more documentary premieres!

Praying with Lior follows the Liebling family over three years, focusing on Lior, a 13-year-old boy with high-functioning Down’s Syndrome who seems to have a special connection with God, and is considered a spiritual leader by some. The film chronicles Lior’s interactions with God, his family, and community, ultimately culminating in his Bar Mitzvah. Praying with Lior is part of our Jewish Film Festival, and includes a special 11am screening on Sunday, March 30.

Egypt was not always hostage to the myth of it being a homogenous society. Rather, Egypt was once a multi-ethnic and religiously heterogeneous society. Salata Baladi is the personal history of filmmaker Nadia Kamel’s grandmother, Mary, as told to her grandson, Nabeel. Like many Egyptians, born at the end of a century filled with multiple waves of immigration, religious conversions, and mixed marriages, Nabeel is a mix of Egyptian, Italian, Palestinian, and Lebanese, with some Russian, Caucasian, Turk, and Spanish, all from his Muslim, Christian and Jewish ancestors. As Mary weaves her way through the family tales, she bumps into her own fears and the continued silence shrouding the Israeli branch of her family. In an act of solidarity with the Palestinian people dispossessed by the creation of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948, Mary has been boycotting her Egyptian Jewish family in Israel for 55 long years. Inspired by the telling of her own stories and the fresh perspectives her ten-year-old grandson brings to them, she and her loving, eclectic circle of friends and family engage in breaking one of the most vicious taboos in modern Egypt. Filmmaker Nadia Kameel presents her film in a free screening. Cosponsored with the Dept. of Near Eastern Studies, Society for the Humanities and the Mediterranean Initiative of the Institute for European Studies.

A Palestinian refugee camp in the suburbs of Beirut is the setting of Chatila, an ethnographic documentary which was produced collaboratively with a group of children living in the camp; many of the interviews and most of the shooting of everyday life in the camp was done by them. The film explores camp life through their eyes, and in particular focuses on the politicization of children and the impact that TV coverage of the Intifada is having on them and their families. It will be shown with Still Life (2007, 23 mins), a triptych of video portraits with three generations of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon that explores the different ways in which memory is mediated. Filmmaker Diana Allan will present her work in a free screening. Cosponsored with the Department of Anthropology, the Anthropology Graduate Student Association, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the Peace Studies Program.

The final doc looks at a very unhealthy part of our diet and economy. In King Corn, college buddies Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis try to better understand the realities of the “corn industrial complex” by getting in on the ground level—;they lease a single acre of farmland in Iowa and plant a crop. They also attempt to trace the path their crop will eventually take, to the feed lots and the syrup production plants, and into the mouths of an increasingly obese and diabetes-ridden population. “A worthy companion piece to Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation (more the book than the movie), King Corn will put you off corn for a long, long time, but this is as much a thoughtful meditation on the plight of the American farmer as it is a rant against our expanding waistlines.” (Village Voice) Cosponsored with Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.