The 7th Annual DocuAsia Forum
Documentary Screening
Les Sauteurs (Those Who Jump)
Post film discussion
Yasin Kiraga Misago, Founder and Executive Director of African Descent Society BC, Carla Hilario, PhD candidate in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia and a research associate in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, and Minah Lee, researcher/artist and one of the unlanded on this land.
Here in Metro Vancouver, discussions of the Asian diaspora have become commonplace, usually not without a nod to the Jewish diaspora. Yet one of the most widespread and arguably most complex diasporic communities in our midst is rarely acknowledged. The African diaspora traces migratory paths both coerced and voluntary. Examined, it reveals much about the structural forces behind our individual and collective stories of movement and displacement.
By the producers of Academy Award Nominees THE LOOK OF SILENCE and THE ACT OF KILLING, Les Sauteurs is a fascinating insider’s look into Mount Gurugu, an informal camp on the Spain-Moroccan border where over a thousand hopeful African migrants live, waiting for a chance to jump the fence that marks the distance between Europe and Africa, hope and despair…
Performer
Juliane Okot Bitek is a Liu Scholar alumna and PhD candidate (Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Program) with her home department at the Liu Insitute for Global Issues. Her research around identity, citizenship and forgetting has led her to do fieldwork in Arusha, Kigwa, Tabora, Gulu, Musoma, Tarime, Butiaba, Bukoba, Kampala, Lira, London and Mwanza. Her latest publication, 100 Days (U of Alberta Press 2016), is a collection of poetry that negotiates ways to remember the 1994 Rwanda Genocide.100 Days has been shortlisted for the 2017 Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Award for Poetry and won a gold prize for the 2016 Foreword INDIES Award for Poetry.
Her essays, reviews, interviews and other writing can be widely found online and on her website at julianeokotbitek.com
Panelists
Yasin Kiraga Misago is the Founder and Executive Director of African Descent Society BC and founder of African Descent Festival BC and the Creative Director for Hogan’s Alley Historic Memory traveling Exhibition and History research for people of African descent in Canada and BC. He is an urban historian and heritage walking tour guide in Vancouver with Black Strathcona Heritage Walking tour in Vancouver Eastside and other historical places for people of African Descent in BC where he has worked tirelessly mobilising the community advocating for the City of Vancouver to remove the Georgia St. Viaduct and build a Centre for African descent heritage. Yasin is also the coordinator for UNESCO General History of Africa Project within Vancouver.
Carla Hilario is a PhD candidate in the School of Nursing at the University of British Columbia and a research associate in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. Her work focuses on community-engaged research aimed at improving mental health outcomes for immigrant, refugee, and visible minority populations at the intersections of gender and race.
Minah Lee is a world citizen who was born and raised in South Korea. She is currently one of the unlanded on this land todayand also a proud member of a secret army called ESL poetrees planted in the soil. She wants to use her privilege of standing in academia as a researcher/artist to delve deeper into the issues of being and belonging against the commodification of citizenship; human security; identities of migrants, located in the state-driven paradigms. Minah takes pleasure in excavating personal narratives and creative practices in all forms that subvert and/or challenge the up-to-date grand narratives such as War on Terror, Economic Security, and Public Safety. What do privacy and freedom of expression mean to individuals, especially artists, in the state of surveillance?
Minah wants to inspire new ways of becoming and longing by re-imagining Home and borders. She believes that securing more places to summon and share personal/social traumas and memories is essential. If new technology and devices are an extension of our body/mind and its dwelling spaces, how do we draw boundaries from governing machines that are programmed to perpetuate cycles of exploitation by controlling our physical/psychological agencies?
Date
Saturday, March 10, 2018
Time
7:00 - 9:30pm
Place
SFU Harbour Centre Terasen Cinema
515 West Hasting Street
Vancouver
Please register here.
Host
- SFU David See-chai Lam Centre