You can register at our webstie for our two sessions of Kopkind CineSLAM short films. Our opening night is in Brattleboro on June 17th at 7pm and our second session is in the barn in Guilford. More information at the CineSLAM site on films and events surrounding the festival. This year we have created a special package for those coming out of town with the Latchis Hotel and you can get their telephone number at the website… so we hope people from far and near will join us for this specail Kopkind event in Vermont! http://www.cineslam.com
Kopkind’s CineSLAM 2011
6 06 2011Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: films, gay film festival, Kopkind, Lesbian Film Festival
Categories : Uncategorized
Kopkind’s Administrators Remarks at Marlboro College Commencement
12 05 2011On Sunday May 15th 2011 John Scagliotti, Kopkind’s Administrator, will be recieving an honorary degree from Marlboro College. Below are his remarks given at the commencement ceremony.
“I’d like to thank President McCulloch-Lovell and Marlboro College for according me this honor. I was pleased to see that Marlboro College was recognizing me not only for my work in film and television but also for my role on behalf of the LGBT and allied community.
I am accepting this honorary degree in the memory of Ron Squires, an eighth-generation Vermonter, a neighbor and friend from my hometown in Guilford, who, as the first openly gay legislator in 1990, led the way to passage of legislation that would stop discrimination in the workplace and housing for gay and lesbian Vermonters. It was pioneering work, as Vermont became only the sixth state in the nation at the time to pass such civil rights legislation.
Ron died from complications of AIDS early in his life, at 41, right after winning his first re-election campaign. Ron’s work inspired many of us, including his mother, Shirley. Each May she has participated in the Brattleboro AIDS Walk in honor of her son. She walks again for the 19th time next Saturday. Over these past years, she has raised close to $200,000 for the AIDS Project of Southern Vermont.
The struggle for human rights has been hard fought, and my presence here is an indication of how far it has brought us. An old-timer from the black struggle in the South likes to say, “You can learn about history, you can read history, but when you’ve lived history, you can talk about it.” I guess I’ve done all three–and I could tell you stories–but, in the end, what’s driven me is the belief that if we really want a world fit to live in, if we have any hope of a just society in the future, we need to know our history of struggle, and we need to be vigilant in preserving it. For all our sakes, I hope the students graduating this year never stop learning history, and take the chance to live it.
On this important occasion for me, I asked my neighbor, the poet Verandah Porche, to write a few words to end my acknowledgement of the honor you bestow on me today. Verandah writes…
‘When the world hurts
and Death holds court with the patriarchs, in the hinterland are
loaves and fishes.
Love throws a pot luck.’Thank you. “
Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: Marlboro College Ron Squires AIDS Project
Categories : Uncategorized
The World Turns at Kopkind Harvest Festival
17 09 2010October 9-10, 2010
Najla Said in “Palestine”
13th Annual Harvest Late Brunch Benefit, featuring
Vijay Prashad on “Trembles in the Tropics”
The theme will be internationalist at the Kopkind Colony’s Harvest Festival this year, on the weekend of October 9 and 10.
On Saturday (Oct 9) evening, Najla Said will perform at the Hooker Dunham Theater in her acclaimed one-woman show, “Palestine.”
On Sunday, events move to The Organ Barn at Guilford, where Vijay Prashad, the award-winning author of The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, will be the featured speaker, following a “late brunch” tapas feast.
Najla Said star of "Palestine"
“Palestine” opened Off-Broadway earlier this year and had an extended run. The play is, by turns, funny and harrowing, a canny, deeply personal, disarmingly political coming-of-age story, written and performed by Najla Said. In “Palestine,” Said, daughter of the eminent scholar and human rights advocate Edward Said (also a member of Kopkind’s honorary board until his death in 2003), engages questions of identity, cultural fluidity, love and suffering from many angles, in many locales, from New York’s Upper West Side to Gaza to Beirut and back. As an actress, Najla Said brings a sense of the absurd even to deadly serious situations, and, in one reviewer’s words, as her “sweetness turns to incredulity … you begin to understand the madness endured in war-torn countries.”
The performance begins at 7 pm, at the Hooker Dunham, 139 Main Street in Brattleboro. Suggested donation is $15 adult, $10 student.
