Justice Forum

FREE THE MIND
Phie Ambo, Denmark, 2012
Saturday May 4, 2013 | 2:00PM |
VIFF’s Vancity Theatre

Featured Speakers

MATT DIXON is a 2nd year Ph.D student studying cognitive neuroscience at UBC. His research uses behavioural and neuroimaging methods to examine the factors that allow people to be reflective and intentional with their behaviour, rather than creatures of habit. Work from Matt's lab at UBC and other labs has demonstrated that meditation can enhance some of the most uniquely human abilities, such as self-awareness and the capacity to regulate emotions. Meditation has also proved to be associated with changes in the structure and function of many brain areas including the prefrontal cortex. A practitioner of meditation himself for over 11 years, Matt has experienced first-hand the practical benefits of learning to still the mind and live in the present moment.

MARCY JACKSON is one of the founding directors and a senior teacher for the Art of Living Foundation Canada, a non-profit, educational and humanitarian organization founded in 1981 and now with a presence in over 150 countries. AOLF offers numerous educational and self-development programs as well as humanitarian projects and service initiatives. As a teacher for AOLF, Marcy has for over 20 years been involved in offering practical tools and experiential processes incorporating meditation, yoga and breathing techniques to manage emotions, eliminate stress, improve and expand awareness and be in the present moment. Her work with at-risk communities, adolescents, prisoners and returning veterans has taken her to many countries including India and Indonesia, to Australia, Europe and across North America.

FIRE IN THE BLOOD
Dylan Mohan Gray, India, 2012
Sunday May 5, 2013 | 2:30PM |
Rio Theatre

Featured Speakers

JON MONG is a second year medical student at the University of British Columbia, the first Canadian university to adopt Global Access Licensing Principles. He is the co-chair of the UBC Chapter of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), an international coalition of students, researchers, and community activists dedicated towards ensuring equitable access to medicines to people throughout the world, regardless of income or geographic location. Recently, UBC-UAEM advocated for the Canadian government to pass Bill C-398, the Canadian Access to Medicines Regime Reform Bill, a measure that would have decreased the cost of medications for use in the global south. In the future, the organization plans to advocate for changes to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that in its current state would have severe consequences on drug prices both in Canada and internationally.

PATIENCE THEMBIE is the Chair of the Afro-Canadian Positive Network, a charitable organization that provides support to all people of African origin who are infected/affected by HIV/AIDS, regardless of race or ethnicity. As a peer supporter, Patience assists Afro Canadians with their needs and works towards reducing the stigma of HIV while making change in her community. A mother of three, she came to Canada from Zimbabwe in 2007, at around the same time she was diagnosed with HIV. A difficult transition to life in her new country was made easier by joining the Positive Women's Network, where she signed up for training, conferences and workshops and finally accepted her status. Patience now shares her story as part of her healing. She says: "I now know that life is precious and I'm grateful. I take pleasure in simple things. I'm counting my blessings each and every day."

THE HUMAN SCALE
Andreas M. Dalsgaard, Denmark, 2012
Sunday May 5, 2013 | 5:45PM |
The Cinematheque

Featured Speakers

ANDREW PASK is the founder and director of the Vancouver Public Space Network (VPSN), a non-profit organization that has been championing the importance of good public space since 2006. The VPSN works on advocacy, education and outreach relating to the city's public realm — and does so by mixing more conventional forms of change-making with creative interventions in city space. By using public space as a unifying theme, the VPSN has been able to work on everything from the development of community gardens, to creating internationally recognized design competitions, from mapping all the non-compliant billboards in the city, to throwing skytrain parties, public policy debates, and community development workshops. Andrew was trained as both an anthropologist and city planner, studying in Holland and Canada. He has worked with municipalities and non-profit organizations across the country. Currently, he is a neighbourhood planner with the City of Vancouver.

