The Ants and the Grasshopper (2021), dir. Raj Patel and Zak Piper

20 September 2023 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie
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Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge:

persuading Americans that climate change is real.

Traveling from Malawi to California to the White House, she meets climate skeptics and despairing farmers. Her journey takes her across all the divisions shaping the US, from the rural-urban divide, to schisms of race, class and gender, to the thinking that allows Americans to believe we live on a different planet from everyone else. It will take all her skill and experience to persuade us that we’re all in this together.

This documentary, ten years in the making, weaves together the most urgent themes of our times: climate change, gender and racial inequality, the gaps between the rich and the poor, and the ideas that groups around the world have generated in order to save the planet.

The screening will be followed by a discussion of the film with IUPUI faculty.

Inhabitants: Indigenous Perspectives on Restoring Our World (2021), dir. Costa Boutsikaris and Anna Palmer

18 October 2023 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie
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Climate change is undeniably the most pressing issue we are facing in our lifetime, and how we should deal with it is still being debated. It may appear that there are no viable solutions, but perhaps the answer lies in plain sight. For millennia, Native Americans have successfully managed their natural resources despite discrimination and forced colonization. Inhabitants: An Indigenous Perspective takes us on a journey through deserts, coastlines, forests, mountains, and prairies to see how various Indigenous communities are restoring their ancient relationships with the land.

We visit a Hopi farmer in Arizona growing crops without dependence on rainfall, the traditional Blackfeet herders of Montana are now managing the buffalo herds, the Karuk people of Northern California who have perfected controlled burnings in their forests, and Hawaiian natives who are reclaiming commercial plantations in exchange for food secure gardens. It soon becomes quite clear that as the climate crisis escalates these time-tested practices of North America’s original inhabitants are becoming increasingly essential in our rapidly changing world.

The screening will be followed by a discussion of the film with IUPUI faculty.

Singing Back the Buffalo (2023), dir. Tasha Hubbard

29 November 2023 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie
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Award-winning Cree filmmaker Tasha Hubbard’s (nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up, Birth of a Family) feature length Singing Back the Buffalo follows Indigenous visionaries, scientists and communities who are rematriating the buffalo to the heart of the North American plains they once defined, signaling a turning point for Indigenous nations, the ecosystem, and all of our collective survival.

As a little girl, Indigenous filmmaker Tasha Hubbard would imagine herds of buffalo roaming the prairie landscape in which she lived. 165 years ago, a herd of buffalo on the Great Plains of North America would take two days to pass by. After three decades of deliberate slaughter, there were less than 500 left from the over 30-50 million that moved across the continent, drastically impacting Indigenous nations.

The buffalo’s fate reflected Indigenous people’s confinement to reserves. For over a century, neither have been free to walk the lands that have been Indigenous for millennia. 

Indigenous point of view, we understand the importance of rematriating teachings from the buffalo, and how the land needs the buffalo back more than ever in this time of climate change, food insecurity, and uncertainty. We meet Indigenous visionaries, leaders, scientists, and communities who are restoring the buffalo to the land they once defined. Their return back across the heart of North America signals a turning point for Indigenous nations, the environment and all of humanity’s long-term collective survival.

The trailer for this film can be viewed at https://buffalosong.com/.

The screening will be followed by a discussion of the film with IUPUI faculty.

The Seventh Seal (1957), dir. Ingmar Bergman

17 January 2024 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie
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Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly comes face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death, and challenges him to a game of chess. As the fateful game progresses, and the knight and his squire encounter a gallery of outcasts from a society in despair, Ingmar Bergman mounts a profound inquiry into the nature of faith and the torment of mortality. One of the most influential films of its time, The Seventh Seal is a stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning and a work of stark visual poetry.

The screening will be followed by a discussion of the film with IUPUI faculty.

Invisible Demons (2021), dir. Rahul Jain

21 February 2024 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie
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This film explores the dramatic consequences of India's growing economy, capturing a city in crisis and magnifying our collective climate realities. An urgent look at the climate crisis, Rahul Jain’s eye-opening essay unfolds in a series of stunning, often birds-eye images of a very man-made disaster. Hard to look away from and impossible to ignore, Invisible Demons immerses us in climate chaos as we hear from those caught in the crossfire.

As the New York Times summarizes the film: “Through a series of arresting images, the director Rahul Jain presents a city on the verge of apocalypse. Hazardous foam coats the murky Yamuna River, which teems with sewage and industrial waste. Towering garbage heaps speckle the streets. And, on a particularly polluted day, Jain manages to record individual flecks of hazardous haze, the microscopic matter whizzing across the screen in golden streaks. Breaking up the soaring cinematography are a series of casual interviews with residents.” The Guardian calls the film “apocalypse now for the pollution nightmare in Delhi.”

The screening will be followed by a discussion of the film with IUPUI faculty.

