Bright Lights

Events in February 2013

Beirut the Last Home Movie w/ director Jennifer Fox
2/11/13
7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Paramount Center
Bright Family Screening Room
On Monday, February 11 at 7:00pm, special guest, filmmaker Jennifer Fox will present and answer questions about her debut documentary Beirut: The Last Home Movie, which won seven international awards, including Best Documentary Film and Best Cinematography at the 1988 Sundance Film Festival and Best Documentary at the 1988 Cinema Du Reel Festival, Paris. The film chronicles three months in the life of a Lebanese family living in a heavily-bombed Beirut neighborhood—revealing their everyday life as they attempt to maintain their upper-class lifestyle during the Lebanese Civil War.
On Tuesday, February 12 at 7:00pm, six student documentary films will be screened including a feature presentation of Losing LeBron by Emerson graduate students Nicole Prowell Hart and Allyson Sherlock. The film traces the impact of NBA superstar LeBron James' decision to sign with the Miami Heat, leaving behind his home state and devoted fans of Cleveland, Ohio.
Refreshments will be served.
Sponsored by Department of Visual and Media Arts
For more information please contact:
Anna Feder
Bright Lights: It's All True documentary showcase
2/12/13
7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Paramount Center
Bright Family Screening Room
On Monday, February 11 at 7:00pm, special guest, filmmaker Jennifer Fox will present and answer questions about her debut documentary Beirut: The Last Home Movie, which won seven international awards, including Best Documentary Film and Best Cinematography at the 1988 Sundance Film Festival and Best Documentary at the 1988 Cinema Du Reel Festival, Paris. The film chronicles three months in the life of a Lebanese family living in a heavily-bombed Beirut neighborhood—revealing their everyday life as they attempt to maintain their upper-class lifestyle during the Lebanese Civil War.
On Tuesday, February 12 at 7:00pm, six student documentary films will be screened including a feature presentation of Losing LeBron by Emerson graduate students Nicole Prowell Hart and Allyson Sherlock. The film traces the impact of NBA superstar LeBron James' decision to sign with the Miami Heat, leaving behind his home state and devoted fans of Cleveland, Ohio.
Refreshments will be served.
Sponsored by Department of Visual and Media Arts
For more information please contact:
Anna Feder
Bright Lights: Gigi with Vincente Minnelli biographer alum Mark Griffin
2/14/13
7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Paramount Center
Bright Family Screening Room

