MadCat Women's International Film Festival: "Maquilapolis"

***PLEASE JOIN US FOR THIS IMPORTANT FILM FESTIVAL***

MadCat Women’s International Film Festival

presents

Maquilapolis Northern California Premiere Screening

Thursday, September 21, 2006 @ 7:30 pm

Grand Lake Theater
3200 Grand Avenue
Oakland

• Filmmakers and Film Subjects in Person

Maquilapolis Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre
2006 • 60 min • Color • Beta SP • US/Mexico

This intimate documentary shares the lives of some members a tightly knit community that sits in the shadow of one of Tijuana’s 800 maquiladoras, multinational factories that thrive off Mexico’s cheap labor force. Carmen, a single mother and one of the more than one million Mexicans employed at the maquiladoras, works making television components six nights a week for six dollars a day. She comes home to a shack she built out of recycled garage doors, in a neighborhood with no sewage lines or electricity. At 29, she already suffers from kidney damage and lead poisoning from her years of exposure to toxic chemicals. However, Carmen is far from a victim—she is a dynamic young woman, busy making a life for herself and her children.

Carmen and her friends, some of whom become promotoras (community-based activists), reach beyond the daily struggle for survival to fight for workers’ rights. They take a major television manufacturer to task for violating labor rights and pressure the government to clean up a toxic waste dump left behind by a departing factory. The women, armed with the video cameras Funari and De La Torre provide, also document their lives, their city and their hopes for the future. As they work for change, the world changes too: a global economic crisis and the availability of cheaper labor in China begin to pull the factories away from Tijuana, leaving an entire community with an uncertain future.

Tix: $10.
Advance tickets available by calling (415) 255-7296
Mastercard and visa accepted only in advance of the screening. Cash or Debit at the door.

This screening is co-sponsored by Global Exchange and the Wellstone Democratic Club. Partial proceeds go to benefit these organizations.
Co-presented by Film Arts Foundation
--------------
Preceded by
South of Ten Liza Johnson
2006 • 10 min • Color • 35mm • US • West Coast Premiere
Using the decimated landscape of the Mississippi Gulf Coast as its backdrop, South of Ten restages the extraordinary routines of survivors of Hurricane Katrina. A girl flees a makeshift tent city. A man finds a trombone amidst the rubble. A worker watches the ocean from under a moving house, while its owner gazes at the view from her shifting living room. In ten vignettes, residents of the destroyed Mississippi Gulf Coast act out scenes of their everyday lives and the relentlessness of labor now required in their extreme terrain.
For more information contact:
(510) 452-3556
http://www.grandlaketheater.com


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