“Remember September”

"HRIPSIME'S AGONY, ATHENA'S MOURNING, AND RACHEL'S HEARTBREAK"

A Centennial Memorial of the Martyrs of the Christian Genocide in Asia Minor, the Pontus, Anatolia (1915-1922),
and the Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust

September 11 – 25, 2022

For Details: Pahellenicfoundation.org/RememberSeptember and https://www.rememberseptemberpa.com/

7 PM, Sunday September 11, 2022: Genocide in Asia Minor, the Pontus, and Anatolia (1915-1923) as the "Final Solution's" Inspiration. Formal Opening of the Program and Greetings by Distinguished Guests.

7 PM, Monday September 12, 2022 : "Tetraodeon Tribute to the Neomartyrs of Asia Minor". A musical/hymnologic commemoration of the Greeks in Anatolia, The Pontus, and Asia Minor who were slaughtered in the Christian Genocide.

7 PM, Tuesday September 13, 2022: “Etty: Writing as Resistance”. Adapted from the diaries of Etty Hillesum and performed by Susan Stein. Directed by Austin Pendleton. In-Person Event. Details at: Pahellenicfoundation.org/RememberSeptember.

7 PM, Wednesday September 14, 2022 : "A Prisoner of War’s Story" by Stratis Doukas. For the first time ever, the story will be presented in its English translation.

3 PM, Thursday September 15, 2022 : "The Students of Umberto Primo” - a post-film discussion with Alessandra Maioletti (director ), Diane Boulanger (Executive Producer) & Avi Ben Hur. Details at Pahellenicfoundation.org/RememberSeptember

7 PM, Friday September 16, 2022 : "Experience and Creations: Vaggelis Anetopoulos".

3 PM, Saturday September 17, 2022: Commemorating the Armenian Genocide Through Testimony: An Interactive Discussion with the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education.

7 PM, Sunday September 18, 2022 : "HRIPSIME'S AGONY, ATHENA'S MOURNING, AND RACHEL'S HEARTBREAK". A Musical and poetic Centennial commemoration of, and tribute to the martyrs of the Christian Genocide in Anatolia, the Pontus, and Asia Minor, and the Jews in the Holocaust.

5 PM, Sunday September 25, 2022: "Mapping Migration, Learning from Oral History: Ottoman Greek Immigration to Western Pennsylvania", A Lecture-Presentation by Dr. Yiorgo Topalidis, Ph.D., Samuel Proctor Oral History Project, University of Florida.

Until now, little was known about Greeks in the Ottoman Empire who migrated to America surrounding the Christian Genocide. For the first time ever, Dr. Topalidis will shone a spotlight on those who settled in Western Pennsylvania through a lecture-presentation on his groundbreaking research.

This event is part of the month-long commemoration "Agape and Hope Resurrected in Hripsime's Agony, Athena's Mourning, and Rachel's Heartbreak." The Greek, Armenian, and Jewish Communities of Western Pennsylvania are coming together in September 2022 to mark 100 years since 1922, a point between 1915 and 1923 when Christians and Jews were systematically exterminated for their faith and culture. We will commemorate those who perished and use this milestone in our histories to show that in the face of despair and death, creation and inspiration can be fostered and nurtures for a better and more tolerant world.

Join the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs center, for a student open house for CONNECT, the Congress of Neighboring Communities.

Klaus-Dieter Frankenberger is a German journalist who previously served as the Foreign Editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His writing has focused on the United States, European, transatlantic, and international politics. Mr. Frankenberger holds a master’s degree in Political Science, Economics, and American Studies from Frankfurt University. In 1980, he participated in an exchange program with the University of Mississippi. From 1982 to 1985 he was a research associate at the Center for North-American Studies at Frankfurt University. Mr. Frankenberger was a Congressional Fellow in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1985 to 1986 and a Marshall Fellow at Harvard University in 1990. He has lectured at several American universities. In 2011, he was a Bosch Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington, D.C. Since he joined the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s leading national daily, in 1986, he served in various capacities, as European, International, and Editorial Page Editor. Mr. Frankenberger was a Member of the Trilateral Commission and of the Scientific Council of the Institute for European Politics in Berlin. He also served on the Advisory Board of the Federal Academy for Security Policy in Berlin and is associated with several organizations that deal with the transatlantic relationship.

