The 5th annual Romanian Film Festival, themed "Travelling Shots: Families Beyond Boundaries," will be held on different dates at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University starting on Nov. 5th and ending on Nov. 13th. 

Stanford University will host the festival on November 5th and November 8th.

 

Thursday, November 5, 2015:

• 6:30pm - 8:30pm  ALIYAH DADA by Oana Giurgiu, documentary, Romaina, 2015
• 8:30pm - 9:30pm  Q&A with director Oana Giurgiu

For the complete list of other festival dates, times, locations and films, please visit https://rofilmfestival.wordpress.com/program/

Sponsored by Stanford's Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies  (CREEES), and the Special Language Program (SLP), and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley (ISEEES) and the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University. 

Co-sponsored by Stanford's The Europe Center,  Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Stanford University Libraries and UC Los Angeles' Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, Center for European and Eurasian Studies, and the Romanian Student Club, and the “Nicolae Tonitza” High School, Bucharest, Romania, and Fundatia Semn, Romania.

The Pussy Riot protest, and the subsequent heavy handed treatment of the protestors, grabbed the headlines, but this was not an isolated instance of art being noticeably critical of the regime. As this book, based on extensive original research, shows, there has been gradually emerging over recent decades a significant counter-culture in the art world which satirises and ridicules the regime and the values it represents, at the same time putting forward, through art, alternative values. The book traces the development of art and protest in recent decades, discusses how art of this kind engages in political and social protest, and provides many illustrations as examples of art as protest. The book concludes by discussing how important art has been in facilitating new social values and in prompting political protests.

Lena Jonson is Associate Research Fellow at UI. Her research currently focuses on Russian domestic politics and issues of political and societal change (modernisation) as well as the contemporary role of culture and its standing in Russia.

Lena Jonson has published several articles and works examining Russian society and politics (mainly foreign and security policy), Russia's relations with Europe and Russian relations with the former Soviet territories. She has also published widely on Central Asia, and on Tajikistan in particular. 

Lena Jonson is one of the founders of the network "Sällskapet för studier av Ryssland, Central-och Östeuropa samt Centralasien" (1997) and was its first chairperson. She has been a guest researcher at George Washington University and the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Centre, as well as a scholarship recipient at the universities of (then) Leningrad and Moscow. From 2005-2009, she served as Cultural Attaché at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow. In 2002, she worked as a Political Officer at the OSCE-office i Dushanbe, Tajikistan. In 1997-1998, she was a Senior Researcher at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

Sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

"Rabbit-Proof Fence" is a 2002 film based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It concerns the author's mother, and two other young mixed-race Aboriginal girls, who ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, in order to return to their Aboriginal families, after being placed there in 1931. The film follows the girls as they trek/walk for nine weeks along 1,500 miles of the Australian rabbit-proof fence to return to their community at Jigalong while being tracked by a white authority figure and a black tracker.

The film will be moderated by The Europe Center faculty affiliate Krish Seetah, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the ‘Mauritian Archaeology and Cultural Heritage’ (MACH) project, which studies European Imperialism and colonial activity.

"Rabbit-Proof Fence" is the last film in the annual SGS Summer Film Festival running from June 17th to August 26th.  This year's festival features films from around the world that focus on the topic of “Imagining Empire: A Global Retrospective” and offers a flexible lens with which to look at both historical and contemporary geopolitical and socioeconomic contexts.  For more information on the film festival, please visit: https://sgs.stanford.edu/sgs.stanford.edu/2015-film-festival.

Ernst Röhm (1887-1934) was an early member of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s closest friend.  As head of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung), Röhm was one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, at least until his execution during the “Night of Long Knives” in the summer of 1934.  Röhm was also openly homosexual.   This talk considers Röhm’s rise, the disclosure of his homosexuality in 1931 in two widely-publicized trials (for violation of the anti-sodomy statute), his role in the consolidation of Nazi control, and his downfall.  The talk also considers how Hans Blüher’s theory of the Männerbund (male association) might help analyze not only Röhm and the Nazis but also contribute more broadly to the historical sociology of nationalist revolution.

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, The Europe Center and the Department of German Studies.

This colloquium is the final event of the year-long working group on 'The Contemporary." The workshop examines the  “contemporary” with a focus on defining moments such as: 1945, 1973, 1989, and 2001. In recent years the concept of the contemporary has been taken up within limited disciplinary discourses and in the context of distinct geographical settings. The horizon of this workshop, however, is the global. We employ a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to the hybrid term “contemporary” as it intersects various fields and serves as a heuristic device to understand phenomena in politics, culture, and the arts. In this spirit, our colloquium brings together scholars from various fields and disciplines that all are grappling with questions such as 1. what is this thing we call "the contemporary," and how do traditional disciplinary methods need to adapt to new challenges faced by the unique cultural objects of the contemporary moment?

For more information on this colloqium and to view videos of the presentations, please visit The Contemporary website

Co-sponsored by the Department of Literatures, Cultures and Language, Department of Literatures, Cultures and Language Research Units, The Europe Center, Stanford Humanities Center and Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.