Join NYWIFT, SAG-AFTRA, the School of Visual Arts Film Department, FF2 Media, ImageNation Cinema Foundation, Women in the Arts & Media Coalition (WAMC), African-American Women in Cinema (AAWIC), Women Make Movies (WMM), HerFlix and the SVA Theatre for a screening of the award-winning documentary Winnie by director Pascale Lamche in recognition of S.W.A.N. (Support Women Artists Now) Day, an annual event on the last Saturday of March that celebrates women artists. There will be a Q&A and reception following the screening.
Winnie
Pascale Lamche (Writer/Director)
Christoph Jörg (Producer)
98 min; English; France, Netherlands, South Africa (2017)
Winnie Madikizela Mandela is one of the most misunderstood and intriguingly powerful contemporary female political figures. Her rise and seeming fall from grace, bear the hallmarks of epic tragedy. For the first time, this film pieces together and properly considers her life and contribution to the struggle to bring down Apartheid from the inside, with intimate insight from those who were closest to her and with testimony from the enemies who sought to extinguish her radical capacity to shake up the order of things.
While her husband was kept, paradoxically, both safe and morally uncontaminated, in jail for 27 long years, Winnie rode the tumultuous violence of a life of struggle far from the safety of exile abroad, eyeball-to-eyeball with a seemingly immutable and vicious apartheid enemy controlling the country.
She came to symbolize the oppression of her people while her unwillingness to lie down and take it, during the long years in which the ANC languished in exile and incarceration, incited them to get organized. She was the barometer for the political temperature in the country and brushed patriarchal and conservative conventions aside, within her own culture, by keeping a finger on the pulse of the youth and by leading from the front.
She remained her husband’s eyes in the wilderness, his closest advisor. And she, it was, who kept the Mandela name alive and ensured it would become synonymous with Freedom the world over. But she increasingly chafed against the proxy role of mouthpiece for her husband, to forge her own way, her own ideas, her own definition of freedom.
Supremely controversial, Winnie is routinely represented as victim turned perpetrator. Her repeated demonization in the media has been amplified abroad to such a degree that the passionate respect she elicits among those who still struggle in South Africa, seems a paradox. And that’s what intrigues us. How did this occur and more importantly, to what ends?
Winner, Directing Award: World Cinema Documentary 2017 Sundance Film Festival
Pascale Lamche is an award winning filmmaker who has made feature documentaries and series both as a writer/producer, and writer/director for key broadcasters internationally, and whose films have been premiered at many international film festivals including Edinburgh International Film Festival, Locarno International Film Festival, Dublin International Film Festival, Toronto Documentary Festival, FIPA Documentary Film Festival and travelled the world. Her selected filmography includes Stalingrad (2014), Black Diamond (2010), Pakistan-Zindabad (2007), French Beauty (2005), Accused No1: Nelson Mandela (2004) and Sophiatown (2003).
Moikgantsi Kgama (Moderator) is an audience development specialist with a reputation for excellence in her field. Her credits include: I Will Follow, Academy Award nominated Trouble the Water, Killer of Sheep and Lumumba, to name a few. She is also the founder of the ImageNation Cinema Foundation. A Harlem-based nonprofit media arts organization, ImageNation presents progressive media by and about people of color, with the goal of establishing a chain of art-house cinemas dedicated to these works. Through a variety of public exhibitions and programs, ImageNation fosters media equity, media literacy, solidarity, cross-cultural exchange and highlights the humanity of Pan-African people worldwide. ImageNation is currently developing its existing RAW SPACE Culture Gallery into a 60-seat, boutique cinema-café dedicated to Black and Latino film, music and culture. This social enterprise will be located in Harlem along the historic Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. Kgama’s accolades include being named one of 25 Women Who Are Shaping the World by Essence Magazine, the Trailblazer Award from Reel Sisters Film Festival and a proclamation from the City of New York for her work with ImageNation. Kgama earned a BS in Newspaper Journalism from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. She serves as the Director of Communications at Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, Inc.Kgama resides in New York City’s Harlem community with her husband and partner Gregory Gates, and their son.
The screening is co-presented with the School of Visual Arts and SAG-AFTRA.
SAG-AFTRA is a sponsor of the reception.
SPECIAL THANKS
Sponsor Jan Lisa Huttner
Leeya Mor, Cinephil
Reeves Lehman and Mary Lee Grisanti, Interim Chair, Film and Animation
The School of Visual Arts
Adam Natale, Jess Jackson and the staff of the SVA Theatre
PARTNERS
SVA Theatre
333 West 23rd Street
(Between 8th & 9th Aves)
Free Admission
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NYWIFT programs, screenings and events are supported, in part, by grants from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.