Vijay Prashad will cap the weekend events with a talk titled “Trembles in the Tropics (In which we will consider the projects to end all human pain, and then wonder for ourselves, seeking necessity in the North).” A spirited, original thinker, he is the author of eleven books, including Karma of Brown Folk, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting and Fat Cats and Running Dogs: The Enron Stage of Capitalism. His path-breaking Darker Nations tells the history of the cold war from the perspective of the world’s poor, and limns the life and death of the Third World as an ideological project that had people across the globe “fired up for freedom,” sovereignty and cooperation, and then collapsed under the weight of debt, globalized capital, internal conflict, corruption, militarism and cultural nationalism. His new project, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, will pick up the story from the 1980s to explore why we are in such a morass today, where is the motion, and what the currently amorphous movements for land, water and human rights in every country, on every continent might spell for the future. Prashad was born in Calcutta, educated in India and the US; he directs the International Studies Program at Trinity College in Hartford. He is a contributing editor of Himal South Asia (Kathmandu, Nepal), an editor of Bol (Lahore), a columnist for Frontline (India) and a frequent contributor to CounterPunch, ZNET and a host of others US publications. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Sunday’s events begin with the tapas feast at 2 pm, at 158 Kopkind Road in Guilford; the talk follows in the Organ Barn. Tickets are $35 adult, $25 student.
This will be the 13th annual Harvest Late Brunch benefit for Kopkind and is our only fundraising event of the year.
“Discussions at the retreats this summer revolved around the interconnection of culture, history and politics, and the relationship between personal stories and larger political or historical currents,” Kopkind programming director JoAnn Wypijewski said. “In different registers, Vijay Prashad and Najla Said bring that all together, while drawing our attention in a new direction, to the wider world, on which our fates depend, whether we recognize it or not.”
Reservations for both events can be made by sending a check payable to the non-profit Kopkind, to 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, VT 05301, or e mailing stonewal@sover.net. For directions, people can e mail that address or call 802.254.4859.
Vijay Prashad, speaker at Harvest
Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: Kopkind Progressive, Najla Said, Palestine, Vijay Prashad
Categories : Uncategorized
Movies coming to Kopkind Summer 2010
7 07 2010Sunday, July 18, 7 pm: Organ Barn, Guilford, Movie Night, featuring “Land of Destiny“, a work in progress with Brett Story. A timely and stunning exploration of the conflict between industry and the environment told through the story of a working-class city caught between the prospects of mass joblessness and death from the job, between fear of industrial toxins and the terrible beauty of the industrial landscape. Preceded by a potluck cookout: 5:30 pm (salads, side dishes, desserts; we’ll take care of grilled things) ,
The Kopkind Grasssroots Film Festival:
SPEAKING IN TONGUES with filmmakers Marcia Jamel and Ken Schneider
Friday, Aug 6th, 7 PM at the Hooker-Dunham Theater, Brattleboro, VT. 139 Main Street. Meet Julian, Jason, Kelly, and Durrell. Four typical American kids, with one exception. Their parents put them in a school where, from the first day of kindergarten, their teachers speak mostly Chinese or Spanish.Speaking in Tongues follows these four diverse kids and their families on their journey to become bilingual. Enter their world and ask, today is knowing one language enough? Seating is limited and reservations for this special screening in Brattleboro VT can be made by calling the Hooker-Dunham Reservation line 802-254-9276
STONEWALL UPRISING! with filmmakers Kate Davis and David Heilbroner Saturday, Aug 7th, 7:30 PM at the Organ Barn, Treefrog Farm, Guilford, VT.
“It was the Rosa Parks moment,” says one man. June 28, 1969: NYC police raid a Greenwich Village Mafia-run gay bar, The Stonewall Inn. For the first time, patrons refuse to be led into paddy wagons, setting off a 3-day riot that launches the Gay Rights Movement. Told by Stonewall patrons, reporters and the cop who led the raid, Stonewall Uprising recalls the bad old days when psychoanalysts equated homosexuality with mental illness and advised aversion therapy, and even lobotomies; public service announcements warned youngsters against predatory homosexuals; and police entrapment was rampant. At the height of this oppression, the cops raid Stonewall, triggering nights of pandemonium with tear gas, billy clubs and a small army of tactical police. The rest is history. (Karen Cooper, Director, Film Forum) This American Experience Film will be seen on PBS next year but you can see it August 7th and meet the filmmakers at the Organ Barn in Guilford.
Contact: John Scagliotti for directions to the Organ Barn in Guilford, stonewal@sover.net
Comments : Leave a Comment »
Categories : Uncategorized
Call for Kopkind’s CineSlam Submissions
20 02 2010Please forward our call to interested filmmakers you might know.
