Dana Auditorium (Sunderland Language Center)

Set in the untamed wilds of the Mbaracayú Reserve in rural Paraguay, this intimate verité documentary offers a rare glimpse of a disappearing world where timid girls grow into brave young women even as they are transformed by their unlikely friendships with one another. Free and open to the public. There will be a Q&A period afterwards led by faculty from the Education Studies Program.

This film examines the hidden assumption of cultural superiority behind education aid projects, which overtly aim to help children “escape” to a “better life” – despite mounting evidence of the environmental, social, and mental health costs of our own modern consumer lifestyles, from epidemic rates of childhood depression and substance abuse to pollution and climate change. Free and open to the public. There will be a Q&A period afterwards led by faculty from the Education Studies Program.

This award-winning documentary follows the evolution of working-class, immigrant Boyle Heights from multiethnic to predominately Latino. The film shows how Boyle Heights survived the building of the largest and busiest freeway interchange system in North America and now faces another threat, gentrification. Following the screening there will be a Q&A with director Betsy Kalin.

Wu Wenguang (b. 1956) is a leading figure in the Chinese New Documentary Film Movement. He has made ten films, including the seminal “Bumming in Beijing” (1991). In 2005 Wu co-founded the Caochangdi Workstation Art Center in Beijing, where he curated the Village Documentary Project (2005) and the on-going Memory Project (2010), which organizes amateur filmmakers to record memories of China’s Great Famine (1958-1961) and family and local histories. From 7:00 to 8:00 PM Wu will talk in English about the Memory Project and take questions.

Ancient oceans teeming with life, Norwegian settlers, Native Americans and multinational oil corporations find intimacy in deep time. Following up his 2009 feature Crude Independence (SXSW), Deep Time is director Noah Hutton’s ethereal portrait of the landowners, state officials, and oil workers at the center of the most prolific oil boom on the planet for the past six years.

Directed by Joan Grossman, independent film maker and faculty in the Middlebury School of the Environment. This tells the story of an artists community that became an icon for a global counterculture, emerging from a drive to create a new civilization on the scrapheap of a wasteful society. Screening will be followed by a talk with the director.

Debunking Organic: What’s in your granola bar and how did it get there? A talk with Q & A by Jean Richardson, Chair of the National Organic Standards Board, Organic Inspector, and professor emerita UVM. Dr. Richardson will discuss the true meaning of the organic label and how it is regulated, using your friendly organic granola bar as a case study.

Please join us for this documentary film about Japanese society. LONELY SWALLOWS – Living as the Children of Migrant Workers – unveil the struggles experienced by members of mixed race minority groups in Japan.

Please join us for this documentary film about Japanese society. Both HAFU the Film and LONELY SWALLOWS – Living as the Children of Migrant Workers – unveil the struggles experienced by members of mixed race minority groups in Japan.

CHILDREN OF THE WOODS captures the growth of preschoolers of the Kisarazu Community Nursery School, a child care facility located in a cultivated woodland village forest in Chiba Prefecture.