SAM SULLIVAN served as Mayor of Vancouver from 2006 to 2009, was a Vancouver City Councillor from 1993 to 2005, and is a recipient of the Order of Canada. During his time on Council he participated in the development of the new high density neighbourhoods in and around downtown Vancouver. As Mayor, his major policy platform was the EcoDensity Initiative which garnered the highest award from the Canadian Institute of Planners for City Planning in 2009. Sam is an Adjunct Professor at the UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and organized the 2012 Vancouver Urban Forum which featured 23 urban thinkers from around North America speaking to the theme of "Achieving Urban Densification." He is the founder of the speaker series 'Sam Sullivan's Public Salons' and its weekly half-hour Public Salon Television on Shaw TV, and is currently a candidate for MLA in Vancouver False Creek for the BC Liberal Party.
 

MY BROOKLYN
Kelly Anderson and Allison Lirish Dean, USA, 2012
Monday May 6, 2013 | 6:00PM |
The Cinematheque

Featured Speakers

MARK BRAND is one of Vancouver’s most recognized entrepreneurs. After opening his first restaurant, Boneta, in 2007, he went on to open an independent clothing label and storefront called ‘Sharks + Hammers,' followed by The Diamond tapas restaurant and lounge, Seamonstr Sushi, Catalog Art Gallery, PortSide Pub and lastly, his largest undertaking to date, Save on Meats. Founded in 1957, Save on Meats has been a Vancouver landmark since it opened, serving the local community with a butcher shop and lunch counter. After closing down, Mark Brand resurrected the Save on Meats enterprise. Brand carried with him a vision to restore the building back to its prime for all Vancouver residents, and to be committed to it being a true social enterprise by working with partners to create a sustainable business model that serves the community. Mark has since been invited to share his message of social enterprise at numerous conferences and universities in North America, as well as world-renowned events such as TED Talks.

GENA THOMPSON came to Vancouver from Toronto in 1999 and has been living in the Downtown Eastside since 2001. She became involved in the Carnegie Community Centre Association (CCCA) in 2002, as the organization was preparing to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the building's construction at Main and Hastings. Today, Gena is the President of the Board of Directors of the CCCA, a 5000 member grassroots organization that supports programs at the Carnegie Community Centre and works to give voice to low-income Downtown Eastside residents. She is also a singer, actor, poet and photographer. Since 2005, when she bought her first digital camera, Gena's work as a photographer has been documenting the changing face of the Downtown Eastside and the social change movements that characterize it. Her photographs have appeared in The Tyee, as well as in various blogs.

Filmmakers Kelly Anderson and Allison Lirish Dean will also participate in the panel discussion.

KELLY ANDERSON, recently completed Never Enough, a documentary about clutter, collecting and Americans’ relationship with their material possessions, which won an award for Artistic Excellence at the Big Sky Documentary Festival. Her other work includes Every Mother’s Son (with Tami Gold), about three mothers whose children were killed by police and who became advocates for police reform, which won the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival and aired on P.O.V. Anderson and Gold also made Out At Work, which was at the Sundance Film Festival and aired on HBO.

ALLISON LIRISH DEAN (Producer, Original Research) has covered arts, culture, and urban planning and policy issues for public radio, and for publications such as The Next American City, The Huffington Post, The Brooklyn Rail, and Gotham Gazette. Her film production credits include Someplace Like Home (2008), an award-winning video for Brooklyn-based community organization FUREE. My Brooklyn grew in part out of extensive ethnographic research Allison conducted about the Fulton Mall as part of a study led by the Pratt Center for Community Development.

ANNE BRADEN: SOUTHERN PATRIOT
Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering, USA, 2012
Tuesday May 7, 2013 | 6:00PM |
The Cinematheque

Featured Speakers

JACK O'DELL is a legendary civil rights activist, strategist and organizer with a lifetime of experience in the U.S. civil rights, anti-poverty and peace movements of the 20th century. His career spans the National Maritime Union in the 1940s, the underground left in the South in the 1950s (where he met and collaborated with Anne Braden), Freedomways Magazine and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (where he worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr.) in the 1960s, and the Rainbow/PUSH campaigns of the 1970s and 80s. In the early 1960s, Jack held a leadership position in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Determined to sabotage the civil rights movement, former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover used O'Dell's prior Communist Party membership to force him to step down. Since retiring to Vancouver with his wife Jane Power in the 1990s, the now 89-year-old O'Dell has focused on speaking with young activists and passing on his knowledge to a new generation.

