[Daviscenter-list] November film series at the Davis Center

The US State Department and Department of Education have designated November 14-18 "International Education Week 2005." International Education Week is an annual initiative to celebrate and promote international education and exchange. As part of this year's festivities at Harvard, the Davis Center is sponsoring a film series (details below). For a full program of Harvard events, please see the Office of International Programs calendar at http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~oip/calendar.html. * ** /Worlds Colliding: Soviet and the Other/* Three films--one each on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia--exploring the effects an encounter with a starkly different culture can have on an individual. *Tuesday, November 15 * *"Good Bye, Lenin!" (2003, dir. Wolfgang Becker) 121 min.* East Germany, the year 1989: A young man protests against the regime. His mother watches the police arresting him and suffers a heart attack and falls into a coma. Some months later, the GDR does not exist anymore and the mother awakes. Since she has to avoid every excitement, the son tries to set up the GDR again for her in their flat. But the world has changed a lot... CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street, Concourse Level, Room S050 8:00 pm *Wednesday, November 16 * *"Genghis Blues" (1999, dir. Roko Belic) 88 min.* The extraordinary odyssey of a U.S. musician of Cape Verdean ancestry to Tannu Tuva, in central Asia, where nomadic people throat sing more than one note simultaneously, using vocal harmonics. A bluesman, Paul Pena, blind and recently widowed, taught himself throat singing and was by chance invited to the 1995 throat-singing symposium in Kyzyl. Helped by the "Friends of Tuva," Pena makes the arduous journey. Singing in the deep, rumbling kargyraa style, Pena gives inspired performances at the festival, composes songs in Tuvan, washes his face in sacred rivers, expresses the disorientation of blindness in foreign surroundings, and makes a human connection with everyone he meets. CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street, Concourse Level, Room S050 8:00 pm *Thursday, November 17 * *"Window to Paris" (Okno v Parizh) (1994, 87 minutes)* Nikolai (played by Sergei Dontsov) has been fired from his job as a music teacher and has to live in the gym until he finds a place to stay. Finally, he gets a communal room in the apartment of Gorokhov (Victor Mikhalkov). The room's previous inhabitant, an old lady, has died a year ago, and yet her cat, Maxi, is still in the locked room, healthy and fat. Soon, Nikolai and his neighbours discover the mystery: there is a window to Paris in the room. That's when the comedy begins - will the Russians be able to cope with the temptation to profit from the discovery? CGIS South, 1730 Cambridge Street, Concourse Level, Room S050 8:00 pm -- -------------------------------------------------- Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Harvard University 1730 Cambridge Street, 3rd Floor, Suite 301B Cambridge, MA 02138 Phone: 617.495.4037 Fax: 617.495.8319 http://www.daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu