Meet the director following CineCulture screening of ‘Adios Amor – The Search for Maria Moreno’

CineCulture, Events, Media, Communications and Journalism, Video, , , Leave a comment
Adios Amor - The Search for Maria Moreno

May 10: Adios Amor – The Search for Maria Moreno (2017)

  • Discussants: Laurie Coyle (Director/Producer) and Gilbert Padilla (featured interviewee)
  • 50 Minutes, in English and Spanish with subtitles
  • Sponsors: College of Arts and Humanities, Arte Américas, California Humanities, El Concilio de Fresno, Radio Bilingüe, and Valley Public History Initiative

In Adios Amor, the discovery of lost photographs sparks the search for a hero that history forgot — Maria Moreno, a migrant mother driven to speak out by her twelve children’s hunger. Years before Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta launched the United Farm Workers, Maria picked up the only weapon she had—her voice—and became an outspoken leader in an era when women were relegated to the background. The first farm worker woman in the U.S. to be hired as a union organizer, Maria’s story was silenced and her legacy buried—until now. With the search for Maria Moreno, Adios Amor raises provocative questions about whose lives we remember and recognize, while inspiring viewers to launch their own journeys of discovery into the past.

CineCulture is a film series provided as a service to Fresno State campus students, faculty and staff, and the broader community. CineCulture is also offered as a three-unit academic course (MCJ 179) in the Media, Communications and Journalism Department. The CineCulture Club promotes cultural awareness through film and post-screening discussions.

Screenings are held on Fridays at 5:30 p.m. unless otherwise noted* in the Peters Education Center Auditorium (West of Save-Mart Center in the Student Recreation Center Building).

All films screened on campus are free and open to the public. Parking is not enforced after 4 p.m. on Fridays.

Fresno State encourages persons with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you anticipate needing any type of accommodation or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact us in advance to your participation.

Visit the CineCulture website for more information or contact Dr. Mary Husain, instructor and club adviser.

Past Events

May 3: “En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)” (2018)

En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day), a fiction feature from director Jim McKay, follows a group of undocumented immigrants living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn over the course of seven days. Bicycle delivery guys, construction workers, dishwashers, deli workers and cotton candy vendors, they work long hours six days a week and then savor their day of rest on Sundays on the soccer fields of Sunset Park. José, a bicycle delivery worker, is the team’s captain – young, talented, hardworking and responsible. When José’s team makes it to the finals, he and his teammates are thrilled. But his boss throws a wrench into the celebration when he tells José he has to work on Sunday, the day of the finals. If he doesn’t work, his job and his future will be on the line. But if he doesn’t stand up for himself and his teammates, his dignity will be crushed. Shot in the neighborhoods of Sunset Park, Park Slope, and Gowanus, En el Séptimo Día is a humane, sensitive and humorous window into a world rarely seen. The film’s impact is made quietly, with restraint and respect for the individual experiences, everyday challenges and small triumphs of its characters.

*April. 26 (5 p.m.): “The Zookeepers Wife” (2017)

The real-life story of one working wife and mother who became a hero to hundreds during World War II. In 1939 Poland, Antonina Żabińska (portrayed by two-time Academy Award nominee Jessica Chastain) and her husband, Dr. Jan Żabiński (Johan Heldenbergh, a European Film Award nominee for the Academy Award-nominated The
Broken Circle Breakdown), have the Warsaw Zoo flourishing under his stewardship and her care. When their country is invaded by the Germans, Jan and Antonina are stunned and forced to report to the Reich’s newly appointed chief zoologist, Lutz Heck (Golden Globe Award nominee Daniel Brühl of Captain America: Civil War). To fight back on their own terms, the Żabińskis covertly begin working with the Resistance and put into action plans to save lives out of what has become the Warsaw Ghetto, with Antonina putting herself and even her children at great risk.

April 12: “Violeta Al Fin” (2017)

April 5: “Tia and Piujuq” (2018)

Directed by Costa Rican filmmaker Hilda Hidalgo Xirinachs, Violeta Al Fin tells the story of Violeta, a 72-year-old woman, who lives alone in her childhood home in the heart of San Jose, Costa Rica, after divorcing her husband of more than forty years. She tends to her lush tropical garden and makes plans to turn her property into a boarding house. When she discovers the bank is about to take away her house, she decides to fight and breaks all the rules to hold onto her home and her freedom.

