Kopkind Colony

Presenting Two New Films, free admission

Love and Other Anxieties at the Hooker Dunham, Brattleboro August 10^th  7:30pm

White: A Memoir in Color at the Organ Barn, Guilford, August 11th  7:30pm

Filmmakers in attendance to take your questions.

{The festival is collaboration with the Center for Independent Documentary which is located in Boston.}

The Festival opens with a screening of Lyda Kuth’s Love and Other Anxieties at the Hooker Dunham Theater at 139 Main Street in Brattleboro on Friday night, August 10th at 7:30pm. In this year’s festival Kopkind focuses on the personal while not excluding the political. Susi Walsh, who runs the Center for Independent Documentary and co-programmer of the Kopkind/CID festival and retreat with John Scagliotti, has encouraged many of the filmmakers who have attended the Guilford seminars to take the time to look inward.  Susi explains, “It is this self-exploration that allows the filmmaker to connect in a deeper way with the political forces swirling around them.  This intimate process helps many of us, the viewer and the filmmaker, make some sense of the given realities of politics on our lives that we face every day.”

Faced with the realty that her only child will flee the nest for college, film-funder turned filmmaker Lyda Kuth gets anxious not only about how her daughter will fare in today’s world of love and romance, but also about her relationship with her husband of 20 years.  What will life be like after her daughter leaves?  What is the real meaning of love, marriage, and long-term commitment? She queries non-experts and experts alike, such as indie filmmaker Josh Safdie, playwright and musician Kyle Jarro, author and scholar Stephanie Coontz, about their successes and failures of the heart.  Love and Anxieties, a midlife story,  is both personal and poetic.  With the help of editor/co-writer Lucia Small (filmmaker of “My Father the Genius” and “The Axe in the Attic”),  Kuth has crafted a meditative documentary that is poignantly intimate yet surprisingly universal.   Lyda Kuth will be at the theater to take questions after the screening.

Lyda Kuth’s Wedding Day

The next evening, August 11^th at 7:30pm  Kopkind opens up the Organ Barn in Guilford to the public again for a free screening of White: A Memoir in Color. In this deeply personal and emotional exploration of racial identity, director Joel Katz (“Strange Fruit” 2003) shares his family’s journey of immigration, assimilation, liberal idealism, bitter disillusionment and ultimately, reconciliation.   The son of white Jewish, immigrant parents who assimilated in 1930s Brooklyn, Katz’s father became a professor at Howard University. As a white Jew working at the nation’s preeminent African-American college during the turbulent civil rights era, he went through a range of difficult experiences and emotions. Katz himself became a professor at a predominantly non-white university, and later confronted his own racial attitudes as the adoptive parent to a mixed-race child of Irish-Italian and African-American descent. Highly engaging and thought-provoking, White: A Memoir in Color packs a powerful punch as it exposes intricate dimensions to race and prejudice in the melting pot of American society.  Joel Katz will be in the Organ Barn to take questions about the film following the screening.

Kopkind is a living memorial to the late Guilford resident and journalist Andrew Kopkind, who tracked politics and culture for thirty years for publications from Hard Times to The New York Times, The Nation to Esquire. The project puts on seminars for its summer participants and free events like this Film Festival for the public.  The theme of the seminars during the week with filmmakers is about diversity and filmmaking.  The seminars are co-sponsored by the Center for Independent Documentary.

For information or directions to the Organ Barn in Guilford, call John Scagliotti: 802.254.4859, , or  email stonewal@sover.net  All the screenings are free and donations to Kopkind are welcome.

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Website for “Love and Other Anxieties” http://www.loveandotheranxieties.com/press-kit/

Website for “White: A Memoir in Color”  http://www.ajff.org/film/white-memoir-color

Kopkind Website: www.kopkind.org

Speaker’s Night

with Robert Pollin, on:

Life vs. Austerity

Friday, July 27   The Organ Barn, 7:30 pm

Please join us for a talk and discussion with Robert Pollin, a brilliant radical economist, founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at UMass, Amherst, longtime activist analyst of the perils of casino capitalism, and author, most recently, of Back to Full Employment. Pollin, who has recently been advising the economics team of Syriza, the left party in Greece, will speak on Life vs. Austerity.

 As Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, has said, “Pollin lights the way forward with a roadmap for a sustainable economy for generations to come and poses the burning question, ‘If not now, when?’  As a writer and speaker, he is intelligent, inspirational, and—a rarity among economists—accessible for all those seeking passage out of the ‘austerity trap’ delusion.”

Before the Talk, Bob will say some words about his long time friend Alexander Cockburn.

Alex Cockburn, Treefrog Farm, 1984

For more information or directions, contact 802.254.4859, stonewal@sover.net or jwyp@earthlink.net.