Come and practice your Hungarian and meet others interested in the language! All levels welcome.

Discussion on Nara Pavão's "Corruption as the Only Option: The Limits to Electoral Accountability" (The Journal of Politics 80, 3, July 2018), and Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman's Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World (Cambridge Elements, 2021)

What is Donald Trump's personality like? What was his family like? What is his ideology? What have been the highlights of his performance as a businessman, candidate, and head of the government of the most powerful country in the world? These questions require multi-causal answers that go beyond the clichés that have been spread by his defenders, his detractors, and Trump himself. The 45th president of the United States has been both praised and reviled. His personality, his professional career, and his emergence in American and world politics have been the subject of biased and didactic analyses. This book attempts to offer a more nuanced explanation, underpinned by hundreds of articles, books, and interviews on the character and his historical context.

To understand the “Trump phenomenon” it is necessary to analyze its origins, as well as the political, social and economic dynamics of the United States. For better or worse, Trump is not a historical anomaly, but rather a product of his time. However, some of the most controversial actions of his mandate, which put democratic coexistence on the ropes, were largely his responsibility. His style of doing politics is still alive, as are the circumstances that made for his rise to power in 2016. Will he return to the White House in 2024?

When an assistant professor of medicine witnesses a student storming out of a respected older colleague’s office in tears, she finds herself drawn into an all-consuming quest for justice that is further aggravated by domestic pressures and her daughter’s troubles at school. Painting a portrait of the systemic sexism and abuses of power that push one of the few dissenters into a spiral of obsession, Rehana Maryam Noor hinges on a fearless performance by newcomer Azmeri Haque Badhon, who lends the heroine a complex mix of egotism, moral fervor, and repressed anger. The film took home two awards at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, winning Best Performance by an Actress for Badhon and the Jury Grand Prize for director Abdullah Mohammed Saad.

For more information on the festival, click here.

For more information about this film and for tickets, click here.

A LIVE INTERVIEW WITH Polly Jones, Oxford University AND Zuzanna Bogumil, Polish Academy of Sciences

REEES Fall 2022 series, The Specter in the Present: Trauma and its Legacies in Eurasia, will explore the place of trauma in Eurasia society in four interviews that pair scholars to discuss social and clinical trauma, victimhood, historical memory, and the politics of history in the region.

This event is part of a larger series

On September 29th, the Center for Latin American Studies and the Latinx Student Association will screen Selena (1997) at 6:00PM in the Frick Fine Arts Auditorium (Room 125). Pizza will be provided! There will be a post-screening discussion following the film.

Synopsis: The true story of Selena, a Texas-born Tejano singer who rose from cult status to performing at the Astrodome, as well as having chart-topping albums on the Latin music charts. Watch the trailer here.

The Japan Council of the University of Pittsburgh and SCREENSHOT: ASIA are pleased to announce the winner of the third biennial University of Pittsburgh Japan Documentary Film Award: Maelstrom, directed by Mizuko Yamaoka. The film will be screened with the filmmaker in attendance as part of the second SCREENSHOT: Asia Film Festival. The award ceremony will take place on September 29 at 7pm in the Seventh Floor Auditorium of Alumni Hall, immediately followed by the screening of the film. General information about the award and the schedule for events and screenings can be found at www.jdfa.pitt.edu.

This year’s committee was led by Pitt film professors Robert Clift and Hillary Demmond, known for their acclaimed documentary Making Montgomery Clift (2018), and documentary filmmaker Kazuhiro Soda, recipient of the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival for Zero (2020). They and our other judges selected Maelstrom, which is Ms. Yamaoka’s story of “loss and return” due to a drastic life change from a car accident that damaged her cervical vertebrae. A profoundly humanist tale of tragedy and rebirth, Ms. Yamaoka's intimate documentary is both a telling of her own losses and a portrait of human experience.