Harlan County USA (1976), dir. Barbara Kopple

20 March 2024 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie
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Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award–winning Harlan County USA unflinchingly documents a grueling coal miners’ strike in a small Kentucky town. With unprecedented access, Kopple and her crew captured the miners’ sometimes violent struggles with strikebreakers, local police, and company thugs. Featuring a haunting soundtrack—with legendary country and bluegrass artists Hazel Dickens, Merle Travis, Sarah Gunning, and Florence Reece—the film is a heartbreaking record of the thirteen-month struggle between a community fighting to survive and a corporation dedicated to the bottom line.

The screening will be followed by a discussion of the film with IUPUI faculty.

Herbaria (2022), dir. Leandro Listorti

17 April 2024 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie
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In his second feature film, Leandro Listorti establishes a parallel between two worlds he seems to know well: that of plants and that of cinema. This delicate cinematographic work, full of beautiful images—both archival and current—gives an account of the immense work of classification and preservation, and generously invites us to think about forms of representation and memory.

“At once precise and meditative, the award-winning experimental documentary Herbaria draws provocative connections between botanical conservation and realms of film preservation. Visiting the National Gallery from Argentina, Listorti — artist, film programmer, and currently manager of the film archive at Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires — carefully gives space to the processes and characteristics of time on the organic matter of flowers, fauna, and celluloid. “Listorti’s own patiently paced, careful lyricism posits saving and preserving plants, history, art and culture as the antithesis to the world of commerce and the advancement of homogeneity, enabling biodiversity in all aspects“ — Brittany Gravely, Harvard Film Archive.

The screening will be followed by a discussion of the film with IUPUI faculty.

Dersu Uzala (1975), dir. Akira Kurosawa

15 May 2024 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie
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Dersu Uzala is epic in form yet intimate in scope. Set in the forests of Eastern Siberia at the turn of the century, it is a portrait of the friendship that grows between an aging hunter and a Russian surveyor. A romantic hymn to nature and the human spirit, it boasts a performance by Maxim Munzuk as the wise and wizened old man of the Taiga. It is Kurosawa’s only non-Japanese-language film, and his only film to be shot on 70mm film.

“One of the most beautifully composed and photographed of Kurosawa’s films, Dersu Uzala visually illustrates its theme—in Arseniev’s words: ‘Man is too small to face the vastness of nature.’ The camera is always at eye level: It is through the human eye that the vastness of the steppes is viewed, and it is the human figure, small in this elemental landscape, that one remembers after having seen the film. 

”This is one of the last appearances in Kurosawa of the humanism which so illuminates his films. Later pictures (Kagemusha, Ran) would end with vast panoramas of death undignified by hope. Dersu Uzala is one of the final and most persuasive statements of a major thesis in the director’s films: the fact of courage in the face of death.” - Donald Richie

The screening will be followed by a discussion of the film with IUPUI faculty.

Newtok (2022), dir. Michael Kirby Smith & Andrew Burton, producer Marie Meade

18 January 2023 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie

Water will erase Newtok, Alaska. Built on a delta at the edge of the Bering Sea, the tiny Yup’ik village has been dealing with melting permafrost, river erosion and decaying infrastructure for decades. To keep their culture and community intact, the 360 Yup’ik residents must relocate their entire village to stable ground upriver while facing a federal government that has failed to take appropriate action to combat climate change. In moving their village, they will become some of America’s first climate change refugees. This is a film of a village seeking justice in the face of climate disaster.

Michael Kirby Smith and Andrew Burton are documentary filmmakers and photojournalists who have covered conflict, protest, natural disasters and presidential campaigns for outlets including The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Washington Post, TIME and Getty Images. Their work has been honored by the Pulitzer Prize (Finalist, 2016); Sundance Institute (Grantees, 2019); Photographer of the Year International (2011); American Photography (32 & 34) and PDN Photo Annual, amongst others.

Marie Meade is a Yup'ik anthropologist and language professor at University of Alaska, Anchorage. Her family is originally from Kailavik, which is where the people of Newtok were located prior to the government-forced relocation to Newtok. For more than 20 years she has documented the cultural knowledge of Yup’ik elders. Her publications and exhibitions have significantly contributed to the world’s understanding of the values, language, and beliefs of the Yup’ik people. In 2005 she translated Yup’ik Words of Wisdom: Yupiit Qanruyutait, which is a bilingual volume focused on teachings and wisdom of expert Native orators as they instruct a younger generation about their place in the world. In 2002 she received the Governor’s Award for Distinguished Humanities Educator and in 2014 received the Meritorious Service Award from UAA. She is considered a culture bearer throughout the Yupik communities of the Yukon-Kuskokwim region.

The Falconer (2021), dir. Annie Kaempfer, producers: Annie Kaempfer & William Stefan Smith

15 February 2023 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie

The Falconer is a documentary feature that captures beauty and hope. This is a story of second chances: for injured birds of prey, for an abandoned plot of land, for a group of teenagers who have dropped out of high school, and for Rodney himself. This intimate portrait film follows master falconer Rodney Stotts on his mission to build a bird sanctuary and provide access to nature for his stressed community. The Falconer weaves Rodney's present-day mission with the story of his past, both of which are deeply rooted in issues of social and environmental injustice, and consistently orient the viewer to his worldview: nature heals.

