October 24, 2012
San Francisco, CA – Variety is pleased to host the 15th UNITED NATIONS Association Film Festival at the Variety Preview Room Theater, Northern California’s most advanced private screening room and events lounge.
Variety Preview Room Theatre, 582 Market St. San Francisco
OCTOBER 24th - 5:00PM
Reception with the filmmakers to celebrate the 65th Anniversary of the United Nations signing of the Declaration of Human Rights.
UNDOCUMENTED DREAMS -6:00 PM
Director/Producer: Sara Masetti Loren, a young Latino college graduate and civil right
organizer, learns to move forward in life with an engineering degree in one hand and an expired visa in the other.
Biography: Sara Masetti is an Italian graduate student filmmaker at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Her interest varies from social issues to hybrid international documentary with a focus on topics and practices like immigration, minority representation, social justice, war zones, applied anthropology, and participatory video.
IMAGINING EMANUEL: 6:20 PM
Description:
How can we know who a person is? Emanuel’s identity is unknown, and his life is put on hold. Emanuel has an unknown identity and is residing illegally in Norway. He entered the country in 2003, but does not want to live in Norway illegally, and has tried to return to his homeland without success. He claims to be from Liberia, but Norwegian authorities claim that Emanuel comes from Ghana and have forcibly sent him there twice. Each time, Ghana has returned him to Norway with the message that he is not Ghaneser.
Emanuel is thus condemned to a life in limbo, without a residence permit and rights, but also without exit opportunity. Through several different documentary genres, Imagining Emanuel attempts to form an image of a man calling himself Emanuel. At the same time, the film exposes the process of observing, and how credibility is formed in a documentary. Who is Emanuel? What is identity? How can identity be depicted? Who holds the truth?
Biography:
Thomas A. Østbye was educated as an editor at the Norwegian Film School in Lillehammer, and works as an artist, film director, and editor. He runs his own production company, Plymserafin, and works with documentary material in film, photography, and installations. His short documentary In Your Dreams received numerous awards and nominations, among them the Prix Francaise at the National Art Exhibition in the autumn of 2005, the Best Short Film Award at Bergen International Film Festival and the award for best documentary at Euganea Movie Movement. It was also nominated for the National Film Award Amanda for best short film in 2005 and bought by the Arts Council Norway. Veil from 2008, and the fiction short Human from 2009 were also shown at various festivals around the world.
Director: Thomas A. Østbye Producer: Kristine Ann Skaret
PANEL DISCUSSION: 7:15 PM
Filmmakers discussing the DREAM ACT and its effects.
CAPTIVE RADIO: 8:30 PM
Director/Producer: Lauren Rosenfeld
Description:
Every Sunday morning, men and women in captivity deep in the Colombian jungle show.Captive Radio tells the story of two families that use the unique radio program to communicate with their loved ones held hostage by rebel guerrilla groups in Colombia. The film follows the harrowing personal accounts of the police major, Guillermo Solórzano, and the parents of Juan Camilo Mora, who have waited six years for news of their kidnapped son. Their stories represent the thousands of people marred by kidnapping who desperately seek a way to cope with separation and find it through The Voices of Kidnapping.
Biography:
Lauren Rosenfeld has worked on a variety of educational films, multimedia content, public television series, and independent documentary films. She settled in the Bay Area after producing two documentaries in Chile, including Watershed, which screened at film festivals and environmental forums around the world. Her other credits include coordinating producer of the George Lucas Educational
Foundation’s Digital Generation Project and consulting producer for the PBS
series E2: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious. She was the associate producer at Talking Eyes Media, where she managed the production and outreach campaign for the documentary film, Collateral Damage and co-produced the Iraqi Kurdistan Flipbook for MediaStorm. Lauren worked for Propeller Films on two documentary features, including The Recruiter, which premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and was broadcast on HBO. She was also an assistant editor on the Emmy Award-winning film, Made in LA. Most recently, Lauren has produced content forMission Loc@l, MediaStorm, the PBS NewsHour and the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Hazaribagh, Toxic Leather: 9:10 PM
Director: Elise Darblay, Eric de Lavarene Producer: Veronique Mauduy
Description:
Hazaribagh is giant slum of Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh. The increasing production costs in China have pushed this slum to one of the first world leather-producing rank. Garments and accessories, mainly intended for the European market, bring in more than 350 millions euros per year to Bangladesh. In archaic conditions, the workers work at least twelve hours a day for forty euros per month. Cancer, congenital malformation, ulcers, and many other illnesses will catch and kill them before they are fifty. Hazaribagh became a sanitary and environmental drama scene, and European and Bengali authorities seem to ignore it. This is a story about the everyday life of those men and women who live in one of the world’s top most polluted areas.
Biography:
Elise Darblay is an author of various documentaries and has been an assistant director for over five years. She worked on various series thirteen -to twenty-six minute TV reports, including one in Nagorno Karabakh that explores the issues of a country auto-proclaimed independent in the heart of hostile Azerbaidjan. Elise then became one of the directors for Yann Arthus Bertrand’s 7 billion Others, a world-scale project covering the UN Millennium Development Goals. She is currently working for WA Productions, writing and directing series of documentaries on the new human and environmental issues of our world.
Eric de Lavarene left for Cambodia during the peace process and became a journalist by working in a monthly magazine, which was published in Phnom Penh. He went back to Paris after four years to work with a new magazine and work in TV. For two years, he worked with Aina, an NGO media centre, training Afghan journalists and also working as a correspondent for radio France. Since 2003, he has covered the war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan for French public radio. He created various documentaries in the region: The Hunt of Ben Laden, The Country of the Taliban andIslamization of Pakistan. He is just finishing a documentary for French public television showing how NATO forces lost the war in Afghanistan.
UNAFF would like to thank both the UNA-San Francisco Chapter for organizing tonight’s reception and the Variety Screening Room for their generous support of the festival.