Moving Images Film Festival 2012!
Thank you for your interest in Vinfen’s 5th Annual Moving Images Film Festival
Wheelchair access for the building is available.
Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) services and ASL are available upon request.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Joseph B. Martin Conference Center at Harvard Medical School
77 Avenue Louis Pasteur, Boston, MA
10:30AM-11:00AM Registration
11:00AM-12:00PM War Torn 1861-2010
12:00PM-12:45PM War Torn 1861-2010 Panel Discussion
12:45PM-1:30PM Lunch
1:30PM-3:00PM Rebirth
3:00PM-3:15PM Break
3:15PM-4:15PM Rebirth Panel Discussion
Day concludes
Project Rebirth
www.projectrebirth.org
Project Rebirth’s film, REBIRTH, is a full-length documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January of 2011. It is the result of a decade-long process by director Jim Whitaker and is a riveting journey into living history. It is also an act of personal witness to one of the most profound events in American history and the healing that has come its wake.
From early 2002 through 2009, the REBIRTH film crew chronicled the lives of five people directly affected by 9/11. The participants include a survivor from an impact floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center (WTC); a firefighter who survived the collapse of the WTC but lost his best friend; a high school student who lost his mother; a young woman who lost her fiancé; and a construction worker who lost his brother, assisted with recovery efforts, and is presently helping to build the Freedom Tower. Their narratives are the thread of recovery and resiliency from grief, loss and trauma that comprise the unique message of the film.
REBIRTH also simultaneously tracks – via unprecedented multi-camera time-lapse photography – the evolution of the former WTC and the entire rebuilding of the site. Though the film captures the minute-by-minute demolition and redevelopment of the WTC site until 2009, Project Rebirth will continue the time-lapse element of the project until the site is completed in its entirety. Please visit our Time-Lapse Project + Film Archive tab and page to learn more about this important element of our project. Philip Glass composed REBIRTH original score.
Civil War doctors called it hysteria, melancholia and insanity. During the First World War it was known as shell-shock. By World War II, it became combat fatigue. Today, it is clinically known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a crippling anxiety that results from exposure to life-threatening situations such as combat. With suicide rates among active military servicemen and veterans currently on the rise, the HBO special WARTORN 1861-2010 brings urgent attention to the invisible wounds of war. Drawing on personal stories of American soldiers whose lives and psyches were torn asunder by the horrors of battle and PTSD, the documentary chronicles the lingering effects of combat stress and post-traumatic stress on military personnel and their families throughout American history, from the Civil War through today’s conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Executive produced by James Gandolfini (HBO’s “Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq”), WARTORN 1861-2010 is directed by Jon Alpert and Ellen Goosenberg Kent and produced by Alpert, Goosenberg Kent and Matthew O’Neill, the award-winning producers behind the HBO documentary “Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq.” Alpert and O’Neill also produced and directed the HBO documentaries “Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery” and the Emmy®-winning “Baghdad ER.”
The documentary is co-produced by Lori Shinseki. The documentary shares stories through soldiers’ revealing letters and journals; photographs and combat footage; first-person interviews with veterans of WWII (who are speaking about their PTSD for the first time), the Vietnam War, Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom; and interviews with family members of soldiers with PTSD. Also included are insightful conversations between Gandolfini and top U.S. military personnel (General Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, and General Peter Chiarelli, Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army), enlisted men in Iraq, and medical experts working at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Gen. Chiarelli, who is working to reduce the rising suicide rate in the Army comments, “You’re fighting a culture that doesn’t believe that injuries you can’t see can be as serious as injuries that you can see.” Bookended by haunting montages of emotionally battered American soldiers through the years, WARTORN 1861-2010 explores the very real wounds that occur as a result of combat stress, or PTSD. HBO Documentary Films in association with Attaboy Films presents WARTORN 1861-2010. Directed by Jon Alpert and Ellen Goosenberg Kent; produced by Jon Alpert, Ellen Goosenberg Kent and Matthew O’Neill; co-producer, Lori Shinseki; co-producer, archival segments, Caroline Waterlow; edited by Geof Bartz, A.C.E., Andrew Morreale, and Jay Sterrenberg; supervising producer, Sara Bernstein; executive produced by James Gandolfini and Sheila Nevins.
Artist Bio: Amira El Ghamry is an Egyptian American artist who has been painting and drawing since she was a child. She began seriously painting when she was 23 after reading Van Gogh’s Biography “Lust For Life”. Amira is currently working on her art and developing a portfolio at the Webster House Arts Program where she exhibits and sells her work.