For our friends in the Southern Vermont area, where Alexander once lived with Andy, John and Katherine Kilgore  at Treefrog, we will be joining together for an impromtu remembrance around the Organ Barn in Guilford on Thursday (July 26, 8PM) .  We’ll have coffee, tea and some sweets.   Please feel free to email John (stonewal@sover.net) if you need directions to the Organ Barn.  JoAnn says it will be a Hawaiian “Talk-Story.”

Below is a fun moment at Treefrog presenting to those at the party, the birthday convention ticket for President and Vice President, 1984.

John Scagliotti, Kopkind Administrator

The birthday convention ticket for President and VP, August 1984.
l to r: Andy Kopkind, Katerine Kilgore, Alexander Cockburn, John Scagliotti

To have known Alexander is to have known lots of style surprises… like what to drive across the country.  Can you say “gas guzzler?”  Somehow it all fit.  He talked Andy Kopkind into going down with him to Florida in the summer of 1981 to help him pick up his old Imperial.  They had a great road trip back to the farm.   We posed on the Imperial  with Alexander’s wonderful daughter, Daisy.

l to r: Andy, Daisy Cockburn, Alexander, and John, Treefrog Farm 1981

This week JoAnn Wypijewski and John Scagliotti, friends of Alexander, will be organizing a remembrance.  Stay tune here for details for those who would like to attend.

Meanwhile we will have a few pictures posted here from Alexander’s times here at Treefrog Farm in Vermont.

John Scagliotti, Kopkind Administrator

Alexander Cockburn, July 4th BBQ (1982) Treefrog Farm

still from AMERICAN AUTUMN

“Occupy Kopkind” begins this week in Guilford with OWS

Sunday, July 22 Potluck barbecue 5:30 pm; Screening 7 pm The Organ Barn, 158 Kopkind Rd., Guilford, VT

On Sunday, July 22, the Kopkind Colony will open its summer season with American Autumn, a film that documents the action and articulation of grievances that began in New York City as Occupy Wall Street, spread to cities and towns across the country, and continues in myriad projects under the banner Occupy.

Filmmaker Dennis Trainor, Jr., takes a view of the early months of the Occupy movement from the inside out, from the meeting rooms to the streets, from the encampments to the police lines and beyond. American Autumn follows the people and the actions in New York City, Boston and Washington with a style, an energy and a politics that, as MichaelMoore.com put it, is “radically different from what you’ll see at your local movie theater…. This is a movie with us in it.  I don’t mean our little group of activist friends.  I mean us, the people of this country, our stories, our hardships, our triumphs, our injustices, our tragedies, our humor.”

With an original score by Goldi, of the OWS music Rebel group and the street band Guitarmy, plus additional songs by Mike Lawrence-Yanicelli and the legendary punk band FUGAZI, the film captures the beat of the moment and the movement.  It weaves together the voices of protesters, the vivid action in the streets and interviews with veteran writers and activists including Cornel West, Naomi Klein, Medea Benjamin and many more.

Kopkind’s Movie Night begins on Sunday with a potluck barbecue at 5:30 pm, outside the Organ Barn in Guilford, 158 Kopkind Road. The screening of American Autumn will begin at 7, followed by discussion with Trainor and members of the Occupy movement, who will be in residence for this, Kopkind’s first summer seminar/retreat session of the year.  Contact John Scagliotti, Kopkind Administrator for directions to the Organ Barn in Guilford. stonwal@sover.net

Filmmakers Gone Wild!

“…reaches back to the radical roots of liberation, to the joyously skewed visions of sex, love, culture and camp that lie outside the conventions of the straight world,” A Queer Nation, Andrew Kopkind, 1993

With that defining thought, Kopkind is pleased to be sponsoring CineSLAM, Vermont’s LGBT Shorts Film Festival.  CineSLAM is part of the pride events that take place in June for Southern Vermont.  You can see some some great short films starting Friday, June 30th in Brattleboro VT at 6:15pm (repeated at 8:15pm) at the Hooker Dunham Theater (139 Main Street) ; the next day there are two more sessions of shorts and a community bbq at the Organ Barn in Guilford.   for a list of films and descriptions and to make reservations, go to the CineSLAM site www.cineslam.com

The Center for Independent Documentary and the Kopkind Colony are pleased to announce a call to independent documentary filmmakers who would like to participate in a week long seminar and retreat in southern Vermont. The retreat is limited to nine filmmakers.

It’s very easy to apply. Go to the CID “Invitation to Filmmakers” page at http://documentaries.org/newsevents/kopkind2012/

Class K22, 2011

Sniffing the Zeitgeist has be sent to our supporters via the US Mail. If you are not on our list and would like to be added, email John Scagliotti, Administrator of Kopkind, at stonewal@sover.net. Below is an excerpt from this year’s edition.

From JoAnn Wypijewski, President of Kopkind and columnist (“Carnal Knowledge”) at The Nation, on the road in Iowa:

Class K23, 2011

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