Filmmaker Anne Lewis will also participate in the panel discussion.

Since 1970, ANNE LEWIS has been making documentary films (always with limited resources) that create opportunity for social change. Her award-winning work with Appalshop, a media arts center in eastern Kentucky, includes Morristown: in the air and sun, a working class response to globalization in eastern Tennessee, Ciudad Juarez, and Guanajuato; Shelter, about the institutional response to domestic violence; To Save the Land and People and On Our Own Land, about citizens’ movements to abolish strip mining; Justice in the Coalfields, about the UMWA strike against Pittston and what justice means to workers; Belinda, about an AIDS activist who fought against homophobia; and Fast Food Women, about the working poor. Anne's intent is to create meaningful work, tell the truth about working class Americans, and contribute to the vitality of independent filmmaking. She is a proud member of Local 6186 CWA-NABET and the Texas State Employees Union, and is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas–Austin.

WE ARE WISCONSIN
Amie Williams, USA, 2012
Wednesday May 8, 2013 | 6:00PM |
VIFF’s Vancity Theatre

Featured Speakers

HOLLY PAGE has over two decades of experience as a campaign organizer. She has extensive knowledge organizing events and outreach, and of employee rights, human rights and the federal and provincial labour codes. Holly currently works as the Aboriginal Liaison and Equity and Human Rights Officer for the Research and Campaigns Department of the B.C. Government and Service Employees' Union (BCGEU). Her responsibilities include building campaigns, organizing rallies and coordinating community outreach. In the winter of 2011, Holly was dispatched to Madison, Wisconsin, where she worked with American activists organizing a rally of 100,000 to begin collecting signatures to recall Republican senators and later, Governor Scott Walker. In June 2012, Holly attended the recall vote for Governor Walker and worked with a host of trade unions building election campaigns.

HEATHER HETTIARACHCHI is a labour and employment lawyer with a unique combination of legal expertise and extensive hands-on labour relations experience. Currently, she is an associate with the Labour & Employment and Higher Learning Practice Groups at Clark Wilson LLP, a law firm in Vancouver. Her practice focuses on all aspects of employment and labour law, as well as human resource management issues. Heather articled with a leading labour and employment boutique firm in Vancouver, and prior to joining Clark Wilson, was an associate in the labour and employment group of an eminent national firm. While at university, Heather was actively involved in collective bargaining with CUPE and gained considerable experience in job evaluation, job classification and compensation, return to work issues, and health and safety. She has taught labour law as a Visiting Lecturer at the Faculty of Law University of Colombo and the Open University of Sri Lanka.
 

NO BURQAS BEHIND BARS
Nima Sarvestani, Sweden, 2012
Friday May 10, 2013 | 6:00PM |
VIFF’s Vancity Theatre

Featured Speakers

MO KORCHINSKI is involved in prison health research with The Collaborating Centre for Prison Health and Education at UBC, and is the project administrator for the Unlocking the Gates to Health project, a peer mentor program that assists women in the first 72 hours upon being released from prison. Mo is also a member of Women in2 Healing, a network that seeks to improve the physical, emotional, social and physical healing of women inside and outside of prison. Mo has a long history of substance abuse and incarceration. She is seven years clean and sober and has been out of the prison system for six years. She is currently a full time student at the Nicola Valley Institute of Technology, working towards a Bachelor’s Degree in Social Work, and is a painter, writer, photographer and filmmaker.

EVA SAJOO is a Research Associate with Simon Fraser University's Centre for the Comparative Study of Muslim Societies and Cultures. Her writing has focused on women in Afghanistan, particularly issues of education and inequality. She has published work on gender, development, and education in Muslim societies, most recently a chapter on gender and identity in "A Companion to Muslim Cultures" (I.B. Tauris, 2011). Her research on Afghanistan won first place in a 2010 competition sponsored by the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (Geneva). Eva is also a member of Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan, a non-religious, non-political, federally registered charity whose aims are to advance education and educational opportunities for Afghan women and their families and to educate Canadians about human rights in Afghanistan.

