ASIAN AMERICAN MEDIA IN COMMUNITIES Week 1: Asian American Media Arts Centers, Paulo Freire

Topics: Asian American Movement / Third World Strike / Ethnic Studies Counter culture Independent media Asian American media arts center Paulo Freire Pedagogy of The Oppressed

Asian American Movement in the 1970s

Influenced by the Third World Liberation Front strike for Ethnic Studies in the late 1960s; Black Panthers, and other racial civil rights movments

Ethno-Communications was a film production program founded at UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Asian, Chicano, African American, and Native American students who were influenced by the social protest movements and counter culture of the time.

Its ethos was influenced by Third Cinema and other liberationist media movements, and especially by the films and writing of Latin American filmmakers including Glauber Rocha, Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, and Julio Garcia Espinosa.

A number of Asian American graduates of Ethno-Communications became the founders of Visual Communications (VC) the oldest Asian American media arts center, located in Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles.

From left: Duane Kubo, Robert Nakamura, Alan Ohashi, and Eddie Wong

Other Asian American Media Arts Centers Asian CineVision (New York) King Street Media (Seattle) Asian American Resource Workshop (Boston) Asian American Arts and Media, Inc. (Washington DC) Center for Asian American Media / National Asian American Telecommunications Association (San Francisco)

Asian American Film Festivals Asian American International Film Festival (New York) Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (Los Angeles) CAAMFEST (San Francisco) Seattle Asian American Film Festival (Seattle) Boston Asian American Film Festival (Boston) San Diego Asian Film Festival (San Diego)

DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival (Washington DC) Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival (Phildelphia) Related Hawaii International Film Festival (Honolulu) Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (Los Angeles) Vietnamese International Film Festival (Orange County, CA)

Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival (Toronto, Canada) Vancouver Asian Film Festival (Vancouver, Canada)

Paulo Freire Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy His book Pedagogy of the Oppressed is considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement

Trained as a lawyer, Freire also studied philosphy at the University of Recife. Although admitted to the legal bar, he never practiced law. He instead worked as a teacher in secondary schools teaching Portuguese. In 1946, Freire was appointed Director of the Department of Education and Culture of the Social Service in the state of Pernambuco. Working primarily among the illiterate poor, Freire began to

embrace a non-orthodox form of what could be considered liberation theology. In 1962 he had the first opportunity for significant application of his theories, when 300 sugarcane workers were taught to read and write in just 45 days. In response to this experiment, the Brazilian government approved the creation of thousands of cultural circles across the country. In 1964, a military coup put an end to that effort. Freire was imprisoned as a traitor for 70 days. After living and working in exile in Chile, U.S., Switzerland, he returned to Brazil in 1980, and was appointed Secretary of Education for São Paulo in 1988.