California Newsreel – Forward to the 6th Decade

Screenings & Films

California Newsreel – Forward to the 6th Decade

Presented by YBCA |

Saturday, January 13, 2024, 3–5 PM

Experience a selection of films from the past 20 years advancing the causes of health and social justice, led by outgoing co-director Cornelius Moore and incoming executive director Rachel Poulain of California Newsreel.

Since 1968, the San Francisco-based non-profit California Newsreel has produced and distributed films that engage with each epoch’s pertinent social issues. Their collections, which include the entirety of their organizational history, focus on Black American life and history, African cinema, and health equity.

Program

RACE – THE POWER OF AN ILLUSION
The House We Live In episode 3 excerpts (29 minutes)
This segment uncovers how race in the United States resides not in nature but in politics, economics, and culture. It reveals how our social institutions “make” race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status, and wealth to white people.

UNNATURAL CAUSES
The When the Bough Breaks episode (28 minutes)
Infant mortality rates among African Americans remain twice as high as among whites, and African American women with graduate degrees still face a greater risk of delivering pre-term, low birth weight babies than white women who didn’t finish high school.

THE RAISING OF AMERICA
The Wounded Places episode excerpts (29 minutes)
Too many children, especially children of color living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, show the effects of unrelenting structural racism, street violence, domestic instability, and other adversities every day. Their symptoms look a lot like post-traumatic stress disorder. Except for many, there is no “post” until neighborhoods, and traumatized children, begin to heal.

California Newsreel

California Newsreel produces and distributes cutting edge social justice films that inspire, educate and engage audiences. Founded in 1968, California Newsreel is the oldest non-profit social issue documentary film center in the U.S.; the first to marry media production and contemporary social movements. They are a leading resource center for the advancement of racial justice and diversity, and the study of African American life and history as well as African culture and politics.

Gina Basso

Gina Basso is a San Francisco-based independent film programmer of experimental, artist-made, and non-fiction film and video works and thematic narrative film series. She has organized film programs for local cinemas including The Roxie Theater, The Castro Theater, and Alamo Drafthouse New Mission Theater. She has curated programs for McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Design Within Reach, Hunter’s Point Shipyard and the Northwest Film Forum and is the former film curator for San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In her creative practice, she uses video to explore transitional or altered states of being. Through moving collage, handmade animation, and sound she draws on a rich tradition of experimentation with various forms, materials, and processes, combining found and original footage to harness the energy of poetic montage. Her video work has been presented at CROSSROADS Festival, Artist Television Access, HAXAN Film Festival, and Antimatter Experimental Film Festival.

Bay Area Now 9 is curated by Martin Strickland, Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Fiona Ball, independent curator; under the artistic leadership of Amy Kisch, Head of Art + Public Programming; and developed with the inaugural YBCA Curatorial Counsel of curators, artists, activists, and cultural workers working across the Bay Area’s creative disciplines and communities: Erina Alejo, Gina Basso, Jason Bayani, Mina Girgis, Candace Huey, José Ome Navarrete Mazatl, Aay Preston Myint, and Lehua Taitano.

The BAN9 YBCA project team also includes Yoni Asega, Manager of Exhibition Design; David Tim, Head Preparator, Project Design; Bella Manfredi, Senior Preparator, Multimedia + Graphics; O Soo Vegh, Exhibition Project Manager + Registrar; Rea Lynn de Guzman, Manager of Public + Educational Programs; Flavia Mora, Public + Educational Programs Coordinator; and Cori Lucas, Community + Program Event Manager.

YBCA is grateful to the preparator team who made this exhibition possible: Isaiah Acosta, Amy Bergstein, Micha Dudgeonwood, Owen Goodwin, German Hoyle, Calvin Jones, Linden Julien-Lehr, Lauren Kenwood, Benjamin Leon, Maren Mouhanna, Éamon McGivern, Christian Neill, David Prigge, and Kelsey Westphal.

YBCA Programs are made possible in part by the City and County of San Francisco, MacKenzie Scott, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), #StartSmall, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Marilyn Conrad Trust, New England Foundation for the Arts, California Arts Council, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, William G. Irwin Charity Foundation, The Bernard Osher Foundation, The Sato Foundation, Gaia Fund, Office of Mayor London N. Breed, San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Headlands Center for the Arts, ICA San Francisco, Bay Area Mind and Music Society, GitHub, Harvey and Leslie Wagner Foundation, McNabb Foundation, Raymond James Charitable, Savant Group Charitable Foundation, The Building Works, Fremont Group Foundation, and YBCA Members.

Lead image: Image from Race – The Power of an Illusion. Courtesy of California Newsreel.