Telluride MountainFilm on Tour
Telluride MountainFilm on Tour
Topics: Immigrants, Afghanistan, drought, more
films showcasing cultures worth exploring, environments worth preserving, adventures worth pursuing, and conversations worth sustaining.
Films Playing Thursday,August 25th
THE SCULPTOR OF DAMASCUS
2016 Austria / Duration: 12 mins
Directed by: MEHYAR SAWAS, GABRIEL LIFTON-ZOLINE
In the fall of 2015, Telluride native Gabriel Lifton-Zoline was in Eastern Europe reporting on the refugee crisis. While there, he met and befriended a young Syrian refugee named Mehyar Sawas and gave him a phone to document his journey.
Over the next five months, the pair exchanged more than 164 pages of messages online. Mehyar, meanwhile, filmed his life.
The result is The Sculptor of Damascus, a poignant film that puts a powerful face on the refugee situation. In Mehyar, we discover a peaceful young man who is tortured over the abandonment of his family, who has dreams to be an artist and who seeks, more than anything, to survive.
HOW WE CHOOSE
2016 USA / Duration: 15 mins
Directed by: ALEXANDRIA BOMBACH
After years of war, concrete blockades, corruption, suicide bombings and the departure of friends and family for safer countries, there are few opportunities left in Kabul, Afghanistan.
How We Choose follows several people as they grapple with the heart-wrenching decision to leave their motherland — some illegally — and start over again in a new country. The optimists who stay do so because of their desire to bring about positive change and to help create a hopeful future where suicide attacks are not part of daily life. Staying and going each present much to be lost, as well as gained.
50 FEET ROM SYRIA
2015 USA / Duration: 39 mins
Directed by: SKYE FITZGERALD
This short doc begins with a caution: “WARNING: This film contains graphic images of injuries caused by war.” And while the film is disturbing on many levels, it’s important on many more. Syria remains a vexing geopolitical problem for the world community, but this astonishing documentary isn't trying to figure out solutions. Rather, it's focus is on a Syrian-American doctor named Hisham Bismar, who leaves his comfortable practice in the U.S. to work in a Turkish hospital 50 feet from the border of Syria. The horrors he sees, and the humanity we witness, are indelible and essential.
NASCENT
2015 Central Republic of Africa / Duration: 7 mins
Directed by: LINDSAY BRANHAM, JON KASBE
Nascent is proof of how short films can impart big messages. It’s a simple premise: two children, a Christian boy and a Muslim girl, give their perspectives on growing up in the divided and desperately poor Central African Republic. Despite differences in their upbringings and religious backgrounds, the pair share a hopeful vision of peace that would allow them to be friends. This could have been an awkward film or, worse, a treacly one. But in the hands of director Lindsay Branham (who attended school in Telluride in 5th and 6th grade), the result is a thoughtful and powerful documentary that asks the simple question: Why can’t we all just get along?
Films Playing Friday, August 26th
LIFE AFTER WATER
2015 USA / Duration: 10 mins
Directed by: ANDREW ELLIS
Californian farmer Jesus Ramos was born in Mexico City and migrated with his family to the U.S. for a better life. He picked oranges in his youth and worked his way up to owning a 140-acre orange farm. As extreme drought wreaks havoc on the American West, Ramos finds himself on the front lines of a water shortage that threatens the future of his farm, his family and his community. Ramos’ condition mirrors that of many farmers in California’s once-fertile Central Valley. “Water — it makes life. Water disappears; the labor disappears. Water disappears; my farming disappears,” Ramos says. “Do you question your faith, your belief in God when you see these things? I try not to, but your tone changes whenever you talk to him. ‘Hey, you’re pushing a little hard, no?’”
As agricultural communities struggle while big coastal urban centers boom, farmers are cutting their losses and beginning to think about life after the fields.
MORE...
Dates: Thursday, August 25 - Saturday, August 27, 2016
Times: 7:30pm, also Sat 10:30am
Venue: Plaza Theatre, 1049 Ponce De Leon Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30306
Tickets: here
Contact: http://www.mountainfilmatl.org/films/
