Public Trust

Screening two classic feminist documentaries produced at bookends of the 1970sThe Woman's Film: Dir. Jennifer Gauthier, 1971, 40 min.Inside Women Inside: Dir. Christine Choy and Cynthia Maurizio, 1978, 21 min.As a mode of action and as a way of thinking, feminism constantly interrogates truth. Whose actions, language, and experience constitute truth? How would/could a feminist truth be gathered, recorded, presented, and claimed? These questions erupt in two classic feminist documentaries produced at bookends of the 1970s: The Woman’s Film (1971) and Inside Women Inside (1978). Screened together, we hope these films will facilitate a conversation about the relationship between feminism,

Screening followed by a conversation with Penn's Meta Mazaj (Cinema & Media Studies) & Mahyar Entezari (Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures)Dir. Asghar Farhadi, 2021, 127 min.A Hero is a 2021 film by a master of Iranian cinema, two-time Oscar winner, Asghar Farhadi. It tells a deceptively simple tale of a man on a two-day leave from a debtors’ prison, who chances upon a pile of gold coins. Should he return the money to its owner, or use it to pay off some of his debt? An ordinary predicament and simple moral judgement, once confronted with complex layers of circumstances and

Screening to be followed by a conversation with artist Victoria Lomasko and Julia AlekseyevaDir. Anna Moiseenko, 2024, 52 min.Tree of Violence is a documentary combining animation and live-action footage to capture the extraordinary artistry of Victoria Lomasko, an artist known for depicting figures of ordinary Russians not often found in mainstream media. We see her standing still amidst public protests against the regime, carefully sketching the outlines of individuals which later appear in large-scale paintings and murals. The film chronicles Lomasko’s life just before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when she had to leave Russia in order to protect herself