Global Peace Film Festival

The 2022 Global Peace Film Festival returns to the Winter Park Library featuring films from diverse perspectives and from across the globe. 

1pm THE BIG PAYBACK

USA – 2022 – 88 mins.

Directors: Erika Alexander; Co-Director: Whitney Dow

Trailer

For the first time in American history, a tax funded reparations bill for Blacks is passed in Evanston, IL. Funded by a tax on cannabis, the program is set to deliver $10 million as a correction for the systematic bias historically inflicted upon its Black constituents. The film follows the fight of rookie alderman Robin Rue Simmons as she leads the community in an uphill battle to obtain this ‘big payback’. Meanwhile, in Washington DC, the formidable Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee continues the fight to pass HR 40: a national bill languishing in Congress for 30+ years, to examine the merits of introducing reparations for slavery to African Americans. While the racial reckoning of 2020 plays out it the background, the two women navigate supporters and detractors, Black and white, in this quest towards correcting historical wrongs.

3:30pm BARRY FARM: COMMUNITY, LAND AND JUSTICE IN WASHINGTON DC

USA – 2022 – 50 mins.

Directors: Sabiyha Prince & Samuel George

Take a left off of the Anacostia Freeway on to Firth Sterling Ave in Southwest DC – what do you see? You see empty fields. You see shiny new buildings just breaking ground. Construction equipment. Sweeping views of the capital. As one community member states in this film, if you are a developer, you see a gold mine.

But these empty fields hold powerful memories. Enslaved people once worked this land. Later, during Reconstruction, formerly enslaved individuals purchased it, and built one of DC’s first thriving Black communities.

Here, the city constructed a sprawling public housing complex in the 1940s, beloved by insiders, if notorious to outsiders. Here, the movement for Welfare Rights took shape. Here, the Junkyard Band honed its chops on homemade instruments before putting a turbocharge into the city’s Go-Go music. Here, residents lived in the Barry Farms Dwellings up until 2019, when the final community members were removed for the redevelopment.

This documentary film, a collaboration between the Bertelsmann Foundation and the DC Legacy Project, tells a story of a journey for community, land, and for justice. It is a story of Barry Farm, but it is also a story of Washington, DC. And, in the cycles of place and displacement, it is a story of the United States of America.

PLUS

MR. ASHLEY LIVED HERE

USA – 2022 – 27 mins.

Director: Hannah Timmons

Trailer

Through interviews and hand drawn animation, Mr. Ashley Lived Here looks back at the lives of six individuals that grew up in the sharecropping community on the filmmaker's family farm and former plantation in the heart of central Louisiana.

PLUS

ROOTED

USA – 2022 – 24 mins.

Directors: Arne Ray Johnson & Shane King

The story of two elders who transformed a median in a troubled neighborhood into a garden paradise and brought a community together.

6pm THE INNOCENTS

USA – 2022 – 80 mins.

Director: Wojciech Lorenc

Trailer (scroll down to “The Film” section)

Follow two acclaimed musicians who are determined to use their talents to advocate for social justice. Allen Otte and John Lane tour the country with their performance of The Innocents - a piece created to shine a spotlight on the growing problem of wrongful convictions in the United States. Using a variety of found-object and home-made instruments, electronic soundscapes, and spoken texts, the performer-composers endeavor to explore various aspects of the issues surrounding wrongful imprisonment and exoneration in the American criminal justice system: mistaken identity, incarceration, injustice, politics, psychology, and resilience. The film culminates with a performance attended by Anna Vasquez - an exoneree, who spent 13 years in a Texas prison system for a crime which never happened.

PLUS
THE CIRCLE

USA – 2021 – 12 mins.

Directors: Marlene D. McCurtis & Alexa Kershner

This poetic lyric collage was written by men on A Yard at California State Prison, Los Angeles County, and performed by formerly incarcerated