Tuesday, May 11

Double Feature

Our Land, My People: The Struggle of the Lubicon Cree

and

The Blood of Kouan Kouan 

7:00pm at the Plaza Theatre, 1133 Kensington Road NW. Admission is by donation.

Our Land, My People: The Struggle of the Lubicon Cree

The documentary follows Lubicon councillors, elders, and band members as they share with Amnesty International the impact of resource exploitation on their way of life and traditional economy. The Canadian authorities have failed to bring about a fair resolution of the long standing land dispute. 

The Blood of Kouan Kouan

In the virgin tropical forests of the Amazon, the region with the richest biodiversity in the world, an unspeakable crime has been and is still being committed against humankind. Ancient native populations are considered invisible and expendable, victims of the oil companies' easy profiteering. They are disappearing on a massive scale, as pollution kills the animals they hunt and causes illnesses until recently unknown to them, such as cancer. This documentary is dedicated to the Tetete and Sansahuari tribes. Their voices were silenced forever at the dawn of the 21st century because of the region's "development". 

Monday, March 8

Taking Root

Planting trees for fuel, food and timber is not what one usually associates with winning a Nobel Peace Prize. Yet with that simple act, Wangari Maathai helped spark a movement to reclaim Kenya’s land from a century of deforestation while providing new sources of livelihood to rural communities. The tree-planting groups that formed gave the women a reason to come together and become involved in resolving their communities' challenges.

part of the Amnesty Film Series 2009-2010

At the Plaza Theatre

1133 Kensington Road NW

Admission by donation 

The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court

Thursday, December 10 @ 7:00 pm

at the Plaza Theatre, 1133 Kensington Road NW. Admission is by donation.

The Reckoning follows dynamic International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo and his team for 3 years across 4 continents as he issues arrest warrants for Lord’s Resistance Army leaders in Uganda, puts Congolese warlords on trial, shakes up the Colombian justice system, and charges Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir with genocide in Darfur, challenging the UN Security Council to arrest him. Like a deft thriller, The Reckoning keeps you on the edge of your seat, in this case with two riveting dramas- the prosecution of unspeakable crimes and the ICC’s fight for the efficacy in its paradigm for justice, innocent victims suffer and wait. Will the Prosecutor succeed? Will the world ensure that justice prevails?

This film is part of a series Amnesty International will be presenting at the Plaza Theatre. The series will showcase picks from the Amnesty International Film Festivals.

 AI Book Club:  Egg on Mao: The Story Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, the story of human rights defender Lu Decheng.

Book Summary:  Most anniversary commemorations of the Chinese regime's brutal crackdown on June 4 have focused on the fifty days when the entire world watched the historic standoff between the student pro-democracy movement and the Chinese leadership. Egg on Mao spans more than a half century of China's recent past, telling a story around the pivotal, defiant moment, when Lu Decheng, together with his two friends, Yu Zhijian, a primary school teacher, and Yu Dongyue, an artist at a small daily newspaper, famously threw paint-filled eggs at the portrait of Mao Zedong that dominates the square. Besides charting what brought the three to travel to Beijing and to their dramatic act, the book explores whether repression and imprisonment, or even time itself, can douse the flame of desire for human rights.