Annie Kaempfer is a writer and director whose work has screened at festivals nationwide including Atlanta, Big Sky, Mill Valley and Woods Hole. Her feature debut, The Falconer, aired on PBS’ America Reframed in 2021 after winning Special Jury Prize at Cinema on the Bayou, Best Environmental Feature at BendFilm, and the 1st Place Storyteller’s Award at Destiny City. A Spike Lee Fellowship recipient, Annie graduated from NYU Tisch School of the Arts with an MFA in Film and Television. She brings a collaborative spirit, devotion to aesthetics, and focus on real-world impact to all her film projects. Annie serves on the Board of Directors of the Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital’s and has consulted for Ford Foundation, JustFilms and FotoDC.

Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2016), dir. Fabrizio Terranova

22 March 2023 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie

Feminist thinker and historian of science Donna Haraway is perhaps best known as the author of two revolutionary works: the essay "A Cyborg Manifesto" and the book Primate Visions. Both set out to upend well-established "common sense" categories: breaking down the boundaries among humans, animals, and machines while challenging gender essentialism and questioning the underlying assumptions of humanity’s fascination with primates through a post-colonial lens.

"Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival" features Haraway in a playful and engaging exploration of her life, influences, and ideas. Haraway is a passionate and discursive storyteller, and the film is structured around a series of discussions held in the California home she helped build by hand, on subjects including the capitalism and the anthropocene (a term she "uses but finds troubling"), science fiction writing as philosophical text, unconventional marital and sexual partnerships, the role of Catholicism in her upbringing, humans and dogs, the suppression of women’s writing, the surprisingly fascinating history of orthodontic aesthetics, and the need for new post-colonial and post-patriarchal narratives. It is a remarkably impressive range, from a thinker with a nimble and curious mind.

Fabrizio Terranova, who lives and works in Brussels, is a film-maker, activist, dramaturge, and teacher at ERG (École de Recherche Graphique) in Brussels, where he launched and co-runs the master's programme in “Récits et expérimentation / Narration speculative” (Narrations and experimentation/ Speculative narration).

Liminal: Indiana in the Anthropocene (2016), dir. Zach Schrank; editor/cinematographer Aaron Yoder; music by Nate Utesch

25 April 2023 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie

“Liminal: Indiana in the Anthropocene” is a meditative aerial film that presents Indiana as a microcosm of the current planetary epoch. Society is accelerating into the Anthropocene; our relationship with the Earth is one of conquest, dominance, and manipulation. The incessant and expansive generation of power, endless extraction, and the nonstop movement of materials create byproducts of continuous dumping, pollution, and catastrophic transformation. “Liminal” captures features of the global phenomenon within the boundaries of Indiana, collapsing the global into the local.

Zach Schrank is a 9th generation Hoosier, sociology professor, and director of the Center for a Sustainable Future at Indiana University South Bend. He teaches social theory, consumer society, and environmental sociology courses. In 2020, he co-directed the documentary Big Enough, Small Enough: South Bend in Transition, which is streaming through Hoodox; a service featuring exclusively nonfiction, Indiana-based films.

The Great Green Wall (2019), dir. Jared P. Scott

16 May 2023 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie

One of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises is occurring alongside devastating impacts of climate change in Africa’s Sahel region. Desertification, famine, conflict, and mass migration have caused nearly 2.7 million people to be displaced, with over 900,000 seeking refuge in neighboring nations.

However, there is a glimmer of hope in the form of the Great Green Wall: an epic reforestation initiative that spans almost 5000 miles across the continent. This remarkable living barrier of trees extends through eleven African countries, aiming to rejuvenate ecosystems and revive economies. In this remarkable tale of resilience and determination, Malian singer/activist Inna Modja embarks on a journey from Senegal to Djibouti, collecting stories and sharing songs with Africans at the forefront of the battle to save their land and preserve their ways of life.

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), dir. Stanley Kubrick

21 June 2023 | 7:30pm
Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie

"Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" is a satirical black comedy directed by Stanley Kubrick, released in 1964. Set during the height of the Cold War, the film follows the precarious situation that arises when an unhinged United States Air Force general orders a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union without authorization.

As the world teeters on the brink of annihilation, a group of political and military leaders, including the eccentric ex-Nazi scientist Dr. Strangelove, scramble to avert disaster. The film explores themes of political satire, absurdity, and the potential dangers of human error in the face of nuclear warfare. With its dark humor and sharp social commentary, "Dr. Strangelove" remains a classic cinematic masterpiece that continues to resonate with audiences, offering a cautionary tale about the fragility of international relations and the catastrophic consequences of unchecked power.