"Filmmaking @ the Margins"

The Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside is hosting a film symposium May 2-3, 2003.

The Center for Ideas and Society at the University of California, Riverside is hosting a film symposium entitled "Filmmaking @ the Margins" May 2-3, 2003. The symposium will focus on Native American and Afro-German filmmaking. Filmmakers Thirza Cuthand, Fatima El-Tayeb, Angelina Maccarone and Randy Redroad will be presenting recent work. The symposium will take place on campus in ARTS 335 on Friday, May 2 from 5-7 (with a reception following) and Saturday, May 3 from 10-5. Admission is free.

Filmmaker Biographies:

Thirza Cuthand, a Cree filmmaker and artist from Saskatchewan, has made over ten videos since she was sixteen years old dealing with issues as far-ranging as sexual stereotypes, ageism, queer identity, race, and mass-mediated representations of the family from what she terms a “wry young halfbreed dyke” perspective. Her films include Colonization: The Second Coming (1996), Working Baby Dyke Theory: The Diasporic Impact of Cross-Generational Barriers (1997), Bisexual Wannabe (1997), Untouchable (1998), Helpless Maiden Makes an “I” Statement (1999), Through the Looking Glass (1999), and Anhedonia (2001). Helpless Maiden Makes an “I” Statement was the co-winner of the Akau Best Lesbian Canadian Short in 2000 and Cuthand was the youngest filmmaker featured in the Directors Series at the Inside-Out Festival in 2001. Her artwork has appeared in, among other venues, the 1999 Peoples Plastic Princess exhibit at the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff.

International award winning writer, academic, and filmmaker, Fatima El-Tayeb received her Ph. D. in History from the University of Hamburg in Germany for a dissertation on Afro-German history, entitled “Black Germans and German Racism: Oxymoron or Repressed History? African Germans and the discourse on “race”, 1900-1933,” which she is revising for publication with the German academic publishing house Campus under the title “Schwarze Deutsche: Eine verdraengte Geschichte.” [Black Germans: A Repressed History.] She also taught the first course on Afro-German history at the University of Hamburg. She has essays published and forthcoming on issues of Afro-German history, whiteness and German national identity, and concepts of German citizenship. In addition to her academic career, she has also written the script for the first Afro-German feature length-film, Alles wird gut—Everything will be fine, a lesbian screwball comedy, which was shown on German national television in 1996. She received the script award of Schleswig-Holstein in 1996, while the film received audience awards at the New Festival New York, the Toronto Inside Out Film Festival, and the Gay and Lesbian film Festival Los Angeles.

Angelina Maccarone was born in Cologne in 1965 and studied German and American Literature and Film at the University of Hamburg. She made her directorial debut in 1994 with the lesbian coming out comedy Kommt Mausi raus? (script/co-direction) and followed this with Blackjack (co-author, 1995), Alles wegen Robert de Niro (script, 1996), Alles wird gut (Everything Will Be Fine, 1997) and Ein Engel Schlaegt zurueck (An Angel's Revenge, 1997). She received Audience Awards in New York, Toronto and Los Angeles for Everything Will Be Fine and a festival award at the 1998 Cologne Conference for An Angel's Revenge.

Brooklyn-based Cherokee filmmaker Randy Redroad has written and directed four films: Cowtipping: The Militant Indian Waiter (1992), Haircuts Hurt (1992), High Horse (1995) and Doe Boy (2001). Haircuts Hurt was named the best short film at the American Indian Film Festival and High Horse won the best film prize at the Festival d’Amiens, France. The Doe Boy, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in January 2001, was the American winner of the Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award. Redroad won the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Intercultural Film Fellowship prior to attending the Sundance Institute Producers Conference and Filmmakers Lab in 1994.