NIRV Screen & Discuss at St Augustine & St Martin’s Church

October 11, 2018

“Somos valiente!”We are brave, said an audience member who believes that immigrants always put themselves forward. She emphasized that immigrants should take pride in maintaining and sharing their cultures, foods and languages. She is one of many immigrants in CSFilm’s home community of Roxbury, MA, where we recently held a NIRV Screen & Discuss event. The event took place on Wednesday, October 9 at St Augustine & St Martin’s Church, which rents us our office space and generously donated the space for the NIRV training.

New Immigrant and Refugee Visions (NIRV) uses films made by and about immigrants and refugees to raise awareness and foster empathy about immigration issues at a time when people are divided in their beliefs. While our target audience is non-immigrants who are both welcoming and resistant to immigrants, we also strive to engage new immigrant communities to empower them and to encourage their civic participation. Since the church has an after-school program that includes many Puerto Rican and the Dominican families, they asked us if we would present two films made by and about people from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

The screening opened with Katsyris Rivera-Kientz’s film Twist and Discover. Katsy, a graduate student from Puerto Rico, wanted to shed light on the work of Puerto Ricans in the US. The film focuses on Jorge Arce, a cultural activist whose music, dance and storytelling engages youth and adults in cultural awareness and community activism.

Rafael De Leon, from the Dominican Republic, screened She’s an American Child, about the uncertainty facing an undocumented woman from the Dominican Republic and her daughter who grew up in the United States. The audience appreciated the film’s focus on the relationship between the mother and daughter. During the discussion, Annabelle further elaborated on her fear of being separated from her mother and her struggle with cultural identities. She shared that she constantly grapples with the possibility of having to leave the home she knows and has grown up in, for a country that she is from but doesn’t know.

The NIRV films convey real stories of immigrants and refugees, aiming to spark open conversations across communities that both support and oppose immigration. CSFilm Founding Director Michael Sheridan, brought the discussion to an end by asking people to try and get into conversation, one-on-one, with people that don’t look like us – if an immigrant or refugee, with people outside our circles; if born in the US, with people from other cultures who are new to the country. This country will not get out of the rut of division that we are in unless we make a special effort to start talking with one another across our cultural and political divides.

View excerpts of the NIRV films and organize a Screen & Discuss event in your community! Our Action Toolkit and a lot more information and resources are available online.

Subscribe to our mailing list to learn more about our work, the issues and upcoming events.

And, please, in order for us to Screen & Discuss these films in communities around the country, we need your support!

Thank you to the organizers at St Augustine & St Martin’s Church, especially Rev. Evan Thayer and Rev. Dorothella Littlepage. Thanks also to our community members who joined us at this event.

 

Related Posts:

War is a Racket! by The Department of Homeland Inspiration – featuring the Art Ranger and Michael Sheridan

War is a Racket! by The Department of Homeland Inspiration – featuring the Art Ranger and Michael Sheridan

Art Ranger, along with her colleague Michael Sheridan, review “War is a Racket” by Brigadier General Smedley D. Butler. This highly decorated war hero becomes dogged activist and tours the country giving speeches about how he was in effect, a bully for the corporations, then quit.  Art Ranger and Sheridan share excerpts of the text as well as a piece of their minds. Sonic textures provided by our back up band, The Dirty Pens.

ON THE MEDIA | Disrupting Journalism: How Platforms Have Upended the News, Columbia Journalism Review

ON THE MEDIA | Disrupting Journalism: How Platforms Have Upended the News, Columbia Journalism Review

After decades of shrinking revenues, and an increasing expectation among consumers that journalism should be free, the global media industry has reached a crisis point. As legacy news outlets shut down or lay off staff, misinformation and conspiracy theories run rampant, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Trust in our institutions of governance continues to decline, fueling an alarming rise in extremism and political violence across previously stable democracies. In the Global South, the impact of journalism’s decline has been even more striking, with the rise of a new generation of autocrats skilled in manipulating the online conversation to suit their consolidation of power.

ON THE MEDIA | Meet the Next Generation of Mexican Filmmakers, Global Press Journal

ON THE MEDIA | Meet the Next Generation of Mexican Filmmakers, Global Press Journal

After the 1994 [Zapatista] uprising, a boom in documentary films focused on indigenous themes and communities — but the overwhelming majority, Sojob says, were made by people from outside the state. Her own interest in storytelling began when, using a camera that her father gave her, she recorded an ongoing land conflict between the people of Chenalhó and the neighboring town of Chalchihuitán. Unless there was some sort of testimony, she realized, no one would know what was happening, “that it was us, ourselves, who had to get out everything that was happening within, from our own context, from our community.”

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *