Copy
Terri Sarris's SAC 403 sketch comedy students learn to to use the Black Magic camera in the studio last week. (Pictured from left to right, at left) Marie Monark, Jill Borowski, Jayne Shahmirzadi, Audrey Cords; (top right) Katrina Anderson, Lauren Wood, Shannon Cash, Julie Fasshnacht; (bottom right) Erich Eberhard, Alex Brown, Jorge Gonzalez, and Alex Bernard. 
Photos courtesy of Terri Sarris 
THIS WEEK'S EVENTS
The Border Collective, Colin Gunckel, and the Ypsilanti District Library Invite You to Celebrate El Dia de los Muertos with Visiting Artist Daniel Gonzalez
Artist Exhibition and Art Workshops 
October 26 - October 31
Ypsilanti District Library 
Times Vary; Please See Specific Schedule for Details 
All Events Are Free and Open to the Public 
Throughout Mexico and Latin America, the Day of the Dead, or Día de los Muertos, on November 1 and 2 celebrates and commemorates those who have passed away with vibrant costumes and celebrations. Local residents can participate in the celebration this year with a week of art exhibitions and workshops led by Daniel Gonzalez, a printmaker and graphic artist based in Los Angeles. Among exhibiting his own prints, Gonzalez will also offer free art workshops for youth and teens to create paper flowers and sugar skulls (to add to the community ofrenda, if they wish), as well as an adult art workshop in relief printmaking. 
Artist Talk with Daniel Gonzalez - In Conversation with Colin Gunckel
Thursday, October 29
3512 Haven Hall
5:00 p.m. 
Daniel Gonzalez will speak about the process of being in Michigan and working in the community, his own work, and the relationship between the arts and community Day of the Dead celebrations. 
“I feel that it is my responsibility as an artist to be a vehicle for culture, to inspire a sensibility of the creative, to pierce the fence we have built to keep ourselves apart and to remind people of the common experience we share in life." 
        -- Artist Daniel Gonzalez 
The Day of the Dead celebration is presented with support from the University of Michigan Departments of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, the Latina/o Studies Program, the Museum Studies Program; and the Ypsilanti District Library.
2015 UM Contemporary Chinese Film Series  
Tuesdays in September and October 
State Theater
7:00 p.m. -- Free Admission 
Still from Aberdeen (2014), directed by Pang Ho-cheung
Sponsored by the Confucius Institute and Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at UM, Electric Shadows: 2015 Contemporary Chinese Film Series will feature six exciting Chinese films released in 2014 and 2015.  SAC Professor Markus Nornes helped curate the festival, which ends today, October 27, at the State Theater with the screening of Aberdeen (2014). The extended Cheng family represents today's "Little Hong Kong" and its myriad of contradictions between traditions and modernity; superstitions and materialism; family and individuality. Read more about the film here. 
SAC Alumnus A. Brad Schwartz Presents Broadcast Hysteria at the Detroit Film Theater 
Thursday, October 29
Detroit Film Theater Auditorium
7:00 p.m. -- Free Admission 
On Halloween Eve, 1938, Orson Welles's brilliant radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds caused unprecedented mass hysteria --
or did it? 
In honor of Welles's centennial year and of the broadcast's 77th anniversary, join A. Brad Schwartz as he re-examines this landmark moment in history in his presentation of Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles's War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News.  Although Welles's live dramatization of The War of the Worlds did not cause mass panic, Schwartz will show that the broadcast was nothing less than history's first viral media phenomenon -- a dire warning for the age of Twitter and 24-hour news. 
This event is sponsored by Friends of the Detroit Film Theater. 
Chronopolis: Time and Urban Space, 2015 Graduate Student Conference  
October 30 - October 31
Rackham East Conference Room 
Times Vary: Please See Conference Schedule for Details 
Although cities are generally understood as spatial phenomena, this conference suggests that urban space cannot be thought independent of its temporal dimensions.  Thinking about the ways time intertwines with urban space illuminates the material and representative dimensions of the city as a dynamic space of experience and practice, systems and conflicts, culture and history.
This conference, hosted by Germanic Languages and Literatures, is generously supported by Rackham Graduate School, International Institute, LSA, Institute for the Humanities, the Departments of Screen Arts & Cultures, History, History of Art, Museum Studies, Anthropology, and the European History Workshop. 
SAC Graduate Student Ben Strassfeld Kicks Off 3rd Thursday Speaker Series (on Friday!)
Friday, October 30 
SAC Conference Room, North Quad
1:00 p.m. 
Third Thursdays is a forum for talks and similar events hosted by the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures.  This series showcases the best SAC scholarship and brings in friends of SAC to share their expertise, providing experiences of the wide range of intellectual and creative work happening in the Department, the University, and beyond.
Ben Strassfeld kicks off this year's series with his paper, entitled, "'The Blight of Indecency': Antiporn Politics and the Urban Crisis in Early 1970s Detroit."
In this paper, Strassfeld tells the story of the efforts of the Detroit neighborhood of Redford to shutter an adult business that had opened in its midst in the summer of 1972. Not long after the Adult World Bookstore set up shop in Redford, neighborhood residents mounted a campaign aimed at stamping out the adult businesses, inundating the offices of the mayor and city councilmen with hundreds of letters calling for the city to take action. Strassfeld's paper aims to situate local antiporn activism within the context of the urban crisis of the early 1970s, as Detroit and cities across the country struggled to cope with the effects of white flight, deindustrialization, and racial conflict. Utilizing archival sources, including the handwritten letters sent by residents to city officials, he argues that Redford's antiporn activists drew much of their rhetoric and tactics from white racial politics of the day.
International Studies Horror Film Festival
Friday, October 30
Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery (Room 100)
11:00 a.m. - 6:30 p.m. 
Free and Open to the Public -- Snacks provided!
Join in the "horror" of the Third Annual International Studies Horror Film Festival featuring four frightening foreign language films from around the world.
 
