Stewardship of place and stories: Bearing witness through documentary film and oral history

Monday April 10th, 4:15 PM in Schow 030B

Panel Discussion with documentary filmmakers Lynette Wallworth, and James and Maureen Tusty.   Dinner and discussion to follow in Thompson Biology Lab, Room 211 at 5:15 PM.  Please email Lois Banta at [email protected] to sign up by Friday April 7.

Lynette Wallworth is an Australian artist known for her immersive multimedia installations, which focus on the interactivity between humans and the natural world. Her works include Coral: Rekindling Venus, an examination of the ecologically threatened biodiversity of the Great Barrier Reef , and Evolution of Fearlessness, an intimate portrait of 10 refugee women.  Her most recent work is Collisions, a virtual reality investigation into the first contact between an indigenous Australian tribe and the momentous impact of Western expansion.

James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty are a husband and wife film-making team. They founded, owned and operated a private communications firm called Mountain View Group, Ltd. , which served some of the largest international corporations in the world, such as GE, Coca-Cola, Home Depot, and IBM.  In 2008, they sold Mountain View Group and opened Sky Films Incorporated (SFI), a production company dedicated to documentary films. Their first release, “The Singing Revolution,” played in 125 North American theatrical markets and was one of the most successful feature documentaries of 2008.  The New York Times wrote of the film, “Imagine the scene in Casablanca in which the French patrons sing ‘La Marseillaise’ in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and you’ve only begun to imagine the force of The Singing Revolution.”  The couple recently released a second documentary, “To Breathe as One,” about the 30,000 singers and 100,000 audience members who come together once every five years for the Estonian Song Festival, and the integral role this festival has played in maintaining strength and national identity for a people who have faced cultural genocide multiple times in the last 150 years.