GOD LOVES UGANDA
Roger Ross Williams, USA, 2013
Saturday May 11, 2013 | 12:00PM |
VIFF’s Vancity Theatre

Featured Speaker

DR JOHN STACKHOUSE, JR currently serves as the Sangwoo Youtong Chee Professor of Theology and Culture at Regent College at the University of British Columbia. He draws on history, sociology, theology, and philosophy to explore the intersection of Christian faith and contemporary culture in North America and beyond. Dr. Stackhouse is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World. He is the editor of four books of academic theology, and the author of more than 500 articles, reviews, and book chapters in scholarly and popular publications. Dr. Stackhouse's commentary has been featured by most major North American TV networks (including ABC, NBC, PBS, CBC, CTV, and Global), by dozens of radio stations, and by print media as diverse as The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, The Atlantic Monthly, Reader’s Digest and Time Magazine.

Filmmaker Roger Ross Williams will also participate in the panel discussion.

ROGER ROSS WILLIAMS directed and produced Music by Prudence, winner of the 2010 Academy Award® for documentary short subject. He is the first African American to win an Oscar® for directing and producing a film. He has produced and directed dozens of hours of non-fiction programming for major television networks and cable channels. Williams has won numerous awards for his work. Currently Williams has several projects in development, including a feature narrative film about the African American Baptist church titled Black Sheep.

SOFIA'S LAST AMBULANCE
Ilian Metev, Bulgaria, 2012
Saturday May 11, 2013 | 4:30PM |
The Cinematheque

Featured Speaker

LYNN KLEIN began his career in Emergency Medical Services in 1966, working in the Alberta “Oil Patch.” In 1967, he accepted a position with Starr’s Ambulance Service in Calgary, and in 1970 moved to Victoria to continue his career with another private ambulance service, Garden City Ambulance. In 1973, Lynn's co-authored report on ambulance services commissioned by the Dr. Richard Foulks Health Security Programme Project would set the stage for Canada’s first, and only, provincial owned, and operated ambulance service. In 1974, Lynn was hired into the British Columbia Ambulance Service (BCAS), where he remained for a 38-year career. He served as a field paramedic, superintendent of media and public relations, and in the Vancouver Island Communications Centre as one of the communications officers. Lynn retired from the BCAS in 2012, and is a recipient of the national EMS Exemplary Service Medal with a 30- and 40-year recognition bar. He has presented at local, national, and international EMS conferences, and now serves as the historian of the BCAS. 

WHEN BUBBLES BURST
Hans Petter Moland, Norway, 2012
Sunday May 12, 2013 | 12:00PM |
VIFF’s Vancity Theatre

Featured Speakers

MIKE LEWIS is well known in Canada and internationally as a practitioner, author, educator, and leader in the field of Community Economic Development and the social economy. His experience cuts across the full range of functions connected to community renewal and development. He has built and advised a wide range of businesses, organizations and governments all over Canada and internationally. An innovator, activist and thinker with a penchant for linking practice with policy and the micro and macro, Mike is currently the Managing Director of the non‐profit Canadian Center for Community Renewal, an organization working with communities to increase their self-reliance and resilience, especially their capacity to equitably meet their needs for food, energy, finance, and shelter. Recently, Mike was also a member of Mayor Gregor Robertson’s 'Task Force on Housing Affordability,' which released its final report in September, 2012.

DR. TSUR SOMERVILLE is an associate professor, Director of the UBC Centre for Urban Economics and Real Estate, and holder of the Real Estate Foundation Professorship in Real Estate Finance at the Sauder School of Business at UBC. His primary areas of research are housing markets, Canadian mortgage markets, and real estate development. He has published in all of the leading journals in urban economics and real estate and served on the boards of the top academic organizations and on multiple academic journal editorial boards in these fields. In addition to his academic research, Dr. Somerville is a frequent commentator in the local and national media on housing markets. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and his BA from the Hebrew University (Israel) in Economics and East Asian Studies, and has been at UBC since 1993.