First Friday Movie Series
at the Peace Center of Delaware County
(Springfield Friends Meetinghouse)
1001 Old Sproul Rd., Springfield, PA
(just off the corner of Old Marple and S. Sproul Roads,
behind the Mr. Car Wash)
7 p.m. Free Large-Screen Air-Conditioned
Parking available, click for directions to Peace Center
(Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for light refreshments)
After-film discussion
Co-sponsored by Brandywine Peace Community, 610-544-1818
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Friday, September 3,
7 p.m.
Labor Day Weekend Showing of: Bread & Roses
2000: Directed by Ken Loach. Written by Paul Laverty.
Running time: 106 minutes. Rated R (For strong language and brief nudity).
English and Spanish with English and Spanish subtitles.
Inspired by a True Story...
Bread & Roses is the award-winning dramatic film by social realist filmmaker Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley). The plot deals with the struggle of poorly paid janitorial workers in Los Angeles and their fight for better working conditions and the right to unionize. It is based on the Justice for Janitors campaign of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
Maya (Pilar Padilla), a young Mexican woman makes a harrowing cross-border journey into Los Angeles to join her older sister Rosa (Elpidia Carrilio), who works as a janitor in some of the city's largest corporate offices. Rosa gets Maya a job as a janitor: a non-union janitorial service has the contract, the foul-mouthed supervisor can fire workers on a whim, and the service-workers' union has assigned organizer Sam Shapiro (Adrian Brody) to bring its "justice for janitors" campaign to the building. Maya and other workers try for public support; management intimidates workers to divide and conquer. Workers and management collide.
Surrounded by the machinations of big business, the fight by these migrant workers threatens their livelihood, family, and risks their expulsion from the country.
Timely in its depiction of undocumented migrant workers seeking justice, the film's name, "Bread and Roses" derives from the 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Though the phrase comes from a 1910 poem by James Oppenheim, it is commonly associated with the Lawrence strike, which united dozens of immigrant communities, led to a large extent by women, under the leadership of the Industrial Workers of the World.
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Friday, October 1st, 7 p.m.
THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA:
Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
Directed by Judith Ehrlich, Rick Goldsmith, 92 mins., NR
Featuring: Daniel Ellsberg, Patricia Ellsberg, Howard Zinn, Leonard Weinglass,Tony Russo, Max Frankel, Egil 'Bud' Krogh, Hedrick Smith
2010 Academy Award Nominee - Best Documentary
Long before the WikiLeaks release of classified documents about the war in Afghanistan, there was Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which outlined the "secret history" of the Vietnam war and were crucial to educating the public about the government's lies.
Daniel Ellsberg was a Marine platoon leader, a Harvard University economics Ph.D., and a nuclear weapons strategist at the military/foreign policy think tank RAND Corp. before going to work for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1964. He was the hawk's hawk, who believed in the U.S. war in Vietnam, a man who in 1965 asked to be sent to Vietnam as a civilian for two years. By 1971, however, Ellsberg would bear the wrath of the Nixon White House, and be branded the "most dangerous man in America" by Nixon national security adviser Henry Kissinger, for leaking a 7,000 page document known as the "Pentagon Papers" (the McNamara ordered "Pentagon Study of American Involvement in Vietnam") to the New York Times.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers chronicles the media and political frenzy that Ellsberg unleashed, and traces the effect of the leak on public perception of both the war in Vietnam and successive presidential administrations who waged it. Hailed as a hero, vilified as a traitor, and ostracized by even his closest colleagues, Ellsberg was charged with multiple violations of the Espionage Act and risked life in prison to stop a war he helped plan.
Marked by a landmark battle between America's greatest newspapers and the Nixon White House, the film unravels a saga that leads directly to Watergate, Nixon's resignation, and the end of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg's journey from war planner to peace advocate adds a whole element of human feeling and vulnerability to the Pentagon Papers tale, documenting one man's profound change of heart while providing a piercing look at the world of government secrecy as revealed by the ultimate insider.
In 2010, it's remarkable how much of this story still surprises-and, tragically, how much of it resembles far too much recent history. As we hear in Ellsberg voice-over, speaking of the Vietnam War, "its not that we were on the wrong side in Vietnam, we are the wrong side."
Daniel Ellsberg: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
Pentagon Papers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers
Delaware County Peace Center | 1001 Old Sproul Rd | Springfield
Springfield, PA 19064-1212