IN CINEMA
Newsreel Shorts - 1969
Thursday, June 22 at 7pm
Tickets: $15 General Admission/$7 Reduced Price
Co-Presented with Third World Newsreel
A screening of 3 collectively made films by Newsreel documenting student and teacher resistance struggles between 1968-1969.
This event is presented by artists Giulia Gabrielli and Matt Peterson, based on research and interviews they have been doing with more than 40 original members of the Newsreel collective (1967-1972). This screening is part of a larger series, which will also take place at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn.
Total Running Time: 74 minutes
High School Rising (Newsreel, 1969, 16 min)
An analysis of how the schools by using the tracking system, exploit and oppress people in terms of class origins and how students can begin to organize.
San Francisco State: On Strike (Newsreel, 1969, 20 min)
A documentary of the now famous San Francisco State strike of 1968-69. This film shows the role the tracking system played in determining the quality of education provided to children of working-class families. It portrays the armed force being used to restore control on the university campus
Community Control (Newsreel, 1969, 38 min)
his film documents one of the most important struggles for education in the sixties. In 1968, under intensive community pressure from Black and Latino communities, the State of New York chose three New York City school districts to become part of an experiment in community-run education. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the community board requested the reassignment of several teachers perceived as racists. The request brought the wrath of the United Federation of Teachers, city and state bureaucracies, and ultimately a citywide teacher's strike.
Post-screening conversation with Kazembe Balagun and Coco Tomás Reed
Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish gender-fluid scholar-organizer of radical cultural movements, and the 2022-2023 Postdoctoral Fellow in the PublicsLab at the CUNY Graduate Center. Coco’s new book New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People’s University is out with Common Notions. A co-founding participant in Free CUNY, Rank and File Action, and Reclaim the Commons, and a member of CUNY for Abortion Rights, Conor has been immersed in almost two decades of struggles at CUNY and in NYC around public education access, anti-militarization, police and prison abolition, solidarity with Palestine and Puerto Rico, abortion rights, housing justice, and beyond.
Kazembe Balagun is a native New Yorker who has worked for over two decades in public engagement for social, racial and ecological justice. His work is centered in building spaces for dialogue and education for community development across multiple disciplines. His writings have been published in The L Magazine, Guardian UK, Indypendent and in Anthology Interviews with Octavia Butler (University of Mississippi Press).
Giulia Gabrielli is an artist and researcher, currently part of the Studio Program at the Whitney ISP. She is completing a PhD in Philosophy at the Fine Art Academy in Vienna, where she is writing about the relationship between women, labor, and film production. Since 2014, she has worked as a teaching assistant at IUAV University in Venice, and for the last decade she has been a practitioner of collective research and communal art practice.
Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an experimental space in New York City. He directed the documentary features Scenes from a Revolt Sustained (2014) and Spaces of Exception (2018), and co-edited the books In the Name of the People (2018), The Mohawk Warrior Society (2022), and The Reservoir (2022). Since 2014 he has collaborated with Malek Rasamny on “The Native and the Refugee”, a multi-media documentary project on American Indian reservations and Palestinian refugee camps.
