Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers Film CANE FIRE
FREE screening available for 4 days including Q&A with filmmaker.
The Hawaiian island of Kauai is seen as a paradise of leisure and pristine natural beauty, but these escapist fantasies obscure the colonial displacement, hyper-exploitation of workers, and destructive environmental extraction that have actually shaped life on the island for the last 250 years.
Cane Fire critically examines the island’s history—and the various strategies by which Hollywood has represented it—through four generations of director Anthony Banua-Simon’s family, who first immigrated to Kauai from the Phillipines to work on the sugar plantations. Assembled from a diverse array of sources—from Banua-Simon’s observational footage, to amateur YouTube travelogues, to epic Hollywood dance sequences—Cane Fire offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the economic and cultural forces that have cast indigenous and working-class residents as “extras” in their own story.
Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers Warrior Women
Available to view for 4 days. Free screening.
Screening and Q&A with Director, Producers Christina D. King and Elizabeth A. Castle.
Warrior Women is the story of Madonna Thunder Hawk, one such AIM leader who shaped a kindred group of activists’ children – including her daughter Marcy – into the “We Will Remember” Survival School as a Native alternative to government-run education. Together, Madonna and Marcy fought for Native rights in an environment that made them more comrades than mother-daughter. Today, with Marcy now a mother herself, both are still at the forefront of Native issues, fighting against the environmental devastation of the Dakota Access Pipeline and for Indigenous cultural values.
Through a circular Indigenous style of storytelling, this film explores what it means to navigate a movement and motherhood and how activist legacies are passed down and transformed from generation to generation in the context of colonizing government that meets Native resistance with violence.
Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers
Socks on Fire: Uncle John and the Copper Headed Water Rattlers
Screening and Q&A with Writer, Director, Producer Bo McGuire.
Free Screening available for 4 days
My name is Bo McGuire. I am the first grandchild of the late, great Evelyn Louise Blanton-Washington of Gadsden, Alabama. Now, even though I conjure her as a great historical figure, y’all don’t know her. Not yet. She is my mama’s mama, my Nanny, and I speak of her as royalty because she is—queen of my heart, my imagination. She was the savior of my young, incredibly queer life in the sometimes cruel geography of rural, working-class Alabama.
Socks on Fire is a lyrical testament to Southern women couched in the battle for my grandmother’s throne. I returned home from New York City to find that my Aunt Sharon, my favorite childhood relative, had locked her gay, drag-queen brother, my Uncle John, out of the family home. As a queer Southerner, who can be both equally protective and skeptical of the South, Aunt Sharon stoked a fire within me to document the place and the people I call home. Through a series of stylized reenactments spun in with family VHS footage, Socks on Fire documents the fluidity of identity, personality, and performance in my hometown among my Mama’s people.