Call for submission of shorts
CINESLAM: Vermont’s Pride Film Festival of Shorts
June 18th & 19th, 2010
Sponsored by The Kopkind Colony
http://www.cineslam.com
“[CineSlam]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,”– Andrew Kopkind, 1993 (A Queer Nation)
CineSlam takes place in early summer in Vermont, (think green) — a two day ‘videovapalooza’-of-a-festival — screening rousing shorts in a old barn on a farm in Guilford, Vermont
The CineSlam Festival: Friday Evening (7 pm, June 18th, ) our opening night screening of great shorts in the wonderful Hooker-Dunham Theater and Gallery in Brattleboro, Vermont followed by our annual Pride Dance at the American Legion Hall (yes, you read that right!) at 9pm celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first pride events in 1970.; then the next day (Saturday, June 19th) to the Organ Barn at Tree Frog Farm in Guilford for a full afternoon of three stimulating screening sessions ending with a delicious BBQ and awards ceremony.
Money Prizes include the Chessie Award for Best Short ($750) (last year’s winner was “James” by Connor Clements who was in attendance from Northern Ireland)
See website : http://www.cineslam.com for more information on applying. We have a number of great films already entered and would be very happy to have other filmmakers contact us by sending in their films. (Deadline for entry is May 25th)
Our yearly CineSlam filmmakers’ retreat and seminar for “film slams” will be taking place this year on the high seas during our Kopkind CineSlam benefit cruise on Pride of the Ocean. http://www.prideoftheocean.com May 30th to June 6th. Some great filmmakers of many ages will be joining us and of course their short films will be seen in Vermont in June. The filmmakers retreat has already been booked up (more than 20 filmmakers will be on board.). But we are still looking for films to be screened at the Vermont festival. There will be some travel scholarships to filmmakers to Vermont and a place to stay and some good food to eat. A joyous time to be had by filmmakers and people who love glbt short films.
It’s easy to send your short to CineSlam! Just take a look at our festival entry site and then send John Scagliotti (our program director) a DVD copy to:
Kopkind CineSlam, 158 Kopkind Road, Guilford, VT 05301
Underwritten by a grant from the Chessie Foundation
Programmed by John Scagliotti, creator of the first glbt TV series on PBS, In the Life. Producer of Before Stonewall and After Stonewall, Programmer of the VT Bear Film Festival, Administrator, Kopkind Colony: Email: stonewal@sover.net
Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: gay film festival
Categories : Uncategorized
Kopkind’s Harvest Fundraising Events
18 09 2009Orgasm, Inc to have Brattleboro premiere
Presented by The Kopkind Colony
Hooker-Dunham Theater and Gallery
Friday, October 9th, 7pm
139 Main Street, Brattleboro, VT
Patricia Williams, will speak at the Organ Barn
For Kopkind’s Harvest Late Brunch (Tapas Feast)
Sunday, October 11, 2pm
158 Kopkind Rd, Guilford, VT
“A sexy feature-length indictment of big pharma” that gives “a lot of great laughs.”
-The Toronto Star
The Kopkind Colony begins its Harvest Events for Columbus Day Weekend with this year’s film hit from Hot Docs in Toronto, Orgasm, Inc by Vermont filmmaker Liz Canner. The Brattleboro premiere will be screened Friday, October 9th at the Hooker-Dunham Theater at 7pm.
Orgasm, Inc delves into designer vaginas and other true-life tales of the commodification of women’s pleasure centers. This humorous, infuriating, informative documentary explores the corporate greed and outright quackery that women confront in a quest for beauty and sexual pleasure. Over the past decade, the media, in bed with the pharmaceutical industry, have been promoting the idea that 43 percent of US women suffer from “female sexual dysfunction.” Is this a real disease or a fiction in a marketing campaign created by money-hungry companies? With unique access to corporate hacks and flaks, Canner answers that question as she follows medical hucksters peddling dicey “treatments” and drug companies in their race to be the first to win FDA approval for their pill, cream, patch or nose spray intended to help women reach sexual nirvana. Reservations for the film ($10/tkt) can be made by calling 802-254-9276 at the Hooker-Dunham
Also that weekend on Sunday, October 11th at 2pm Kopkind will have its 12th annual Harvest Late Brunch, a Tapas Feast, followed by an important talk entitled “Alien Nation: The Peculiar Politics of Obamatime” by Nation columnist Patricia Williams. Williams, a professor of law at Columbia University, is the author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights and a recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant. The Tapas feast and talk take place at the Organ Barn at Treefrog Farm in Guilford, Vermont. Reservations for this benefit event are suggested. The price for the Brunch/Talk is $35 but we have a student price of $25 as well as for those who haven’t yet felt the stimulus.