Inuk (or Eskimo) throat singer Lucy Tulugarjuk makes her directorial film debut with this lovely tale from Northern Canada. Shot in Montreal, Canada, and the island of Igloolik, in Nunavut, Canada’s newest, largest and northernmost territory, where the director grew up, the film Tia and Piujuq tells the unlikely and burgeoning friendship between two ten-year-old girls. Piujuq is a bored and lonely young Inuk, and Tia, a Syrian refugee whose sad life takes a dramatic turn when she finds a magical portal that transports her to Canada’s Arctic tundra where Piujuq lives. Together, the two girls discover a world of magic and Inuit stories that heal Tia’s spirit and her soul until their blossoming friendship is threatened by a mysterious character. “Through the eyes of these two girls, we perceive the similarities that unite them beyond their linguistic and cultural differences, their affection for each other and also their desire to be free and adventurous.” This charming film is for everyone: adults and children alike who believe in the power of imagination.

March 29: “Yeva” (2017)

  • Discussant: Professor Barlow Der Mugrdechian
  • 94 minutes, in Armenian with English subtitles.
  • Sponsor: Armenian Studies Program

Yeva is a young woman who escapes her influential in-laws with her daughter Nareh, after her husband’s tragic death and takes refuge in one of the villages of Karabakh, Armenia. Yeva is a complete stranger in this village and is obliged to live her daily life in disguise. 94 minutes. In Armenian with English subtitles.

March 22: World Water Day Film: Two Short Films: “Silent River” and “Sea of Troubles”

Silent River trailer

The Santiago River, known locally as “the River of Death,” flows along the outskirts of Guadalajara, Mexico. For forty years, waste from one of Mexico’s largest manufacturing corridors has been dumped into the Santiago. 80% of the companies in the corridor – such as IBM, HP, Coca-Cola, Levi’s, Honda and Nestlé – are American and Japanese. Therefore, this river has become a sewer with over 1000 known chemicals, including dangerously high levels of arsenic, chrome, and lead. Silent River by Jason Jaacks follows a young woman and her family as they defy death threats to try and save one of the most polluted rivers in Mexico.

Sea of Troubles trailer

Over the last three years we witnessed some of the strangest conditions ever seen off the West Coast of the United States. What happens next? Was this just a weird few years, an anomaly in the normal flux of ocean conditions? Or was this a shift that we will look back on, decades from now, and point to as the beginning of a different era? Join an oceanographer and a paleo-climatologist from the Bodega Marine Laboratory on the northern California coast ponder what’s next for the world’s largest ocean.

March 15: “Saint Judy” (2018)

Directed by Sean Hanish, Saint Judy tells the true story of Los Angeles immigration attorney Judy Wood, who single-handedly changed the United States law of asylum and saved countless lives in the process. In a 1994 landmark case, one of her first as an immigration lawyer, Judy Wood represented an Afghan woman who fled her home country after being persecuted by the Taliban for opening a school for girls. After a tenacious battle both in and out of court, Judy’s efforts culminated in arguments before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit where she fought to include women as a protected class. By winning the case, Ms. Wood single-handedly changed the law of asylum nationwide – saving the lives of not only her client, but thousands of other female refugees who would have been sent back to their home countries where they faced certain death.

March 8: “Shalom Bollywood: The Untold Story of Indian Cinema” (2018)  

A celebration of the all-singing, all-dancing history of the world’s largest film industry, Shalom Bollywood reveals the unlikely story of the 2000-year-old Indian Jewish community and its formative place in shaping the world’s largest film industry. At the advent of the Indian cinema industry, it was taboo for Hindu and Muslim women to perform on screen. Indian-Jewish women took upon the female lead roles and continued to do so for decades. Using stage names, the women were obviously not identified as Jewish and were commonly thought to be Christian or Muslim. With access to rare archival footage, Jewish-Australian director Danny Ben-Moshe’s (My Mother’s Lost Children, 2017) new documentary tells this extraordinary tale through the lives of Indian cinema’s Jewish icons at the heart of Bollywood from the turn of the 20th century to the present day.

March 1: “Time for Ilhan” (2018)

On November 8, 2016, a young, hijab-wearing mother-of-three named Ilhan Omar made history, becoming the first Somali Muslim woman to be elected to a state office in America.  She was hailed by the New York Times as, “one of the bright lights in the post-election darkness,” and the documentary film Time for Ilhan intimately chronicles her hard-fought campaign for State Representative in Minnesota’s Senate District 60B, home to our nation’s largest Somali community. Then, on November 6, 2018, Omar became the first Somali-American to be elected to the United States Congress. A fresh take on the old story of the American Dream, Time for Ilhan offers an inspiring, stereotype-busting portrait of a rising political star as she begins a bold and powerful political career.

