Category: Documentary Film & Photography

COMMUNITY CINEMA AT SOKA UNIVERSITY PRESENTS

Limited Partnership

Date: 05.07.2015

Time: 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Location: Pauling 216

Thomas Miller, Producer/Director
Kirk Marcolina, Producer
Karen Hori, Co-Producer

Decades before The Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8, one gay couple fell in love and took on the US government to fight for marriage and immigration equality. Filipino American Richard Adams and Australian Tony Sullivan met in 1971 in Los Angeles and quickly fell in love. In April 1975, thanks to a courageous county clerk in Boulder, CO, they became one of the first same-sex couples in the world to be legally married. Richard immediately filed for a green card for Tony based on their marriage. But unlike most heterosexual married couples who easily file petitions and obtain green cards, Richard received a denial letter from the Immigration and Naturalization Service stating, ”You have failed to establish that a bona fide marital relationship can exist between two faggots.”

To prevent Tony’s impending deportation, and outraged by the tone, tenor, and politics of this letter, the couple sued the U.S. government. This became the first federal lawsuit seeking equal treatment for a same-sex marriage in U.S. history. Over four decades of legal challenges, Richard and Tony figured out how to maintain their sense of humor, justice, and whenever possible, their privacy. This tenacious story of love, marriage, and immigration equality is as precedent-setting as it is little-known – until now.

COMMUNITY CINEMA AT SOKA UNIVERSITY  PRESENTS

Directors/Producers:
Anne de Mare, Director/Producer
Kirsten Kelly, Director/Producer

The Homestretch follows three homeless teens as they fight to stay in school, graduate, and build a future. Each of these smart, ambitious youths — Roque, Kasey, and Anthony — will surprise, inspire, and challenge audiences to rethink stereotypes of homelessness as they work to complete their education while facing the trauma of being alone and abandoned at an early age. While told through a personal perspective, their stories connect with larger issues of poverty, race, juvenile justice, immigration, foster care, and LGBTQ rights.

With unprecedented access into Chicago public schools, The Night Ministry “Crib” emergency youth shelter, and Teen Living Programs’ Belfort House, The Homestretch follows these kids as they move through the milestones of high school while navigating a landscape of couch hopping, emergency shelters, transitional homes, street families, and a school system on the front lines of the homelessness crisis. The Homestretch examines the struggles these youth face in obtaining a high school level education, and then follows them beyond graduation to focus on the crucial transition when the structure of school vanishes, and homeless youth often struggle to find the support and community they need to survive and be independent. A powerful, original perspective on what it means to be young and homeless in America today, while building a future.

COMMUNITY CINEMA AT SOKA UNIVERSITY  PRESENTS

Directors/Producers:
Christine Herbes-Sommers, Producer
Llewellyn Smith, Producer/Director
Kelly Thomson, Producer

Follow the story of foreign researcher and Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal whose study, An American Dilemma (1944), provided a provocative inquiry into the dissonance between stated beliefs as a society and what is perpetuated and allowed in the name of those beliefs. His inquiry into the United States’ racial psyche becomes a lens for modern inquiry into how denial, cognitive dissonance, and unrecognized, unconscious attitudes continue to dominate racial dynamics in American life. The film’s unusual narrative sheds a unique light on the unconscious political and moral world of modern Americans. Archival footage, newsreels, nightly news reports, and rare southern home movies from the ’30s and ’40s thread through the story, as well as psychological testing into racial attitudes from research footage, websites, and YouTube films.

Soka University of America presents…

A Community Cinema Event

October 23rd 7-8:30 PM

a film by Darius Clark Monroe

In this gripping blend of documentary, true crime, and personal essay, a filmmaker confronts his past, dissecting the circumstances that led him to commit a bank robbery as a young man, and his journey since that act.