The screening and the brunch are benefits for The Kopkind Colony, which is a living memorial to the great journalist and Guilford resident Andrew Kopkind, who tracked politics and culture for thirty years for publications from Hard Times to The New York Times, The Nation to Esquire, until his death in 1994. The project, which held its first summer session in 1999, puts on seminars and workshops for its resident participants, and free events for the public. Please contact Kopkind Administrator John Scagliotti for reservations and directions at 802.254.4859, or stonewal@sover.net.
Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: Kopkind Progressive
Categories : Uncategorized
Kopkind GrassRoots Film Festival Aug 6-8
3 08 2009Polis Is This: Charles Olson and the Persistence of Place, a film described by the great novelist Jim Harrison as “sublime…simply stunning,” will open Kopkind’s Fourth Annual Grassroots Film Festival this year, a free film series from August 6 through 8, beginning at the Hooker Dunham Theater in downtown Brattleboro and continuing on at the Organ Barn at Tree Frog Farm in Guilford.
Charles Olson, the “big fire source” for a restless generation of poets known as The Beats, believed that “human beings must rediscover the earth or leave it.” He lived in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and this gorgeous film, by Henry Ferrini, explores both Olson’s poetry and his world, where the ordinary landscapes of daily life become extraordinary portals to truths about the places in which we live. As Olson brought Gloucester alive in poetry, he also fought a losing battle with so-called development, as bulldozers rumbled through Main Street and dynamite brought down Gloucester’s historic buildings. The film, itself a work of poetry in motion, includes performances by John Malkovich, Robert Creeley, Amiri Baraka, Pete Seeger, the Miami Dolphins and many others. The Boston Phoenix declared it “the best film about an American poet ever made.” Director Ferrini will be on hand on Thursday, August 6, for a discussion following the 7 PM screening at the Hooker Dunham, 139 Main Street in Brattleboro. Seating is limited; reservations may be made by calling the theater at (802) 254.9276.
Friday night, August 7, the film festival will move to the Organ Barn in Guilford, with a showing of Straightlaced, by Academy Award‐winning filmmaker Debra Chasnoff. Featuring unscripted, surprisingly candid and entertaining dialogue of high school students from around the country, the documentary explores the effects of gender roles and homophobia on today’s youth. From girls who dumb-down so as not to intimidate boys, to boys who are hypersexual just to prove they aren’t gay, to nonconforming teens who face relentless bullying, the students demonstrate how gender expectations have an unhealthy and often dangerous impact on their lives. Director Chasnoff will also be on hand for a discussion following the 7 PM screening at the Organ Barn, 158 Kopkind Road in Guilford.
The festival will conclude on Saturday, August 8, with a special sneak preview of a work-in-progress by Vermont filmmaker Liz Canner on designer vaginas and other true-life tales of the commodification of women’s pleasure centers. This humorous, infuriating, informative documentary explores the corporate greed and outright quackery that women confront in a quest for beauty and sexual pleasure. Over the past decade, the media, in bed with the pharmaceutical industry, have been promoting the idea that 43 percent of US women suffer from “female sexual dysfunction.” Is this a real disease or a fiction in a marketing campaign created by money-hungry companies? With unique access to corporate hacks and flaks, Canner answers that question as she follows medical hucksters peddling dicey “treatments” and drug companies in their race to be the first to win FDA approval for their pill, cream, patch or nose spray intended to help women reach sexual nirvana. The film will also be shown at the Organ Barn at 7 PM, and director Canner will join us afterward for questions.
This is the tenth anniversary for the Kopkind Colony, a living memorial to the great journalist and Guilford resident Andrew Kopkind, who tracked politics and culture for thirty years for publications from Hard Times to The New York Times, The Nation to Esquire, until his death in 1994. The project, which held its first summer session in 1999, puts on seminars and workshops for its resident participants, and free events for the public. The film festival concludes Kopkind’s third session this year, a workshop/retreat for documentary filmmakers put on jointly with the Center for Independent Documentary.
For information or directions: 802.254.4859, or stonewal@sover.net.
Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: beat poet, films, women's sexuality
Categories : Uncategorized
CineSLAM 2009
20 06 2009This year’s 4th annual Gay Film Festival in southern Vermont has expanded to two events, with an opening night in Brattleboro at the Hooker-Dunham (139 Main Street) and a full Saturday afternoon of shorts at the Organ Barn in Guilford. Sponsored by The Kopkind Colony and scheduled to screen in both Brattleboro and Guilford, the festival marks the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which is considered the beginning of the modern day Gay Movement. CineSlam is programmed by local Emmy-Award winning filmmaker, John Scagliotti, who has a number of films coming to CineSlam from around the country and this year many outside of the United States.
