EVENT: Three Films Scheduled for African Video & Film Series This Fall

The fall African Video & Film Series, sponsored by the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, will screen three videos that explore the impact of globalization on Africa and Africans' responses to the challenges of the global world. The films will be screened at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1, Oct. 15, and Nov. 19, in room 302 of Morey Hall on the University of Rochester's River Campus. They are free and open to the public.

The first film, T-Shirt Travels: The Story of Second Hand Clothes and Third World Debt (2001), investigates the secondhand clothing business and the growing inequalities that exist between the industrialized and the developing worlds. The film for Oct. 1 seeks to understand how a continent rich with natural resources and human potential has become the dumping ground for our old clothes and discarded goods.

Set for Oct. 15, Taxi to Timbuktu (1994), surveys the topic of workers' migration from Africa to developed nations. Seeking to earn money to keep their families alive, the men of Batama, a village in the poorest region of Mali, eventually face a catastrophe when they discover that abroad is "closed" to them.

Finally, Patient Abuse: South Africa's Struggle for AIDS Treatment (2001) is an activist documentary spotlighting the AIDS crisis and the epidemic's devastating impact on South Africa. The film, which will be shown Nov. 19, introduces the audiences to the Treatment Action Campaign, South Africa's grassroots AIDS organization that is leading the fight against international pharmaceutical companies and the policies of the South African government.

Pizza will be served. For more information, contact the Frederick Douglass Institute at (585) 275-7235.