Buzzworm news briefs

A different take: Human Rights Watch Film Festival

A Chilean village displaced by a hydroelectric dam. An oil field’s crushing impact on a community in Azerbaijan. The scars of U.S. soldiers home from Iraq. Mass media may have made the world smaller, but somehow such human stories still fall by the wayside.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival aims to blast through the abstractions of day-to-day world-news reports and show the true face of those struggling under the thumb of war, oppression and greed.

From sweatshops to weapons deals, the topics featured in upcoming, UNCA-based festival are not light fare. They have the sort of intensity that should make viewers count their blessings. “They all kind of haunt you,” says festival coordinator Matt Freeze.

The festival’s 12 documentaries, which will be shown Jan. 26 to 28, take the place of last year’s Amnesty International Expose Film Festival and have much the same mission. “The essential theme would be that they are all based on general human rights,” Freeze says.

The films were produced in locales around the world and document the hard truths of lives on the margins of globalization. But they also show that in the face of despair, true inspiration thrives. In one of Freeze’s favorites, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, displaced musicians band together to continue their art.

“Their lives are going on because they are playing their music,” Freeze says. “It’s very uplifting.”

Most of the films will be shown in UNCA’s Lipinsky Auditorium, with intermission screenings of work by local documentarian Rebecca MacNeice.

The schedule for the UNCA screenings, which are free, is as follows:

• Friday, Jan. 26: 7 p.m., Punam; 8 p.m., Rosita; 9:30 p.m., Winter in Baghdad; 11 p.m., Homefront.

• Saturday, Jan. 27: 7:30 p.m., Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars; 9:30 p.m., Rain in a Dry Land; 11:15 p.m., KZ.

• Sunday, Jan. 28: Noon, Switch Off; 2 p.m., Source; 3:45 p.m., Black Gold; 8 p.m., Darwin’s Nightmare.

In addition, two Special screenings will be held at Asheville Pizza and Brewing Company, where admission is $2: Black Gold at 9 p.m. on Jan. 26, and Mardi Gras: Made in China at 9 p.m. on Jan. 27.

For descriptions of the films, visit www.hrw.org/iff.

– Brian Postelle

Civic Center Commission: Put a lid on it

Center of conversation: Asheville Civic Center Commission members discuss strategies for repair and update City Council members Jan Davis and Brownie Newman (left and right, in foreground). photo by Jonathan Welch

The Asheville Civic Center’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium was left out in the cold by a Dec. 12 City Council resolution outlining the next five years of capital improvements for the downtown complex. Those projections included $1.5 million to replace the arena roof and ongoing expenditures for other improvements in the arena and concourse, but no assistance for the much-used auditorium.

At the urging of Council member Carl Mumpower, the resolution was forwarded to the Civic Center Commission for comment, and at their Jan. 15 meeting, the commission voted to stress a previously expressed priority: that the roof of the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium be brought into the work schedule. (Replacement of the roof was also listed in the Civic Center staff’s 2006 request to Council.)

The commission unanimously recommended that Council arrange for an inspection of the auditorium’s roof by a professional engineer or specialist, noting that it has leaked in the past and that water damage remains visible on the north and south interior walls, as well as on the ceiling. All past consultant and task-force recommendations, the commission letter states, “include the reuse of the Thomas Wolfe structure.” Thus, the commission reckoned, the structure’s integrity warrants immediate attention.

Additional recommendations included adding professional examination of the fire-alarm system for the entire facility, repairing water damage on the auditorium’s ceiling and walls and adding a weatherproof storage area for the arena floor seats Council has proposed purchasing.

The commission also told Council that, as a board established by city ordinance to develop and recommend long-range plans for the facility, “We have found this responsibility to be quite difficult to perform as the Council and city staff (other than the Civic Center director) do not, as a standard practice, include the Commission in the distribution of information, invitations to meetings nor inclusions in fact-finding and decision-making bodies.” The group could be of more value, they stressed, “if the process functioned as described by the enabling ordinance.”

