Forums

FLEFF Community Forums
Our forums program creates public space for public debates. Forums feature screenings, interdisciplinary panels, and discussions mining repressed, unknown, underrecognized topics of significance percolating on the edges of the media map and politics. Immerse in and traverse through camouflage, counterpoint, games, and gastronomica. The forums mix scholars, producers, writers, activists, artists, and audiences together for robust dialogue and hearty debate.

Screening of Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (Ithaca Premiere)
Thursday, April 3, 7:00 p.m.
Park Hall Auditorium
FREE

In Partnership with California Newsreel
Sponsored by the School of Health Sciences and Human Performances

Screening, panel, and forum contending there is more to health than medicine. Featuring local health, medicine, and public policy analysts and activists. Reception to follow.

What’s happening to our health? This premiere screening of the opening hour of Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick, a groundbreaking documentary series exploring America’s racial and socioeconomic inequities in health, probes the answers to this question.

While we pour more and more money into drugs, dietary supplements, and new medical technologies, this groundbreaking documentary series crisscrosses the country to investigate the findings that are shaking up conventional understandings of what really makes us healthy—or sick.

Join us for the Ithaca premiere of the first program “In Sickness and In Wealth.” Following the screening, local Ithaca health, medicine, and inequality analysts and activists unravel the connections between healthy bodies and healthy bank accounts in an open community forum on why medicine and money camouflage health.

In Louisville, Kentucky, the issues faced by a CEO, a lab supervisor, a janitor, and a welfare mother bring into sharp relief how socioeconomic status shapes opportunities to lead healthy lives. People of color face an additional burden. Solutions, public health officials believe, lie not in more pills but in better social policies.

Unnatural Causes sheds light on mounting evidence that demonstrates how work, wealth, neighborhood conditions and lack of access to power and resources can actually get under the skin and disrupt human biology as surely as germs and viruses. But it’s not just the poor who are sick—so are the middle classes. At each descending rung of the socioeconomic ladder, people tend to be sicker and die sooner. What’s more, at every level, many communities of color are worse off than their white counterparts. Spanning the country, compelling personal stories demonstrate how social conditions are as vital to our health as improving our diet, exercising, and not smoking.

As Harvard epidemiologist David Williams points out, investing in our schools, improving housing, integrating neighborhoods, improving jobs and wages, giving people more control over their work are also urgent and necessary health strategies.And these are the stories Unnatural Causes exposes.

The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival joins with public health schools, medical schools, activist health organizations, community public health departments, research institutes, universities, and public policy advocates across the nation as an outreach partner to mount the national campaign and community organizing project for Unnnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?

Hiding in Plain Sight: Screening and Community Forum on Youth, Sexuality, and Jewish Identity
Screening of Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School
Tuesday, April 1, 7:00 p.m.
Park Hall Auditorium

Panel and forum on gay youth, straight youth, and Jewish identities featuring scholar Rebecca Lesses, Keshet (GLBT Jewish grassroots organization), and student representatives from local high schools and Ithaca College.

Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School is the inspiring story of one student’s courageous fight to establish a gay-straight alliance at a Jewish high school in the Boston area and its transformative impact on her entire community. This special FLEFF community forum following the screening opens up the questions of the camouflage of identities, sexual orientations, and religion. It also mines and explores the unpredictable and challenging terrains that teenagers encounter when navigating these issues.

A representative from Keshet, the organization that produced the film, will be on the panel. Keshet is a grassroots organization dedicated to creating a fully inclusive Jewish community for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) Jews nationally. In the Greater Boston area, Keshet offers social and cultural events for GLBT Jews ranging from Jewish text study to an annual GLBT Jewish speed-dating gala.

Cosponsored by the Center for LGBT Education, Outreach, and Service and the Jewish studies program of Ithaca College.

Digital Counterpoints: Performance and Networked Media
Thursday, April 3, 4:00–6:00 p.m.
Park Hall Auditorium
Panel with online curators Dale Hudson and Sharon Lin Tay, new media artist Stephanie Rothenberg, and locative media artist Nick Knouf

Hiding in Plain Sight
Tuesday, April 1, 7:00 p.m.
Park Hall Auditorium
Screening of Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School
Panel and forum on gay youth, straight youth, and Jewish identities featuring scholar Rebecca Lesses, Keshet (GLBT Jewish grassroots organization), and student representatives from local high schools and Ithaca College.

How to Get Your Break Workshop
Friday, April 4, 4:30–6:00 p.m.
Park Hall Auditorium
Moderated by Steve Gordon, and featuring Lloyd Fales, and other industry and public media professionals 

The Price of Sugar (Ithaca Premiere)
Saturday, April 5, 7:00 p.m.,
Cinemapolis, (downtown Ithaca)
Screening, panel, and forum on labor rights, fair trade, Haiti, and gastronomica

Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (Ithaca Premiere)
Thursday, April 3, 7:00 p.m.
Park Hall Auditorium
Screening, panel, and forum contending there is more to health than medicine

Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art: Special Presentation and Lecture
Tim Murray, Goldsen Archive Curator
Tuesday, April 1, 2008, 4:00 p.m.
Park Hall Auditorium
The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, an analog and online archive, had its public launch this spring. And this year at FLEFF, Tim Murray, the Goldsen Archive curator and professor of comparative literature and English at Cornell University, presents a special lecture and workshop showcasing its wide-ranging and innovative holdings. Under the sponsorship of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art serves as a research repository of new media art and resources. The curatorial vision emphasizes digital interfaces and artistic experimentation by international, independent artists. Designed as an experimental center of research and creativity, the Goldsen Archive includes materials by individual artists and collaborates on conceptual experimentation and archival strategies with international curatorial and fellowship projects.

Named after the pioneering critic of the commercialization of mass media, the late Professor Rose Goldsen of Cornell University, the archive was founded by Murray to house and preserve international art work produced on CD, DVD, video, digital interfaces, and the Internet. Its collection of supporting materials includes unpublished manuscripts and designs, catalogues, monographs, and resource guides to new media art. Emphasizing multimedia artworks that reflect digital extensions of 20th-century developments in cinema, video, installation, photography, and sound, holdings include extensive special collections in American and Chinese new media arts and significant online and offline holdings of art made specifically for the Internet. The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art presents a novel research archive of international significance and a rare collection of important works in the history of new media and interface art. (goldsen.library.cornell.edu)

Wired Sustainability on –empyre-
Online Forum
An Australian-based global community, -empyre- preserves its autonomy as a nonhierarchical collaborative entity by engaging with new content on a monthly basis. The list was instigated in 2002 by Australian Melinda Rackham. The moderator consortium includes Rackham and fellow countryman Jason Nelson, and Renate Ferro, Christina McPhee, Tim Murray, and Nicholas Ruiz III, all from the United States.

The -empyre- monthly discussion in April 2008 will probe aspects of “wired sustainability.” Moderators Renate Ferro and Tim Murray will collaborate with featured guests Patricia Zimmermann and Tom Shevory (codirectors of FLEFF), selected FLEFF artists, and other international guests.

As “a soft-skinned space” of emergent discourse among artists and theorists working at the leading edge of contemporary practice, -empyre- facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices, and events in networked media by inviting key new media artists, curators, theorists, producers, and others to participate in thematic discussions. To participate in the online forum, sign up at www.subtle.net/empyre.