[cgfc] place films this thursday

[Sarah Kanouse]

---Please Forward Widely---

An Informal Film Series About Place presents:

"If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now," directed by Diane Bonder  
(2001, 15 min)
"Claiming Open Space," directed by Austin Allen (2000, 90 min)
"Why Live Here?" directed by Mark Street (1996, 60 min)

Thursday, March 11, 9 pm

Graduate Painting
2109 S. Griffith
Champaign, IL 61820

south on first street >> west (right) on gerty drive >> north (right)  
on griffith drive >>
graduate painting is the fifth building on the left

An Informal Series About Place screens films weekly on Thursday nights  
at 9 pm.
For more information see: www.walkinginplace.org/film

About the films:

"If You Lived Here" is about the divisiveness over land, the  
relationship of public and private space in small town America, and the  
concept of home. Using documentary strategies, landscape stills are  
juxtaposed to stories "ripped from the headlines" of a small-town  
newspaper. The struggle over public space described in the stories,  
reflect universal concepts of space, privacy and property ownership  
everywhere.

"Claiming Open Spaces"
The  city parks of Columbus, New Orleans, Detroit, Oakland and  
Montgomery, and the African-Americans who frequent them, are the  
subjects                  of this urban documentary. Public spaces, and  
the ways in which  we use them, sometimes conflict with official city  
planning.
  	
	"...a celebration of black culture, the sort of positive portrait that  
blacks deserve and seldom receive...a compelling, thoroughly             
         	researched production."  - Frank Gabrenya, Columbus Dispatch
	
	"Austin Allen's documentary takes a controversial stance: that African  
Americans' conception of open space is different from that of            
          	the mostly white civic authorities who have closed public  
parks in recent years, denying blacks a vital gathering place... In  
building his 	case, Allen...creates a fascinating history of black  
America."    - The East Bay Express

"Why Live Here?" explores three characters' reaction to their  
environments--San Francisco, Florida and Montana. In the film each  
character                  develops a particular relationship to place.  
One moves back to Montana to help with a family business, another moves  
to SF for the cultural climate, and a third moves to Tampa, Florida for  
a temporary job. All wonder why they are where they are, and what they  
might be missing elsewhere. Through the musings of the three  
characters, the film considers notions of home and community in an age  
when people move all over for all reasons.

________________________________________________________________________ 
___________________________________
Film series support is generously provided by the Art Graduate Student  
Organization, the Department of Anthropology, the Center for Democracy  
in a Multiracial Society, the Illinois Program for Research in the  
Humanities, the Labor Education Program, the Office of Lesbian, Gay,  
Bisexual, and Transgender Concerns, SORF, the Unit for Criticism and  
Interpretive Theory, and the Office of Women's Programs.