As the longest running festival of its kind, the UCSC Women of Color Film and Video Festival has sparked dialogue across communities – locally, nationally, and trans-nationally – by providing a platform for critical explorations at the intersections of race, nation, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. The festival took place March 14th and 15th at UC Santa Cruz along with spoken word and hip-hop on Friday night at the Hide Gallery in Santa Cruz. The space of the Festival has always served to promote collaborative organizing not only among students from various disciplines, but also among professors, campus research units, and the local community. It has become a much anticipated and acclaimed event for its commitment to visual expression, scholarship, activism, and pedagogy.

This year’s festival, bodies in flight: migration and transit, brought together cultural productions by U.S.-based women of color and women internationally that speak to issues of migration and dislocation associated with a range of global developments, including but not limited to: histories of colonialism and enslavement, the expansion of “transnational” and “global” capitalism, and the ongoing empire/nation-building ventures of U.S. militarism. Conceiving of “cultural production” as a broad and dynamic category of activity, this year’s festival featured not only film and video screenings, but also performance, multimedia artwork, and discussions facilitated by representatives from Bay Area community organizations. Festival organizers aim to engage participants, and all members of the UCSC community, in an interrogation of current immigration debates as they interface with questions of sexuality and gender-based asylum, incarceration, rights discourses, and the formation of categories of race, sexuality, gender and nation. Read More