The Roy H. Park School of Communications and the Park Center for Independent Media will host Rory Kennedy, award-winning documentary filmmaker, on Monday, January 28.
Kennedy will give a free lecture titled, "The Camera Doesn't Lie: Social Change through Documentary Filmmaking," at 7:30 p.m. in Emerson Suites, Phillips Hall.
This lecture is the first in a series of special events in 2008 that will mark the launch of the Park Center for Independent Media.
Rory Kennedy
Cofounder/president of Moxie Firecracker Films, Inc., Rory Kennedy is one of the nation's most prolific independent documentary filmmakers. Her impressive body of work tackles some of our most pressing social concerns -- poverty, domestic abuse, drug addiction, human rights, AIDS, and mental illness -- and has garnered numerous awards and has been featured on HBO, A&E, MTV, Lifetime, the Oxygen Network, Court TV, TLC, and PBS.
Through her films, Kennedy illuminates issues via the stories of everyday people. Her documentary, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, won an Emmy in 2007. The film examines the abuses by U.S. soldiers at Iraqi prisons in 2003 and explores what the events reveal about American society, government, and military operations. It premiered to critical acclaim at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival before being broadcast on HBO.
Other Kennedy-directed projects include: The Homestead Strike, part of the History Channel's "Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America" series; Street Fight (which received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary), tracing the controversial 2002 Newark, New Jersey, mayoral race between Sharpe James and Cory Booker; American Hollow (which received an Emmy nomination in the Nonfiction Prime Time category), illustrating the plight of an Appalachian family caught between century-old tradition and the modern world; A Boy's Life ("Best Documentary" at the Woodstock Film Festival), a dramatic portrait of the troubling forces shaping the life of a young child from impoverished Mississippi; and Pandemic: Facing AIDS, recording the triumph as well as the heartbreak of five people afflicted with the disease. Other films include: Epidemic Africa, Fire in Our House, Juvies, The Changing Face of Beauty, Travelers, Different Moms, Healthy Start, The Nazi Officer's Wife, Sixteen, and Girlhood.
Park Center for Independent Media
This year marks the launch of the Park Center for Independent Media, a national think tank for the study and production of media content created and distributed outside traditional media systems and news organizations. The center's mission is to engage media makers and students in important conversations about the disruptive implications of interactive media in a participatory culture; to develop and distribute best practices to professionals across media forms; and to anticipate and explore newly emergent forms of media production and distribution in our research, our pedagogy, and our professional practices.
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20080115094521170