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Please join us for a virtual event created by the Welsh, Scottish and Irish Rooms as they showcase unique aspects of their culture. Enjoy a brief Powerpoint presentation of each room and pre-recorded videos exclusively made for this event on each culture's history, art, music, poetry, dance and more?

Free, Virtual Cultural Celebration: Join us in a week-long celebration and share the virtual Pittsburgh POLISHFEST '21 with your family, friends and neighbors, across the street, across the country or across the world. Celebrate a variety of Polish, Lithuanian and Carpatho-Rusyn traditions, including folk music, folk dance, culinary demonstrations with recipes, historical, religious, and folk-art offerings. These presentations were created to remember something old, discover something new, keeping alive our traditions alive in an ever-changing world.

Join us for a talk on Jewish Romanian history and collective memory formation in Romanian film with director Oana Giurgiu and historians Cristina A. Bejan and Adrian Cioflâncă. The session will be moderated by Libby Langsner.

Register HERE for the event:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUuf-CoqzsjGtZsT4HXNyHtkZU26th...

Click Here to watch the films that will inform our discussion ( Radu Jude's Dead Nation and The Exist of the Trains, Oana Giurgiu's Occasional Spies) November 12-21st:
https://watch.eventive.org/rffs2021

Event organized in partnership with ARCHER - Romanian American Coalition for Human and Equal Rights.
About the Event:
The issues of the Holocaust, the Romanian-Jewish experience and identity, still remain relevant, and often controversial, topics in contemporary Romanian culture. Film has become a vehicle for these taboo subjects to be explored and for the multi-faceted history of the Romanian Jewish experience, especially during World War Two, to come to light.
Collective memory is defined as how groups remember their past, but the question of who is considered the “group,” and which memories are passed down and how, is more malleable than one might think.
Directors Radu Jude and Oana Girgiu both seek to challenge and expand what we know about Romanian history, and, in essence, who gets to be Romanian.

About Our Guests:
Oana Giurgiu:
Oana Giurgiu is a law and journalism graduate, having directed television documentaries before working in film on Cristi Puiu’s 2005 Cannes Un certain regard winner, “The Death of Mr Lăzărescu” and then on Kornél Mundruczó’s 2008 Cannes FIPRESCI winner, “Delta”.
She produced three of Tudor Giurgiu’s films: “Love Sick” (Berlinale 2006, Panorama); the 2012 Romanian box office hit “Of Snails and Men” (Warsaw IFF); and “Why Me?” (Berlinale 2015, Panorama). She also produced Peter Strickland’s “Katalin Varga” (Berlinale 2009, Silver Bear, European Discovery of the year at European Film Academy Awards) and Cristi Puiu’s “Sieranevada” (Cannes 2016). Oana co-produced Hungarian titles “Eden”, dir. Agnes Kocsis (Rotterdam IFF 2020) and “Spiral” (in post-production), dir. Cecilia Felmeri and the Slovak “The Servants”, dir. Ivan Ostrochovsky (Berlinale 2020, Encounters), and the Turkish “Before two Dawns” (in post-production), dir. Selman Nacar (working progress awards at Meetings on the bridge, Istanbul IFF 2020, and Antalia 2019), produced the greatest Romanian box office hit in recent years, “Moromete Family: On the Edge of Time”, which received ten Gopo Awards in 2019.
After working on several television documentary productions, she made her directorial debut with a feature-length historical documentary, “Aliyah DaDa”, screened in Astra Sibiu, Jerusalem Jewish IFF, alongside other Jewish festivals and screenings worldwide, and recognized as Best Romanian Documentary at the Gopo Awards 2015, now she just launched her new documentary “Occasional Spies”, Special mention of the Jury at Astra Film Festival 2021.
Adrian Cioflâncă:
Adrian Cioflâncă is co-director with Radu Jude of the documentary The Exit of the Trains (2020). He is a historian, director of the „Wilhelm Filderman” Center for the Study of Jewish History in Romania and a member of the Collegium of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives. He is also a researcher with the "A. D. Xenopol” Institute of History (belonging to the Romanian Academy). He was a member of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (2003-2004) and expert in The Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (2006), and a co-author of the Final Reports of the two commissions. Since 2005, he is a member of the Romanian Delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. A “Tziporah Wiesel” Fellow of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (2009), between 2010-2012, he was a department director in The Institute for the Investigation of the Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile. Adrian Cioflâncă edited, in collaboration, eight volumes; the last one: “Discurs și violență antisemită în România modern” (Discourse and Antisemitic Violence in Modern Romania), Hasefer, București, 2020. He also authored studies in fields like the history of the Holocaust, history of communism, political violence, cultural history, the theory of history. Consultant for several movies and theatrical plays.
Cristina Bejan:
Cristina A. Bejan is an award-winning Romanian-American historian, theatre artist, and poet. A Rhodes and Fulbright scholar, she currently teaches history at Metropolitan State University of Denver. Bejan received her Masters and DPhil (PhD) in Modern History from the University of Oxford and her BA in Philosophy (Honors) from Northwestern. A playwright and spoken word poet (Lady Godiva), her creative work has appeared in the US, UK, Romania, and Vanuatu. Bejan runs the arts group Bucharest Inside the Beltway. She has published two books (history and poetry), a play in the anthology "Voices on the Move" (eds. Domnica Radulescu and Roxana Cazan), and 64 articles and the African continent introduction for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's "Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos Vol. 3."
About Our Moderator:
Libby Langsner was the 2020-2021 Jewish Heritage Program Fellow at World Monuments Fund, where she worked with global Jewish communities to help steward their built heritage. She completed her masters in the History of Art focusing on countercultural art from Eastern European and Latin America at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 2020. Her MA dissertation focused on the issues of gender and culpability in contemporary Eastern European Holocaust film. Before attending the Courtauld, Libby completed her undergraduate education in art history at Tufts University and worked at multiple art galleries throughout New York City.

Join the German Department for Laber Rhabarber, a weekly German conversation hour that is open to all!

The mission of the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) is to promote global understanding through support for teaching, learning, and research in and on Latin America, the Caribbean, and the diverse diasporic communities of Latin American and Caribbean origin.
The cartonera Publishing trend began in Buenos Aires in 2003, organized by writers and artists producing low-cost, hand-made books, using recycled cardboard (thus the name cartonera). Interestingly, literacy rates improve with access to cartonera books. The books are produced in a collective-circular way, in which authors become – designers become – publishers become – authors.
The Cartonera phenomenon has expanded across the Americas, Europe and Africa. CLAS will facilitate cartonera publishing through this workshop focused on Pittsburgh schools and the larger community. We aim to promote ways in which language, social studies, and science teachers can work together using their creativity to recycle basic materials while promoting literacy.

A weekly conversation table for people interested in German culture and language, all proficiency levels are welcome!

Join the Spanish Club and Brazil Nuts for a music-themed Kahoot and conversation in Spanish and Portuguese