Other business of the day included a report from Civic Center Director David Pisha, who declared an “exceptional first half” of the fiscal year. “Our revenue is well ahead of budget,” he said, and the future looks rosy. Presently overrun by ice skaters, the center will soon host such big-name acts as Harry Connick Jr., Wynton Marsalis and B.B. King. Looking further ahead, Pisha boasted of the likely return (in 2008) of the Shriners’ convention, which was once a Civic Center perennial.

– Nelda Holder

Hard to be a Jew: Film series probes anti-Semitism

In a new PBS TV special, The Resurgence, journalist Judy Woodruff reports that anti-Semitism is on the rebound in countries all over the world. Here in Asheville, the Jewish Community Center, along with UNCA’s Center for Jewish Studies, is sponsoring an event that will help put such reports in historical perspective.

The JCC’s second annual film series — Shver Tzu Zayn A Yid, It’s Hard to Be a Jew: Five Films about Jewish Identity in America — starts this Sunday. The films were picked by Jay Jacoby, chair of the board of the Center for Jewish Studies, from UNCA’s Jewish Heritage Video Collection.

The selection is intended to draw a crowd of different ages and backgrounds to discuss the challenges of assimilation and anti-Semitism in America, Jacoby says. However, the films could prove relevant to people with other religious and cultural identities. “The issue of assimilation is universal for any group existing outside the mainstream,” Jacoby notes. “Does the pressure to assimilate cloud over a person’s speaking up for their cultural identity and [cause them to] do nothing to stop prejudices?”

The complex relationship between such pressures and prejudices will be explored beginning Jan. 28 with a screening of The Jazz Singer, the Al Jolson film portraying a conflict between the values of Jewish traditions and those of secular society. The series will end on Feb. 25 with Homicide, a contemporary movie about the consequences of one man’s attempt to shed his Jewish identity. Local academics and community members will facilitate discussions following each screening.

Jacoby, who can recall the days of overt religious and racial segregation, says that “the conversation about whether these issues are still alive and well in America is well worth having.”

The screenings, which are free and open to the public, will take place at the Jewish Community Center (236 Charlotte St.). The films are scheduled at 2 p.m. on the following dates:

• Jan. 28: The Jazz Singer (1927)

• Feb. 4: Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)

• Feb. 11: Daniel (1983)

• Feb. 18: Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)

• Feb. 25: Homicide (1991)

– Dana Henry

Tim Tyson: North Carolina’s white chronicler of African-American history

Black History Month comes and goes every year, and often, each one looks much like the last one. Not this time, though, at least not here in Asheville: Tim Tyson is coming to town.

Don’t let his relaxed Southern drawl or fleshy white face fool you. Tyson, a senior research scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, is one of a handful of contemporary historians who makes the case that white supremacy in North Carolina — and what it really meant/means — should and can be put under a meaningful microscope.

He did as much in his master’s thesis at Duke University, which documented how slaves used arson to resist their white masters. He did it in his Duke PhD dissertation and his book Radio Free Dixie (UNC Press, 2001), both of which told the story of black pioneer Robert F. Williams, who led an audacious local and international campaign for African-American rights from the town of Wilson during the late 1950s/early ’60s and eventually fled into exile.

Along the way, Tyson cast his unflinching historical gaze on the Wilmington “race riot” of 1898, which crushed what was then North Carolina’s most successful black community, setting off a statewide white-supremacist power grab, and the 1970 racial killing in his hometown of Oxford, which he explored from a first-hand perspective in Blood Done Sign My Name, (Crown, 2004).

In an age when when most observers are more accustomed to praising Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolence than noting the force of arms that helped some blacks secure civil rights, Tyson’s version of history will surprise many. The stories he recounts are replete with violence, delving into both the KKK and the black militants who fought back against white-supremacist terrorism.

Tyson will appear at two Asheville events on Thursday, Feb. 1: • 12:15 p.m.: At UNCA’s Lipinsky Auditorium, Tyson and his father, Rev. Vernon Tyson, will discuss the events surrounding the Oxford killing. Noted N.C. gospel singer Mary D. Williams will participate as well. Admission is free for UNCA students and $5 for the general public.

• 7 p.m: At Pack Memorial Library, Tyson will discuss “The Ghosts of 1898: Wilmington’s Race Riots and the Rise of White Supremacy.” In a free presentation, the author will again be joined by singer Williams.

– Jon Elliston