Cinema
We’re Alive | Something Like a War
Mon, Jun 20–Mon, Aug 22, 2022
Every Monday
2.30 pm
Free admission
We’re Alive
D: Video Workshop of the California Institution for Women and the Women’s Film Workshop of the University of California, Los Angeles: Michie Gleason, Kathy Levitt, Christine Mohanna, USA 1974, 49 min, English OV
We’re Alive was made as a collaboration between women from the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, and incarcerated women at the California Institution for Women, a state prison located in Riverside County, east of the city. As a voice-over explains early on, every Sunday for six months both groups met in a classroom at the prison to plan the film and videotape their discussions, which in turn comprise its bulk. Over the course of their conversations, the women address experiences of racism, poverty, and drug dependency; the specificity of being a woman in prison; what led to their incarceration; and the difficulties of readapting to life outside. Intermittently, text appears on-screen, offering facts and statistics that contextualize the women’s statements in relation to demographics, policy, and the law, articulating an explicitly critical attitude toward mass incarceration.
Something Like a War
D: Deepa Dhanraj, Indien 1991, 52 min, Hindi/Marwari/English OV with English subtitles
Deepa Dhanraj began making films in the early 1980s as part of the Yugantar Film Collective, a group who embraced cinema as an activist tool. In Something Like a War, she examines India’s family planning program, particularly its impact on poor women living in rural areas who are subject to coerced or forced sterilization as well as to clinical trials of contraceptives conducted without informed consent. As film critic Devika Girish explains, “Through interviews with bureaucrats, researchers, health workers, and patients … Dhanraj’s film traces how these incidents are part of a long, sordid history of incentive-based population control in India, which preys upon the poor to meet targets set by the state and multinational funding bodies.”