11:00 am. -- The Cure (2006, Japanese) 
1:00 p.m. -- A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014, Persian)
3:00 p.m. -- Go Goa Gone (2013, Hindi)
5:00 p.m. -- Them/Ils (2006, French/Romanian) 
 
This event is sponsored by International Studies, University of Michigan Library; films provided by Askwith Media Library.
MARK YOUR CALENDARS
Lusophone Film Festival 
Festival Runs Through Early December
Films Screened at State Theater, Michigan Theater, and UMMA Helmut Stern Auditorium; See Schedule for Specific Times and Locations 
Free Admission  

The Lusophone Film Festival showcases the contemporary cinema of the Portuguese-speaking world. It is the second event of its kind in Ann Arbor and at the University of Michigan. The primary objectives of this event are to provide high visibility to the Portuguese language and its cultures at the University of Michigan and throughout the region, while contributing to program-building efforts currently underway in Portuguese.
Still from Sacred Bush (Kadjike), directed by Sana Na N'Hada. See the screening - with an introduction by Professor Fernando Arena - on November 5th at the State Theater at 7:00 p.m. 

Kadjike is set on the pristine shores of the Bijagós Archipelago, off the coast of W. Africa, and follows the lives and rituals of the islanders as they face up to the threat of drug traffickers in their midst. In the last decade, Guinea-Bissau became a transit hub for cocaine trading between Latin America and Europe. Kadjike is a coming of age drama and a meditation on the schism between traditional Guinean customs and the rising tide of modernity — a constant theme throughout N’Hada’s cinematic career.
The Lusophone Film Festival is sponsored by the Brazil Initiative/Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, LSA, International Institute African Studies Center, Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Institute for the Humanities, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Sheldon Cohn Fund/Department of Screen Arts & Cultures, Center for European Studies, and Rackham Graduate School.
Gasland: A Multimedia Presentation on Fracking by Josh Fox  
November 11
Rackham Auditorium
5:00 p.m. -- Free and Open to the Public 

Goldring Family Foundation Distinguished Speaker Josh Fox, the creator of Gasland I and II, will feature clips and comments from his documentaries in order to showcase environmental issues and its possible solutions.

