Community Cinema Rocks the Bay Area

Sara Brissenden-Smith, regional outreach coordinator for the Bay Area, gives us highlights from a season of Community Cinema screenings.

I just completed my first full season of Community Cinema — that’s 18 screenings, with more than 30 community partners, 40 panelists, and more than 1,000 audience members.

A DJ spins at the Copyright Criminals screening in Oakland

Copyright Criminals brought out some of our most energetic and diverse viewers. People flooded into the theater and almost immediately lost themselves in the music.  Maybe it’s because I’m a hip hop fan, but having youth DJs mixing Lauryn Hill and Tribe Called Quest started my night off right. Law students, hip hop enthusiasts, teenagers, established authors, and DJs all contributed to conversations about artistic expression, creative ownership, and the overall impact on hip hop.

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Tags: Between The Folds, community cinema, Copyright Criminals, documentary, garbage dreams, Oakland, pbs, young@heart

Environmentalists Talk Trash in Oakland and San Francisco

On Wednesday, January 27, Garbage Dreams was screened at Oakland’s Asian Cultural Center. The screening was packed by audience members from every demographic and every age group, including an entire fifth grade class from the Lighthouse Community Charter School. Audience members were struck by the degree to which the Zaballeen managed to find a use for everything. Many attendees were inspired to integrate this consideration into their own lives and think more about the value of the things they view as trash. The screening was followed by an exciting discussion featuring panelists, Monica Wilson, International Co-coordinator at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), Aaron Ableman, Co-Founder of Communitree, and Ambessa Cantave, Co-Founder of Grind for the Green and Oakland Climate Justice Activist. Following is a video including interviews with panelist, Ambessa Cantave and a few of the audience members. A week before this screening, on Tuesday, January 19th, the San Francisco Main Library also hosted a screening of Garbage Dreams.

This screening was also followed by a very interesting discussion. Panelists, Kevin Drew, Residential Zero Waste Coordinator at the San Francisco Department of the Environment, Neil Tangri, Climate Change Campaign Director at the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA), and Bradley Angel, Executive Director at GreenAction, had some very eye-opening things to say about recycling:

“When you burn this stuff (trash), no matter how state-of-the-art, no matter how conscientious the company, you are getting emissions of the most toxic substances known to science- that are having a profound effect on our population worldwide.”
-Neil Tangri, Climate Change Campaign Director, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA)

“The fact of the matter is, companies are producing stuff for which there is no solution and they take no responsibility. And it’s left in the hands of Kevin (San Francisco Department of the Environment) and your tax dollars to solve that problem…If you can’t recycle it, if you don’t have a plan for it, you shouldn’t be producing it in the first place.”
-Bradley Angel, Executive Director, GreenAction

“We really shouldn’t be shipping things a long way away, we should be trying to live locally to the extent that we shouldn’t expect to get avocados year-round or other things, until very recently, we didn’t get year-round. Living within our means from a local ecosystem sense is where you’re going to find the right answer.”
-Kevin Drew, Residential Zero Waste Coordinator, San Francisco Department of the Environment

“If the waste pickers in Cairo can do eighty percent, I think San Francisco can do eighty percent as well.”
-Neil Tangri

Tags: garbage, garbage dreams, Oakland, recycling, San Francisco, trash

Donate Life California and ITVS Partner for D TOUR Community Cinema Screening

Currently there are more than 100,000 people waiting for a life-saving organ transplant, of which 20,000 on the wait list live in California. Due to a lack of donors, 18 patients die every day awaiting a second chance at life.

Donate Life California and ITVS have recently partnered to spread awareness about organ donation for the upcoming Community Cinema screening of D TOUR in Oakland, CA at 6:00 PM, September 23, at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. The film chronicles musician Pat Spurgeon’s search for a living kidney donor and the challenges associated with finding a viable match.

Taking a few minutes to register as an organ and tissue donor can mean a lifetime to someone else.

For those living in California, register on the Donate Life California Web site >>

Find out about upcoming screenings of D TOUR near you >>

Tags: California, kidney, Oakland, organ donation