Monday, February 02, 2015

February's Films and Filmmakers

It's February and that means Southern Circuit is gearing up for the second half of it's season! This month we welcome Brothers Hypnotic, Private Violence, The New Black, and Remote Area Medical. Read on to find out more about these films and check out the entire lineup for the 2014-2015 Southern Circuit Film Schedule.


Reuben Atlas is an award-winning filmmaker and non-practicing lawyer. He premiered Brothers Hypnotic at the SXSW Film Festival in 2013 and is currently making a Sundance Institute and IDA-supported film about the controversial community group, ACORN, as well as a film about the esoteric world of fine wine. Previously, he worked at a maximum-security prison, a music law firm, and Legal Aid.
For the eight young men in the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, brotherhood is literal: they’re all sons of anti-establishment jazz legend Phil Cohran. Cohran and their mothers raised them together on Chicago’s South Side on a strict diet of jazz, funk and Black Consciousness. Family band practice began at 6 AM. Now grown, Brothers Hypnotic shows as the brothers try to make it - while playing in the streets of New York, collaborating with Mos Def, or wowing at a jazz festival - they find the values their father bred into them tested.

Schedule:

Feb 08: Winder Cultural Arts Center, Winder, GA
Feb 10: Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA
Feb 11: Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Feb 12: Wallace State Community College, Hanceville, AL


Kit Gruelle is a survivor of domestic violence and has worked as a battered women’s advocate and community educator for over 25 years. She is dedicated to challenging the stereotypes and prevailing belief systems about violence against women and children, and the prevalence of out-of-date responses that do little to change the fundamental dynamics of domestic violence.






Cynthia Hill is a producer and director whose credits include Tobacco Money Feeds My FamilyThe GuestworkerFebruary One, and A Chef’s Life. Hill’s work has appeared on PBS and the Sundance Channel. She is the co-founder of the Southern Documentary Fund. Hill is from Pink Hill, NC and resides in Durham.






Private Violence is a feature-length documentary film and audience engagement campaign exploring a simple, but deeply disturbing, fact of American life: the most dangerous place for a woman in America is her own home. Every day in the United States, at least four women are murdered by abusive (and often ex-) partners. The knee-jerk response is to ask, “Why doesn’t she just leave?” Private Violence shatters the brutality of this logic. Through the eyes of two survivors, filmgoers witness the complicated and complex realities of intimate partner violence.

Schedule:

Feb 12: Madison-Morgan Cultural Center, Madison, GA
Feb 13: City of Hapeville, Hapeville, GA
Feb 14: The Tennessee Valley Art Association/Ritz Theatre, Sheffield, AL
Feb 17: Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC
Feb 19: Robinson Film Center, Shreveport, LA
Feb 20: Union College, Barbourville, KY


Yoruba Richen is a documentary filmmaker who has directed and
produced films in the United States and abroad including Africa, South America and Southeast Asia. Richen has been an associate producer for the investigative unit of ABC News, as well as a producer for Democracy Now. Richen won the Creative Promise Award at Tribeca All Access and was a Sundance Institute’s Producers’ Fellow. She is a 2014 featured TED Speaker and a Guggenheim Fellow. Richen is Director of the Documentary Program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

The New Black tells the story of an African-American community grappling with gay rights in light of the recent gay marriage movement and fights over civil rights. The film documents activists, families and clergy on both sides of the campaigning to legalize gay marriage and examines homophobia in the black community’s institutional pillar—the black church. It tells the story of the historic fight to win marriage equality in Maryland and charts the evolution of this divisive issue within the black community.

Schedule:

Feb 18: Oxford College of Emory University, Oxford, GA
Feb 19: Presbyterian College, Clinton, SC
Feb 21: Creative City Collaborative, Pompano Beach, FL
Feb 23: East Tennessee State University, Mary B. Martin School of the Arts, Johnson City, TN
Feb 25: Indie Memphis, Memphis, TN
Feb 26: Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts, Auburn University, Auburn, AL


Farihah Zaman is a Brooklyn-based journalist, producer, and programmer. Her diverse background in the film industry includes programming and serving on the Advisory Board of the Film South Asia documentary film festival, working as the Acquisitions Manager at Magnolia Pictures, and working as the Program Manager of The Flaherty, organizing their historic, contentious annual film seminar and launching a monthly screening series at Anthology Film Archives. She is currently a staff writer at the film journal Reverse Shot, blogs for the Huffington Post, and has produced such projects as the trailer for the 2010 New York Film Festival. Her first feature film is Remote Area Medical and this was followed by the short Kombit (2014 Sundance Film Festival) and second feature This Time Next Year (2014 Tribeca Film Festival).

Jeff Reichert’s first feature film, Gerrymandering, premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival where it was named one of the best of the festival by New York Magazine. His second feature film, Remote Area Medical, had its world premiere at the 2013 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and has won numerous awards and screened at festivals across the U.S. It is slated for theatrical release in Fall of 2014. His short, Kombit premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, and he recently premiered his third feature, This Time Next Year at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival. He is the co-editor of the popular online journal Reverse Shot.

During the U.S. debate about healthcare reform, the media—reporters and news crews and filmmakers—failed to put a human face on what it means to not have access to healthcare. Remote Area Medical fills that gap—it is a film about people, not policy. Focusing on a single three-day clinic held in the Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee, Remote Area Medical affords us an insider’s perspective on the ebb and flow of the event—from the tense 3:30 a.m. ticket distribution that determines who gets seen to the routine check-ups that take dramatic turns for the worse, to the risky means to which some patients resort for pain relief. We meet a doctor who also drives an 18-wheeler, a denture maker who moonlights as a jeweler, and the organization’s founder, Stan Brock, who first imagined Remote Area Medical while living as a cowboy in the Amazon rainforest, hundreds of miles from the nearest doctor. But it is the extraordinary stories of the patients, desperate for medical attention, that create a lasting impression about the state of modern health care in America.

Schedule:

Feb 11: Clemson University, Clemson, SC


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