 
This event is hosted by Program in the Environment (PitE) and co-sponsored by Screen Arts & Cultures, Environmental Law & Policy Program, Department of English Language and Literature, Department of American Culture, and the Institute for the Humanities.
THIS WEEK'S FEATURED PHOTO
UM Alum and Producer Peter McPartilin talks with a group of interested students after the screening of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl in Angell Hall, Aud. A on October 15th.
photo courtesy of Mary Lou Chlipala
NEWS
SAC Alums Sultan Sharrief and Oren Goldenberg win Hack 360 Jury Prize at Tech Conference in Harlem  
Earlier this year, the NBPC, National Black Program Consortium, selected eight winners for its new incubator program, NBPC 360. Street Cred, a reality show documenting the challenges 12 Detroit high school students must overcome to meet entertainment / production skill-based tasks in order to win a dream internship, now produced by Sharrief and Goldenberg, was one of the eight winners. 
In mid-October, the NBPC partnered with Silicon Harlem at the 2nd Annual Tech Conference and created Hack 360, a competition whose theme was "gamification"; participants worked for over two days to create prototypes for games to promote their TV series. 
“Additional platforms that create an immersive user experience, like gaming, are even more critical when trying to reach communities of color and younger viewers who are not always as broadly represented in public television.”
Kay Shaw, NBPC
Sharrief and Goldenberg won the Jury Prize with their Street Cred Movie Mogul game app, a game whose goal is for players to build their film company and work their way toward getting their name on a Hollywood star and becoming a movie mogul. Read more about the competition and the NBPC here. 
Professor Emeritus Richard Abel Publishes Essay in Special Issue of Screening the Past 40
Abel's essay, entitled "'A Great New Field for Women Folk': Newspapers and the Movies, 1911-16," was recently published in a special issue on Women and the Silent Screen of the online journal, Screening the Past 40 (September 2015). In this article, Abel argues that "newspaper writing played a crucial role in creating a popular film culture that supported and sustained the new industry's spectacular growth as a mass entertainment, and women, many long forgotten, were engaged in much of that writing." The crux of the article analyzes the work of eight professional newspaperwomen (complemented by fabulous illustrations), who began writing about motion pictures from a variety of perspectives: the reporter, the columnist, the editor, and the reviewer. Read Abel's full analysis here.
"Key of B" Documentary Creators Alexander Holmes, Maggie Marshall, and Jayden Hua Featured in Michigan Daily's The B Side. 
Maggie Marhsall, Jayden Hua, and Alex Holmes (pictured from left to right) prepare for the first day of their shoot at Woodbridge Community Center.  
 
photo courtesy of
Alex Holmes
Daily Music Editor Amelia Zak highlighted "The Key of B" documentary -- created by Alexander Holmes, Jayden Hua, and Maggie Marshall in Marek's Winter '15 SAC 301 and recently selected as a finalist in the Film Challenge Detroit Competition --  in her article entitled, "There is hope here: Seven Mile Music illuminates Brightmoor." The film, a poignant exploration of the pivotal role that art and music play in human development, "holds a depth of discovery," Zak claims. "The incorporation of the perspectives and personal experiences of community leaders [...] added immensely to the legitimacy, honesty, and power of 'The Key of B.'" Read the full article for more details about the film, Seven Mile Music, and the Brightmoor community here.
SAC 2015-16 Honors Cohort
Spotlight on Carina Teoh
A senior Screen Arts & Cultures major from Okemos, Michigan, Carina Teoh holds a strong belief that a command of film production comes with a strong understanding of film theory. Teoh’s honors thesis intends to explore Andrè Bazin and how his ideas on realism and fantasy both conflict with his position as a realist film theorist and work to create a better understanding of viewership and acceptance of fantasy films. Inspired by Bazin’s thoughts on Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon and current reception towards fantasy in films, she hopes to establish a better understanding through the theories of Bazin, how he, as a realist film theorist, could categorize a film as both realism and fantastical and why audiences are more receptive to incongruous aspects of fantastical elements in films praised for realism.
Attention Undergrads! Check Out the Updated Casting and Crew Calls on the SAC Website 
Are you interested in acting or working on the crew of a SAC production? Check out the casting calls for two new SAC 300 productions: Bench in the Park and Janus -- and the calls for extras and PAs for a SAC 400 short film (title pending). Details are posted in the specific calls on the SAC website: find casting here and crew here.