Established by Pitt’s Japan Council to recognize exemplary documentary films promoting the understanding of Japan and Japanese culture, the University of Pittsburgh Japan Documentary Film Award is supported by generous endowments from Japanese donors to promote Japan Studies and deepen cross-cultural understanding at the University of Pittsburgh and across the region. The 2020 Grand Prize was presented to Tokachi Tsuchiya for An Ant Strikes Back, which showcases an employee’s fight to keep his job in the face of routine abuse and cruel working conditions at a large-scale moving company, and an Honorable Mention was awarded to Nanako Hirose for book-paper-scissors, a contemplative look at book publication through the craftsmanship of veteran book designer Nobuyoshi Kikuchi.

For more information on the festival, click here or please email committee chairperson Charles Exley (exley@pitt.edu).

For more information about this film and for tickets, click here.

A teenage delinquent befriends a surly magician who helps her navigate her inner demons and dysfunctional family with sleight of hand magic.

For more information on the festival, click here.

For more information about this film and for tickets, click here.

This inaugural Race & . . . Conference will elevate the work of the race-related centers, the health sciences, Africana Studies - promoting center & department collaboration.

Director Shô Miyake adapts a boxing memoir from Keiko Ogasawara— who turned professional despite the difficulties of lifelong deafness. “A highlight of the Encounters program at this year’s Berlinale,” (Variety), the film fictionalizes it’s subject as Keiko Ogawa, played with stern intensity by actor Yukino Kishii. The film from the structural trappings of the biopic, as it adopts a focused, in-the-moment approach to Keiko’s life and career: we see her struggles inside and outside of the ring. Keiko’s story is the base from which we learn about the larger struggles between the independent boxing community and the pressures of corporatization and conglomeration as COVID 19 sunk so many small community locations. The film’s sound particularly resonates: without any music, we are free listen to the small punches and rhythms that pierce this boxer's story.

For more information on the festival, click here.

For more information about this film and for tickets, click here.

Winner of three Golden Horse awards including Best Leading Actor for Mo Tzu-Yi, the film tells the story of Mr. Lin, an apartment tenant who tends to the daily needs of the elderly apartment owner and helps look after her orphaned nine-year-old grandson, whom he has legally adopted. When the boy’s uncle returns from overseas and charges him with using the adoption as pretext to secure the deeds to the apartment, a troubled past is brought to light. Suffused with melancholy, tenderness, and a sense of the daily rhythms of metropolitan Taiwan, Dear Tenant dramatizes the continued challenges faced by queer couples despite the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2019 and serves as a showcase for Mo’s subtle, heartbreaking performance.

For more information on the festival, click here.

For more information about this film and for tickets, click here.

With a dragon tattoo blazoned across her left arm, Kim Hye-Yoon plays the headstrong heroine who, after her dad falls into a coma following a suspicious accident, doggedly seeks answers despite mounting resistance from a variety of corrupt forces. Faced with the additional pressures of tending to her father’s restaurant, taking care of her younger brother, and completing mandatory work training following a short prison stay, our heroine is forced to grow up fast. Simultaneously a vehicle for social critique, a coming-of-age story, and a gripping thriller, The Girl on a Bulldozer is driven by Kim’s visceral, charismatic performance, which won her the 2022 Screen International Rising Star Award at the New York Asian Film Festival.

For more information about the film festival, click here.

For more information about this film and for tickets, click here.

Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Golden Eye award for best documentary, All That Breathes chronicles the story of two brothers who form a makeshift bird hospital to care for the thousands of black kite—the species of bird they have both fallen in love with—that drop daily due to New Delhi’s heavily polluted skies. Through this specific story, the film paints an unflinching but tender portrait of the city—and of India in general, which has experienced political unrest since the country’s recent turn toward Hindu majoritarianism—as a fraught ecology in which humans, animals, and environments of various kinds are deeply interconnected.

For more information on the festival, click here.

For more information about this film and for tickets, click here.

Wearing radiant orange and a photogenic smile, our protagonist is a successful influencer promoting a product line called “Happiness”—an emotion supposedly guaranteed for the women consumers she is targeting. That said, blissfully composed exteriors belie a brutal reality of abuse, in not just her own home but that of her newlywed daughter. Winner of the Panorama Audience Award for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival, Askar Uzbayev’s searing, chilling portrait of domestic violence confronts viewers with the systemic misogyny in contemporary Kazakhstan.

For more information on the festival, click here.

For more information about this film and for tickets, click here.