Cinema of Urgency Film Series Explores Today's Pressing Social, Political, Environmental, and Economic Issues

Join us each month leading up to the 2016 election, from March through October, for free screenings and conversations about some of the most important topics of our time.

Responding to the tumultuous climate in contemporary American politics, the Cinema of Urgency series features films posing critical questions about today’s most pressing social, political, environmental, and economic issues. Each screening is followed by a discussion with filmmakers, local community leaders, and other guest speakers.
The Walker’s Cinema of Urgency series is programmed in partnership with Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, an annual event in Durham, North Carolina that is dedicated to the presentation of contemporary nonfiction cinema.

Screening Schedule

All films are free and screen in the Walker Cinema on the third Thursday of each month (except in June):

· March 17: Containment

· April 21: Best of Enemies

· May 19: TBD

· June 23 -TBD

· July 21 -TBD

· August 18 -TBD

· September 15 -TBD

· October 20 -TBD

Free tickets available at Hennepin Box Office one hour before screening.

Containment

Thursday, March 17, 2016

Peter Galison and Robb Moss

Post-screening discussion with directors and moderated by Christine Marran (Associate Professor of Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Minnesota)

“How can we warn people centuries in the future about the danger of waste disposal sites? With inventive animation and incisive reporting, Moss and Galison aren’t going to make it any easier to sleep at night.” —Boston Globe

Hundreds of millions of gallons of radioactive sludge remain from the Cold War, and not one country carries a well-hatched plan for its removal. With a situation simultaneously critical but seemingly far off, the demand for solutions remains. The film splits formats between graphic novel and essay to represent future and present waste plants, forcing us to consider tens of thousands of years ahead to protect humankind.

The film focuses on three critical contemporary radioactive sites where containment has become the central issue—each explores a different aspect of the almost impossible task of isolating radioactive waste from the environment: First, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, the world’s only operating underground nuclear dump; the nuclear concentration of facilities in the Savannah River basin. Much of the nuclear waste trucked to the WIPP site originates from the 320-square mile Savannah River nuclear weapons plant (SRS) in South Carolina. In recent years, the SRS has been completely re-designed to deal with the deadly nuclear waste stream created there; and the third loss-of-containment site, Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture, was certainly never intended to be a repository for nuclear waste. But now, like many scenes of accidents and weapons testing, it has become one. The Fukushima story encompasses both the compromised waste pools and the region itself—now a gigantic waste site. (2015, DCP, 81 min)

Best of Enemies

Thursday, April 21, 7 pm, Free

Directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville

Post-screening discussion with guests TBA

In the summer of 1968, television news changed forever. Dead last in the ratings, ABC hired two intellectuals to debate each other during the Democratic and Republican national conventions. William F. Buckley, Jr. was a leader of the new conservative movement. Gore Vidal was a leftist novelist and polemicist. Armed with deep-seated distrust and enmity, they each believed the other’s political ideologies were dangerous for America and their explosive exchanges devolved into vitriolic name-calling. It was unlike anything TV had ever broadcast, and all the more shocking because it was live and unscripted. Viewers were riveted. ABC News’ ratings skyrocketed. And a new era in televised political discourse was born.
2015, DCP, 87 minutes.