Event Details

A Special Daylong Film Festival in Honor of International Women’s Day

Free Admission to both films. Special 10% lunch discounts are available at area restaurants with your BIFF ticket stub. To receive your discount, please present your ticket stub before ordering at the following participating restaurants: Aroma, Baba Louie, Bizen, Fuel, Great Barrington Bagel Company, Martin’s, Neighborhood Diner, and Rubiner’s Cafe.

Co-sponsored by the Berkshire International Film Festival (BIFF), and the Berkshire Human Rights Speaker Series.

In the morning:
BIFF Screening of SARABAH, a new documentary film by Maria Luisa Gambale, Gloria Bremer and Steven Lawrence (Women Make Movies, 2011; 60 min.).

Triplex Theater, Great Barrington, 11 a.m.

Rapper, singer, and activist Sister Fa is a hero to young women in Senegal and an unstoppable force for social change. A childhood victim of female genital cutting (FGC), she decided to tackle the issue by starting a grassroots campaign against the practice. SARABAH follows Sister Fa back home to her own village, where she speaks out passionately to female elders and students alike, and stages a rousing concert that has the community on its feet.

In the afternoon:
Screening of GRANITO: How to Nail a Dictator (Skylight Pictures, 2011, 103 min.)Followed by a discussion with Director Pamela Yates

McConnell Theater, Daniel Arts Center, Bard College at Simon’s Rock, 2-4 p.m.

In the early 1980’s, while working on her first documentary film, When the Mountains Tremble, director Pamela Yates filmed the only known footage of the Guatemalan Army carrying out mass killings of the indigenous Mayan people. Twenty-five years later, her footage was used as forensic evidence at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, in a crimes-against-humanity case against former Guatemalan military dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt. Hailed as a compelling political thriller set in Guatemala and The Hague, Granito is the winner of numerous human rights and film awards, including Best Creative Documentary at the 2011 Paris Film Festival. After the screening, Pamela Yates will talk with the audience about her experience as a human rights activist-through-the-arts for more than a quarter-century, and her vision for the future of arts-based activism in the 21st century.

For more information about the Festival: http://berkshirewomenwriters.org/

Major funding for the 2012 Berkshire Festival of Women Writers is provided by the local cultural councils of the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, including the towns of Alford-Egremont, Dalton, Great Barrington, Monterey, Mt. Washington, New Marlborough, Pittsfield, Richmond, Stockbridge, Washington and West Stockbridge.