Scagliotti said, “On this 40th anniversary of Stonewall we hope to show the variety and depth of the glbt community in terms of filmmaking from around the globe. The gay film festival circuit is now very much an international fixation and there are presently more than two hundred glbt film festivals attracting more than 2 million people into theaters in all industrial countries as well as many now in developing countries like Lebanon.
Scaglioitti added, “ I was pleasantly surprised to be asked to have one of my films in the first gay festival in an Arab country a few years back. We in southern Vermont are really excited to be part of this global phenomenon.”
Friday’s “Opening Night” at the Hooker Dunham theater (7pm) will include international films like “James” by Northern Irish filmmaker Connor Clements having just arrived from showing his film at the San Francisco Film Festival. In Clements’ film, the main character, James, is a young man struggling as an outsider and is surprised by his favorite teacher’s response when he tells him he is gay. Also that evening CineSlam presents a excerpt from the new feature film City of Borders about Jerusalem’s only gay bar. Last year as a short it won the festival’s Chessie Award (best short) and then director Yun Suh went on to make it into a feature film which just won the prestigious Teddy Award at the international Berlin Film Festival. The evening ends with “Gay Penguins,” an animated short by New Yorker cartoonist Arnie Levin who will be in attendance for the festival. After the opening night films there will be a Pride Dance at the American Legion Hall in Brattleboro. (9 pm).
The next day, Saturday, Jan 27th the Kopkind Colony moves the festival to Guilford’s Organ Barn for three sessions of cutting edge short films (starting at 1pm ) followed by a delicious BBQ. The second session of films that day is a collaboration with the Out in Connecticut Film Festival and their program director, Shane Engstrom, will show some of his favorites from last month’s Hartford festival including Kali Ma. This light hearted film about a tough reality (gay bashing) shows the audience what a suburban Indian mother can do when she finds out her son is the victim of a vicious bully, and she delivers her own brand of vigilante justice. Starring popular Bollywood star Kamini Khanna (Monsoon Wedding), “Kali Ma” plunges us into a battle of mythic proportions, where we discover the secrets that divide mothers and sons and the love that binds them together.
Other international films will include Celestial Brides. Here filmmaker Parthiban Shanmugam takes his camera to explore the world of eunuchs (hijras) in India. Richard Davis, just back from Lima, Peru, films a determined group of glbt folks as they go about building a new community center in that capital city. Not everything is from overseas as Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson will also present a fun look at the Transgender March in San Francisco and Burlington, Vermont Filmmaker Alisan Segar’s and I am me provides the audience an intimate look at the relationship of a lesbian mother and her adopted Ethiopian son. There will also be a historical journey back to the “Harlem Renaissance” as filmmaker Robert Phillipson “Takes the Gay Train” into that creative community during the 1930’s.
The festival will have a number of filmmakers in attendance. Besides Levin and Clements, CineSlam will introduce filmmakers from Brooklyn, Atlanta, and Los Angeles to the audience. The BBQ following the Organ Barn sessions will give the audience plenty of time to talk with the visiting filmmakers about their films.
This year many of the CineSlam filmmakers will have the opportunity to win the Chessie Award which will be announced at the BBQ. The winner of the Best Short, named after the Chessie Foundation, which is financially supporting the festival, will receive a cash prize of $750 and an invitation (expenses paid) to present their winning film on Pride of the Ocean Film Festival (sailing out of New York May 30, 2010 http://www.prideoftheocean.com for seven days of films screenings and ocean cruising) .
There is limited seating at both the Hooker Dunham and the Organ Barn in Guilford, so it is advised to make reservations. Both CineSlam film events call for separate reservations. For Opening Night (June 26th, 7pm) at the Hooker Dunham one can call 802-254-9247 ($6 tkt) and to make reservations for the Organ Barn day (Sat. June 27th 1pm to 6pm) of three film sessions plus a BBQ ($10 tkt) one should either go the website (www.cineslam.com) where all the films are listed and make a reservation or by contacting John Scagliotti at stonewal@sover.net Once a reservation is made directions to the Organ Barn in Guilford will be sent via the email or call John Scagliotti at 802-254-4859.
The Kopkind Colony, a nonprofit project based in Guilford, VT, which brings together political journalists and activists, was launched eleven years ago as a living memorial to the late Guilford resident and journalist Andrew Kopkind. The Kopkind Colony organizes seminars for its resident participants and hosts a number of free public events. Next month on Sunday, July 19th, Kopkind will present in the Organ Barn the new film William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe, by his filmmaker daughters, Emily and Sarah Kunstler, which just won raves at The Sundance Film Festival.
John Scagliotti, creator of In the Life.
Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: GLBT LGBT gay lesbian transgender short film festival
Categories : Uncategorized
Kopkind Colony 