Concrete wall with a woman shaped hole to the left and a man shaped hole to the right with an elderly man behind the man shaped hole.

Wednesday, January 15, 2020, 7 PM |Communications 150 (Studio C)
The American Sector
PREVIEW SCREENING with COURTNEY STEPHENS

The American Sector (2020, 67 min., co-directed with Pacho Velez) is a timely feature documentary that documents large panels of the Berlin Wall (30 years after its fall) around America, visiting sites where remnants have been installed as monuments — but to what? The film traverses the country, stopping at over seventy-five locations that have the Wall on display, such as the CIA, the college in Missouri where Churchill gave the “iron curtain” speech, and a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! across from the Alamo. The film captures the ways that Americans have transformed this decommissioned East German border wall into a decidedly American monument, touching on deeper ideas of bondage and freedom, and shows how citizens work, in their own small ways, to push the country towards embodying its own ideals. The American Sector will have its international premiere screening in February 2020 and is being shown as a preview / work-in-progress screening.

Screening is free and open to the public


 

COURTNEY STEPHENS is a filmmaker and programmer based in Los Angeles. Her non-fiction and experimental films have appeared at NYFF, SXSW, Hong Kong IFF, Dhaka IFF, Mumbai IFF, San Francisco IFF, The Exploratorium, DokuFest, Onion City, Orphans Film Symposium, Crossroads, and elsewhere.  She co-founded the Highland Park microcinema Veggie Cloud, and has curated programs at institutions including the Museum of the Moving Image, the J Paul Getty Museum, Union Docs, and Flaherty NYC. She attended the American Film Institute, and has received fellowships to Yaddo and MacDowell, a Fulbright scholarship to India, and lectured on subjects related to female travel and film at the Royal Geographical Society and elsewhere.

More at https://courtneystephens.net/