The Collaborative for Film in Social and Cultural Studies Screenings 2008-9
Press contact: Wayne Titus - wayne@collabarotiveforfilm.org
For release on: Sep 14, 2008
These featured priests and nuns felt called to dedicate their lives to God. After years of working side-by-side in service to the church, something happened that changed everything: they fell in love. Faced with excommunication, financial ruin, and rejection by family and the religious community, they were forced to make an excruciating decision. Through their stories, this film explores the conflict between loyalty to the Church and acceptance of individual truth, and the difficulty of merging spiritual and sexual identities among the clergy.
Since 1965, over 200,000 Roman Catholic priests and nuns throughout the world have fled the Church, many of them breaking their vows of celibacy for love.
Father Jerry and Sister Marita met during the social and sexual unrest of the 1960s, and left the church to marry and start a family. Father Tom Durkin, a priest turned sex guru, fled to California and Hawaii, where he explored sex, communal living, and Eastern religion. Father John Dee, a conservative priest in Minneapolis, continued to wear the priestly collar and practice traditional Catholic mass in his home even after he broke his vow of celibacy with Sister Louise.
The film was directed by lesbian filmmaker Simone Grudzen, whose parents are featured in the film. While coming to terms with her own sexuality as a teenager, Simone recognized the parallels between her experience and her parents' struggle to overcome sexual repression within the Catholic clergy. This film is a tribute to the courage of her parents and other former priests and nuns who left their entire lives behind to find fulfillment through romantic love. The film was co-created by sisters Simone and Corita Grudzen.
As the daughters of a Catholic priest and nun, we knew we wanted an important story to be told. Our parents were forced at a young age to make difficult decisions that would have lasting consequences for them and their families. Lessons from our parents' life continue to inspire our own choices and paths. We felt that by telling their story, and the story of others like them, we could at the very least document this historical moment in the lives of the many priests and nuns faced excommunication from the Church. We hope that this film will inform the debate and have an impact on mandatory celibacy within the Catholic Church. We dream that it will inspire others contemplating life-changing decisions in the face of thousands of years of tradition.
--Corita Grudzen, Producer and Simone Grudzen, Director
Voices is a documentary film which brings forth the stories and testimonies of survivors of Taiwan's February 28th Incident, the 1947 uprising which led to the massacre of tens of thousands of Taiwanese by Chinese Nationalists. The aftermath of Taiwan's holocaust ushered in forty years of marshal law, which silenced the voices that could have spoken about the atrocities committed by the Nationalist government. The year 1987 marked the first public commemoration of the February 28th Incident (also known as the "2-28 Incident"), and the rampant democratization in the ensuing decade encouraged the survivors to finally tell the stories of the brutal massacres.
Following the commemorative spirits and reawakening inspired by the 50th year anniversary of the February 28th Incident, the thirteen survivors in Voices share their experiences of growing up in the shadows of the February 28th Incident. The survivors tell stories such as that of a father who was mysteriously taken away at night by soldiers; a leader who was shot while waving a white flag in surrender; a worker forced to dig graves for himself and his comrades; a family that went searching for a missing father only to find his decomposed body in a grave; a family that brought the deceased father's body home and found three bullets in his skull; a daughter who watched her father slowly die from a injection administered when he was released from prison; and a daughter who was abandoned by her mother shortly after the death of her father.
The film also explores the influence the February 28th Incident has had on the present-day Taiwanese independence movement. Architect Tzu-Tsai Tzeng talks about the concepts behind the 2-28 Memorial in Taipei City, while Dr. Lin Tsung-Yi, founder of the 2-28 Victims' Association, talks about his proposed "peaceful settlement" of the February 28th Incident.
Inspired by the growing public acknowledgment of the February 28th Incident, Voices is also an artistic reconstruction of a historical event for which no photographs, archival footage, or visual documentation has ever been uncovered. The history of the events is pieced together through the works of artists and the testimonies of survivors.
James Hsiao studied film as at Yale University and produced Voices as his senior thesis, which was awarded the Howard Lamar Prize for Outstanding Work in Film and/or Video. Hsiao's student films have been screened at the New Haven International Festival of Arts and Ideas and recognized at the Connecticut Vision Awards. His most recent film, Water Lilies, a feature-length film about the intertwined lives of a psychiatrist and his three patients, screened at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival, garnered two nominations for Best Supporting Actress at the B-Movie Film Festival, and is currently in distribution through Vimooz.com. He is currently finishing work on a play, People for Whom the World Spins and Turns, about a set of recovering addicts trying to survive a 28-day recovery program, which was staged as a reading in the Washington DC Capitol Fringe Festival, and is currently in development through the New Plays Reading Series, Essential Theater, Washington, DC. Hsiao's other plays have been performed at the Washington DC 10-minute Play Festival, and staged as readings at the Baltimore Playwrights Festival and the National Asian-American Theater Festival.
Hsiao received his medical degree from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and completed his residency in emergency medicine at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He is currently an emergency physician at the Sharp Grossmont Hospital in San Diego. His essays have been published in the online Yale Journal of Humanities and Medicine, and his videos have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and Academic Emergency Medicine.
Samantha Federer, Co-Director/Co-Producer, Executive Producer, is a media producer, activist and educator. She has been working on documentaries for political and social justice since 1999. Her first project brought her to Cuba for four months, where she worked alongside renowned Cuban filmmakers producing "Versus," a film about US Cuba policy. Feder was the Associate Producer for the film "Beyond Good & Evil; Media Children and Violent Times," which explored the ways that the media's representation of the war in Iraq has affected children both in the US and abroad. She produced and edited the short narrative "F. Scott Fitzgerald Slept Here," which won the Frameline completion fund. Boy I Am is her first feature film. Feder received an M.A. in Media Studies from the New School University, with concentrations in media criticism and documentary production. With the help of a research fellowship from the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, Feder has begun pre-production on her second documentary.
Julie Hollar, Co-Director/Co-Producer, is a freelance writer, artist and activist. She worked as a volunteer member of the Paper Tiger Television collective for three years, co-producing documentaries such as "Class Dismissed"—a 30 minute documentary featuring Howard Zinn that explores what is left out of the typical high school history curriculum—and "Mandate for Democracy," a response to the 2004 presidential election. Previously, as the field and communications coordinator at the Lesbian Gay Rights Lobby in Texas, Hollar helped pass the first trans-inclusive non-discrimination legislation through the Texas House of Representatives. She recently left her position as the communications director at the national media watch group FAIR to travel and live abroad. Boy I Am is her first feature film.
Punta Soul! tells the story of international cultural and musical phenomenon, punta rock, which eminates from the personal experiences of Garifuna artists from Belize. Punta rock is an electric, percussive sound deeply rooted in African and indigenous rhythmic and spiritual traditions and layered with modern instrumental elements. Despite their popularity throughout Central American communities, punta rock, and its acoustic cousin, paranda, remain underappreciated among North American audiences, as well as among many Belizeans themselves. The vision for Punta Rock! grew out of a desire to promote greater appreciation for Garifuna heritage, particularly among Belizean and Diaspora audiences.
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