also follows the effort to enact new legislation that imposes stricter sentencing on perpetrators of acid attacks.

Speaker: Raili Roy, Department of South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania

 

This year’s series is sponsored by the departments of Anthropology, Black American Studies, History, Political Science, Sociology and Criminal Justice, and Women and Gender Studies, as well as the Faculty Senate Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events (CAPE), the Student Centers Programming Advisory Board  (SCPAB) and the Office of Equity and Inclusion, Sexual Assault Prevention and Education Committee (SAPE).

All films are free and open to the public.

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