What better way to welcome Valentine's Day and Oscar season than with one of the most romantic Oscar-winning movies ever made ?
Gigi (MGM, 1958), winner of nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, this sumptuous musical stars Leslie Caron as a precocious Parisian girl groomed to be a kept woman, who comes to realize she'd rather marry for love instead. Laced with some of Lerner-and-Loewe's finest songs ("Thank Heaven for Little Girls," "The Night They Invented Champagne," ) and considered to be the last great MGM musical, this luxurious production crowned the career of acclaimed director Vincente Minnelli. Gigi will be introduced by Emerson graduate Mark Griffin, author of A Hundred or More Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli (Da Capo Press). Before the main feature, Griffin will screen a compilation of clips from some of Minnelli's other movies including Meet Me In St. Louis, An American in Paris and The Band Wagon.
Sponsored by Department of Visual and Media Arts
For more information please contact:
Anna Feder
Bright Lights: An Evening with experimental filmmaker Peter Rose
2/19/13
7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Paramount Center
Bright Family Screening Room
Since 1968 Peter Rose has made over thirty films, tapes, performances and installations. Many of the early works raise intriguing questions about the nature of time, space, light, and perception and draw upon Rose's background in mathematics and on the influence of structuralist filmmakers. He subsequently became interested in language as a subject and in video as a medium and generated a substantial body of work that played with the feel and form of sense, concrete texts, political satire, oddball performance, and a kind of intellectual comedy. Recent video installations have involved a return to an examination of landscape, time, and vision. Rose has been widely exhibited, both nationally and internationally, having been included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Biennial, the Centre Pompidou, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Film Society at Lincoln Center, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. He has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Pew Foundation, the Independence Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and is fond of writing descriptions in the third person.
Sponsored by Department of Visual and Media Arts
For more information please contact:
Anna Feder
Bright Lights: BOSCPUG presents VISUAL STORYTELLERS: Featuring Dan Lebental, A.C.E
2/21/13
7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Paramount Center
Bright Family Screening Room
Featured Guest: Dan Lebental, A.C.E. (IRONMAN, IRONMAN 2, ELF, COWBOYS AND ALIENS)
Boston Premiere of "TouchEdit"
TouchEdit cptures the spirit of classical filmmaking while offering cutting-edge digital editing capabilities. By allowing editors to cut video using finger touch commands on tactile filmstrips, TouchEdit reconnects its users with the essence of real film. The app can also carry metadata, including timecode, and can output specialized lists to collaborate with other editing systems.
About Dan Lebental, A.C.E.
Dan Lebental, A.C.E., is a Hollywood professional editor, the founder and the designer of TouchEdit. He has been editing feature films for more than twenty years, working with some of Hollywood's top movie studios and directors. His long time collaboration with Jon Favreau has yielded hits such as ELF and the blockbusters IRON MAN and IRON MAN 2. His versatility across genres includes working on comedies, dramas, thrillers, documentaries, TV projects as represented by more than 20 movies and hundreds of music videos cut over the span of his career.
He recently completed the documentary THE ART OF CONFLICT as both Producer and Editor.
Dan Lebental is a member of American Cinema Editors and the Motion Picture Academy of Arts, has lectured on the art of editing at USC and has spoken at various international conferences.
Throughout his career Dan continues to support and mentor students and aspiring beginners taking pleasure in fostering a new generation of editors.
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- Ross Shain, Imagineer Systems and Robin Hobart, Brickyard VFX
Ross Shain will present on mocha Pro from Imagineer Systems. Ross and Imagineer Systems has just been honored by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences with a Scientific and Technical Award for mocha and its Planar Tracking technology. Motion tracking and rotoscoping are necessary foundation skills for both finishing and visual effects. Special Guest Robin Hobart from Boston's Brickyard VFX will show how the team at Brickyard has used mocha on recent projects and discuss how Imagineer's software tools fits into their workflow.
Imagineer Systems is the Academy Award winning developer of visual effects solutions for film, video and broadcast post production markets. Imagineer Systems has made its mark on such marquee Hollywood blockbuster productions as The Hobbit, Black Swan, The Amazing Spiderman, Invictus, and the Harry Potter series.
About Robin Hobart
Robin Hobart is a visual effects artist at Brickyard VFX, a nationally recognized company specializing in film, television and commercial visual effects. http://www.brickyardvfx.com/
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- Rick Macomber, Macomber Productions
Rick will screen his newly released music video for the band Air Traffic Controller, "Ready or Not" - and will be joined by local filmmaker Sean Meehan to discuss the making of this video.
RSVP Link: http://boscpugfeb21.eventbrite.com
Sponsored by Department of Visual and Media Arts
For more information please contact:
Anna Feder
Bright Lights: Have You Heard From Johannesburg with director Connie Field
2/28/13
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Paramount Center
Bright Family Screening Room
This story traces the complex and fascinating drama of the anti-apartheid movement in one of South Africa's most important allies, the United States. The US is a key battleground, with African-Americans at the center of the struggle. The campaigns take place in boardrooms, universities, embassies, and finally in the US Congress itself, where a stunning victory is won against the formidable opposition of President Ronald Reagan. African-Americans, for the first time in history, have turned the tide and altered the direction of US foreign policy. The US, once the backbone of support for the apartheid regime as her ally in the Cold War, finally imposes sanctions on Pretoria. This is part five of a seven part series on the global anti-apartheid movements, stretching from 1946-1990.
Sponsored by Department of Visual and Media Arts with Institiute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
For more information please contact:
Anna Feder