Millsaps College presents director Cathy Crane on Monday, April 14, as part of the Southern Circuit tour of independent filmmakers. Following a screening of her movie “Unoccupied Zone: The Impossible Life of Simone Weil,” Crane will engage the audience in a discussion of her work and the film. The screening and discussion will begin at 7 p.m. in the Ford Academic Complex, Room 215. The event is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Austin Wilson at 601-974-1305 or wilsola@millsaps.edu.
The evening will open with a short by Jorge Moran entitled “Theodore.” The title character of this film knows loneliness, but the challenge of his life is knowing love.
“Unoccupied Zone” follows Simone Weil after the 1940 German occupation of Paris forces her to leave for the “unoccupied zone” of southern France. Under Vichy, she is denied the right to teach. For two years, she waits, she says, for God. The film stages the “theatre” of her thought through a mise-en-scene whose rear screen projections of live-feed video and archival newsreels antagonize the spectacle of biographical reconstruction being played out before it.
After working in New York City for 10 years as a stage manager of experimental Off-Off Broadway plays (including the first North American production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Roundheads and Peakheads”) and working in the music business coordinating international tours for Suzanne Vega and Shawn Colvin, Cathy Crane turned to filmmaking.
While in graduate school at San Francisco State University, her short experimental narrative films won numerous awards, and she was one of four individuals selected to receive the prestigious Eastman Kodak Scholarship in 1997 as “one of the nation’s most promising talents of the future generation of filmmakers.” Since joining the cinema production faculty at Ithaca College in 2002 as an assistant professor, she has received every major grant from the college for “Unoccupied Zone,” which is her first full-length film. She is currently working on an adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last, unfinished novel, “Petrolio.”
The 2007-2008 Southern Circuit is a program of the Southern Arts Federation in collaboration with the South Carolina Arts Commission. It is sponsored locally by Millsaps College, the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Film Office.
