United Nations Association Film Festival
This year’s United Nations Association Film Festival (UNAFF), running Oct. 17-27 in Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Stanford University and San Francisco, has the theme “Scales of Justice” and offers feature and short documentary films on a wide-range of justice issues spanning the globe.
Once again, films and filmmakers with a local connection make a good showing at UNAFF. “Waking Dream” comes from director Theo Rigby, a local resident and Stanford alumnus and profiles six “Dreamers” left fearfully adrift when the Trump administration rescinded DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). The film’s subjects, among them a Richmond middle-school teacher and a San Francisco health care consultant, face very real existential threats to their homes, their jobs and their higher-education degrees in progress.
In Gabriel Diamond’s “We Are in the Field: Adventures of a Third World Animal Rights Activist,” we meet Manoj Gautam, a Nepalese protégé of Jane Goodall. Inspired by Goodall’s work, Gautam founded Nepal’s first wildlife rescue and rehabilitation center. Diamond follows Gautam to get a sense of his day-to-day work, resulting in an eye-opening half hour about an extraordinary individual making a difference by inspiring other individuals to step up and do the same (what Gautam calls a “wave effect”). Diamond, who works in Palo Alto, got his filmmaking start in Oakland and has studied and taught in San Francisco.
Menlo Park-based filmmaker Bo Boudart helmed the aptly titled “A Concerned Citizen,” a profile of environmental activist Dr. Riki Ott. Ott was working in Cordova, Alaska, in 1989 when she predicted the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill hours before it occurred. While remaining in her devastated community, Ott became the face of resistance to corporate personhood.
Another Stanford alumnus and local filmmaker, Chris Beaver, examines the global water crisis in his film “Once Was Water.” Beaver’s film asserts that water is a resource as non-renewable as it is necessary for all life on the planet.
In one of the closest-to-home documentaries of this year’s UNAFF, former diplomat and local filmmaker Ashleigh McArthur shines light on an artistic endeavor that memorialized a disaster for the sake of healing. Produced in Stanford’s documentary film MFA program, “Ignis” depicts the work of artist Gregory Roberts, whose Sonoma Ash Project offered to collect ash from the homes lost in the 2017 Tubbs Fire and incorporate it into ceramic pots.
The film festival will again offer an opening night reception and a closing night party following the presentation of awards. Tickets, schedule and more info are available at unaff.org.
—Peter Canavese
California Bach Society’s ‘Bach and Zelenka’
California Bach Society (a 30-voice choir), along with a full baroque orchestra and vocal soloists Morgan Balfour (soprano), Gabriela Estephanie Solis (mezzo-soprano), James Hogan (tenor), and Christ
