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Documenting
Environmental Justice
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Mossville Screening and Discussion
Date & Time: TBD
Mossville, Louisiana: A once-thriving community founded by formerly enslaved and free people of color, and an economically flourishing safe haven for generations of African American families. Today it’s a breeding ground for petrochemical plants and their toxic black clouds. Many residents are forced from their homes, and those that stay suffer from prolonged exposure to contamination and pollution. Amid this chaos and injustice stands one man who refuses to abandon his family’s land - and his community.
The Duke Human Rights Center will showcase this documentary in September as a part of the Celebrating 40 Years of Environmental Justice commemorative programming at Duke.
"I Am Berta" Film Screening and Discussion
Discussion: October 13 at 10am EST | Levine Science Research Center A156
Film Screening: October 14 | Nelson Mandela Auditorium at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Environmental defender, Berta Cáceres's crime continues unpunished, even though she denounced those who conspired to kill her. Her organization, Copinh, remains firm in the fight and they have not managed to silence the Mexican environmentalist Gustavo Castro, victim and only witness of the horror of that night,
BERTA SOY YO (I am Berta) is released nine years after the filmmaker Katia Lara arrived for the first time to record the resistance of the Lenca people against the Agua Zarca hydroelectric plant. The documentary praises the struggle of the Lenca and Garífuna peoples of Honduras and the magnicide of Berta Cáceres.
On October 13, the Nicholas School for the Environment at Duke and the Center for Latin American Studies will hold a discussion with director Katie Lara on "Defending the Environment Through Documentary Work" focused on Environmental Justice, Indigeneity, and Water Rights. There will be a showing of her documentary, I Am Berta, on October 14 at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Katia Lara (Tegucigalpa, Honduras 1967) is a Director and Producer, founder of Terco Productions. Her work focuses on human rights (gender and political participation), and environmental justice affairs in Honduras and Central America. After studding visual arts in Honduras and Mexico, Lara worked as journalist. She became news editor for news networks Notimex, Imevisión and CNN En Español, and fixer for war correspondents in Central America, Epigmenio Ibarra and Ronnie Lovler. After the signing of the Peace Agreements in 1992, moved to San Salvador where she worked in advertising. Then in 1998, studied Film Directing at the Eliseo Subiela School of Cinematography, in Argentina. In 2003, returned to Honduras where co-founded Terco Producciones.
Katia Lara is member of the Network of Latin America and Caribbean Documentarians and member of the Advisory Council of CINERGIA- Fund for the Promotion of Cinema in Central America and Cuba. Her films include: De largo distancia (2000;) Corazón abierto (2005); Quién dijo miedo, Honduras de un golpe... (2010); Berta Vive (2016); and Berta Soy Yo (2022).
With Berta Vive Lara won the best documentary at the Guadalajara Film Festival (2017).
MARTÍRIO: 40 Years of Struggle for Survival
October 15 at 7:00pm EST | Nelson Mandela Auditorium at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
With Celso Aoki, Myriam Medina Aoki, Oriel Benites, Tonico Benites and Guarani and Kaiowá communities of Mato Grosso do Sul state.
Filmed over the course of 40 years, indigenous expert and filmmaker Vincent Carelli seeks out the origins of the Guaraní Kaiowá genocide. A conflict of disproportionate forces: the peaceful and obstinate insurgency of the dispossessed Guaraní Kaiowá against the powerful apparatus of agribusiness. While fighting against the Brazilian Congress in order not to be evicted from their homes, the 50.000 indigenous people demand the demarcation of the space that belongs to them.
With rigorous investigative work, this Brazilian director recorded the birthplace of the resistance movement in the 1980s and tells, with his own voice and those of the indigenous people, of the social and political injustices suffered. The stunning archival historical images, new footage, both color and black and white, hearings in Brazilian Congress, and even interviews with those opposed to the Guaraní Kaiowá’s rights, reveal the crudeness with which they coexist every day: among the violation of their civil rights and the fortitude with which they confront the usurpers.
This epic documentary has become a sensation in Brazil and the ultimate testimony that unifies these unheard voices by “ethnocide actions,” the cruel synthesis of a conflict without a foreseen solution in the near future.
This showing was organized by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke and the Center for Latin American Studies as a part of the North Carolina Latin American Film Festival.
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SECRETS FROM PUTUMAYO
October 19 | Chelsea Theater in Chapel Hill
The story of the father of indigenous human and environmental rights inquiries, Roger Casement (1864-1916). His work in Africa, Brazil, and his native Ireland still has repercussions today.
In 1910, the British Consul General in Rio de Janeiro, Roger Casement, undertook an investigation into allegations of crimes against indigenous communities committed by the British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company. Narrated from his journals, Secrets from Putumayo recounts the horrific treatment he uncovered there: an industrial-extractive system based on killings and slave labor in the midst of the Amazon rainforest, “a real green hell.” Shocked by his discoveries, and despite a heavy personal toll, Casement was determined to bring awareness to the British of their own colonial atrocities by revealing the appalling human cost of the rubber industry. Blending unflinching passages from his journal (powerfully narrated by Stephen Rea) with unforgettable archival images, the film makes space for the Indigenous relatives of the survivors to share the oral stories passed down by the family members, who also recount current struggles for self-determination against today’s multinational corporations, just as fixated on extracting the resources of the Amazon.
Casement’s pursuit of justice continued when he returned to his native Ireland where he became an active Irish nationalist, to be executed for treason during World War I by the British government.
This showing was organized by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke and the Center for Latin American Studies as a part of the North Carolina Latin American Film Festival.
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Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power
Showing to take place in the Spring
Date, Time, and Location TBD
In 1960, Lowndes County, AL--despite being 80% Black--had zero registered Black voters. This film chronicles the courageous men and women, famous and unknown, who put their lives on the line to secure the right to vote for everyone. The story here is told by the Black and white people who were there at the time, including grassroots organizers and citizens content with the status quo, who share their personal anecdotes of that tumultuous time, lending an uncommon intimacy and authenticity to this historical documentary. Against a backdrop of blatant and brutal violence against freedom fighters, a young Stokely Carmichael brings passion to the crusade, and we witness the evolution of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) into a powerful force on the frontlines, fanning the cause outward throughout the South.
This showing is being organized by the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke and the Duke Human Rights Center. It is also a collaboration with the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice and Lowndes County native, Catherine Coleman Flowers.
