EMU Ballroom

UO Campus

Film poster for “Finding Face”

This event will feature the film “Finding Face” with filmmaker Patti Duncan.

From the Finding Face website: “‘Finding Face’ details the controversial case of Tat Marina, who was attacked with acid in Cambodia in 1999. At 16, Marina was a rising star in Phnom Penh’s karaoke music scene. She was coerced into an abusive relationship with Cambodia’s Undersecretary of State, Svay Sitha, and subsequently doused with a liter of nitric acid—allegedly by his wife—that disfigured her face. A decade later, despite the fact that there were multiple witnesses to the crime, no charges have ever been filed in the case.”

Patti Duncan

An associate professor of Women’s Studies at Oregon State University, Patti Duncan specializes in transnational feminist theories and movements, women of color in the United States, and Asian and Asian Pacific American women’s writings and experiences. She is the author of Tell This Silence: Asian American Women Writers and the Politics of Speech (University of Iowa Press, 2004).

This film event is sponsored by CSWS and the Women of Color Project.

Métis writer and filmmaker Christine Welsh screens her feature-length film “Finding Dawn”—about the disappearance and murder of aboriginal women in British Columbia—on May 13, 3:30 p.m. at the Knight Library Browsing Room on the University of Oregon campus. Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society, this free event will include a discussion session with the filmmaker.

They were poor, mostly indigenous. Some were sex workers. More than 500 missing, murdered, gone over a 30-year period. “Finding Dawn,” a National Film Board of Canada (NFB) documentary made in 2006, follows the lives of three women believed to be among the victims—Dawn Crey, Ramona Wilson and Daleen Kay Bosse.

A Film by Christine Welsh

Why do these murders and disappearances remain unsolved and unpunished? In “Finding Dawn,” Welsh undertakes what the NFB describes as an “epic journey” to shed light on the mystery and horror of a too often untold story—“a worldwide culture of impunity” that allows violence against women. Welsh begins at Vancouver’s skid row where more than 60 poor women disappeared, and travels the “Highway of Tears” in northern British Columbia where more than two dozen women have vanished.

Christine Welsh is an associate professor at the University of Victoria, where she teaches courses in Indigenous Women’s Studies and Indigenous Cinema. She has been producing, writing and directing films for more than 30 years.

Independent filmmaker Lourdes Portillo will present her talk “A Glimpse of Latin America through the films of Lourdes Portillo” in the Walnut Room of the EMU at 3:30 on April 29. This special Center of the Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS) event is part of the series, “Putting Latino/a Studies and Latin American Studies in Conversation.”

This event is co-sponsored with the Center for the Study of Women and Society (CSWS), Ethnic Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Latin American Studies.

Film Screening

April 30, 7 p.m. Lillis Hall, Room 182, 990 East 13th Ave., University of Oregon

Lourdes Portillo’s film “Missing Young Woman”  (USA, 2001) will be shown as part of the Latin American Studies spring film series, “Gender and Sexuality in Latin America.”

This film addresses the search for truth in the hundreds of cases of murdered young women in Ciudad Juárez, México. Question-and-answer session with the film director, Lourdes Portillo.

UO journalism associate professor Debra Merskin will provide framing comments following the screening of a hard-hitting documentary about the porn industry—“The Price of Pleasure”—on June 2, 7 p.m. in Room 221 Allen Hall on the University of Oregon campus. This free event is jointly sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women in Society, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, ASUO Women’s Center, Office of Greek Life, Alliance for Sexual Assault Prevention, and the UO School of Journalism and Communication’s Communication Studies Program. Viewer discretion advised: contains violence, nudity, and sexual imagery.

DVD cover

Once relegated to the margins of society, pornography has become one of the most visible and profitable sectors of the cultural industries in the United States. The pornography industry’s annual revenue is estimated at more than $13 billion. At the same time, according to the makers of this documentary, the content of pornography has become more aggressive as well as more overtly sexist and racist.

According to University of Texas journalism professor Robert Jensen, who is featured in “The Price of Pleasure,” one of the central aims of the documentary is to move the debate about pornography beyond the usual kinds of predictable, and distracting, arguments about morality and free speech.

“The film tries to move the discussion beyond a clash between a rigidly moralistic position and the irresponsibly individualistic free-speech response we hear so often whenever the issue of pornography comes up,” Jensen said. “Instead of asking important questions about what a relentlessly sexist and routinely racist pornography genre says about our culture, conservatives try to assert control and liberals try to assert independence. Complex questions about contemporary pornography are too often derailed by a debate that never gets past First Amendment arguments.”

“The Price of Pleasure” intervenes in this debate by taking a sustained and often disturbing look at pornography itself, placing the voices of producers, performers, industry critics, and anti-porn activists alongside candid observations from men and women about the role pornography has played in their lives. The film paints a nuanced portrait of how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, and liberty and responsibility are intertwined in the most intimate parts of our sexual identities and relationships.