Feb. 22: “Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart” (2017)

  • Discussant: Dr. Margaret Wilkerson, author of the forthcoming book, Lorraine Hansberry: Am I a Revolutionary? 
  • 118 minutes
  • Film begins at 5 p.m. due to long running time.
  • Sponsored by The Africana Studies Program

Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart is the first-ever feature documentary about Lorraine Hansberry, the visionary author of the groundbreaking play A Raisin in the Sun. An overnight sensation, this play transformed the American theater and has long been considered a classic, yet the Remarkable story of the playwright faded from view. With this documentary, filmmaker Tracy Heather Strain resurrects the Lorraine Hansberry we have forgotten—a passionate artist, committed activist and sought-after public intellectual who waged an outspoken and defiant battle against injustice in 20th-century America. The film reveals Hansberry’s prescient works tackling race, human rights, women’s equality and sexuality that anticipated social and political movements on the horizon. Lorraine Hansberry lived much of her 34 years guided by a deep sense of
responsibility to others, proclaiming: “One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world.”

Feb. 15: “The Long Shadow” (2018)

From New Orleans to Virginia, Mississippi and Canada, The Long Shadow follows two white Southern filmmakers as they travel the roads of oppression and suppression to reveal the connections of slavery and strong-arm Southern politics to the current racial strife in America. The film is a disturbing story about the lingering human cost of ignorance, intolerance and inaction in the US, casting a long shadow over our national identity and imperfect democracy. “I am a filmmaker and journalist. On my odyssey to
investigate racism in America I was stunned to discover that I was the problem. My family codified white supremacy into law,” said Frances Causey, filmmaker.

Feb. 8: “Maborosi” (1995)

  • Discussant: Dr. Ed EmanuEl
  • In Japanese with English subtitles
  • 110 minutes

One of the finest films of Japanese cinema, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first feature
film Maborosi is a story of love, loss, and ultimately, regeneration. Haunted by the mysterious loss of her grandmother many years ago, a beautiful young mother (Yumiko, played by Makiko Esumi) struggles to come to terms with the sudden loss of her husband. Yumiko remarries and with her young son moves to her new husband’s home in a remote village on the wild, untamed Sea of Japan. There, she is haunted by the past, but with time and the natural wonders around her, she awakens to find love, understanding, and a sense of peace. Kore-eda’s feature films reflect back on his beginnings in documentary with a regard to truth and an incredibly humane sense of his characters’ strength and fallibilities. Working with almost entirely natural lighting, Kore- eda’s remarkable and elegant camerawork makes Maborosi one of the most striking visual works in cinema.

Feb. 1: “Women of the Venezuelan Chaos” (2017)

Embodying strength and stoicism, five Venezuelan women from diverse backgrounds each draw a portrait of their country as it suffers under the worst social, economic and political crisis in its history amid extreme food and medicine shortages, a broken justice system, and widespread fear. The women share what life is really like for them and their families as the truth about their country’s difficulties is repeatedly denied by their government. Featuring stunning visuals and creative soundscapes, Women of the Venezuelan Chaos presents a uniquely beautiful country and its people, who remain resilient and resourceful despite the immense challenges they face.

Jan. 25: “Under the Blood Red Sun”

Under the Blood Red Sun movie trailer

December 7, 1941 – Tomikazu “Tomi” Nakaji and his best friend Billy Davis are playing baseball in a field near their homes in Hawaii when Japan launches a surprise attack on the US at Pearl Harbor. As Tomi looks up at the sky and recognizes the blood-red sun emblem on the fighter planes, he knows that his life has changed forever. Torn between his love of all things American and the Japanese traditional ways of his parents and grandfather, Tomi is frightened and feels ashamed of his native country. His friendship with Billy is soon tested as prejudice divides their island community. He must find the courage to stand up to a neighborhood bully while protecting his family’s honor and its katana, a century-old samurai sword. He is soon forced to become the man of the family to care for his Mama and sister after his Papa (Chris Tashima) is arrested and taken
away to an internment camp. Adapted from Graham Salisbury’s 1995 historical novel and directed by Tim Savage, Under the Blood Red Sun, is an unforgettable story (based on actual events) of friendship, courage & survival. 99 minutes.


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The College of Arts and Humanities provides a diverse student population with the communication skills, humanistic values and cultural awareness that form the foundation of scholarship. The college offers intellectual and artistic programs that engage students and faculty and the community in collaboration, dialog and discovery. These programs help preserve, illuminate and nourish the arts and humanities for the campus and for the wider community.

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