WIFT-FL welcomes the University of Tampa College of Arts and Letters Film, Animation and New Media Department (FMX), Professor Dana Plays and their students, into our educational support program. WIFT-FL is proud to support the.....
Address: Tampa College of Arts and Letters- 401 W. Kennedy Blvd. Tampa, FL 33606-1490
2018 FMX Special Events for Spring
Monday, April 9, 7PM: FMX Filmmaker Series: Women in Film: Dana Plays Reeves Theater, Vaughn Center •FMX Filmmaker Series: Women in Film, Filmmaker Dana Plays in person. Screening; The Longest Walk, Euthanasia, Birth of a Pipe Organ, and more.
Upcoming Events:
Monday, April 27, 6PM: FMX Blackbox Film Festival Reeves Theater, Vaughn Center
Monday, April 30, 6PM: FMA Senior Thesis Showcase Reeves Theater, Vaughn Center
FMX Filmmaker Series Award Winning Filmmaker & Professor Dana Plays. Reeves Theater, Monday April 9th, 2018, 7PM. Hosted by the FMX Department.
Professor and filmmaker Dana Plays will screen her internationally awarded short documentary, narrative and experimental films. The program will feature Plays eclectic approach to filmmaking that covers a range of pertinent humanistic and social topics, ranging from Native American rights, death with dignity laws, and history of sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean - to music biopics. She will screen The Longest Walk, Euthanasia, Demise of Sugar and Birth of a Pipe Organ, and a short retrospective reel of her 16mm experimental films (in 2K). Co-sponsored by Women in Film and Television, and will be held in Reeves Theater, Vaughn center on The University of Tampa campus, Monday April 9th, 2018, 7PM. Free parking is available in the Plant Hall lot at Kennedy and S. Hyde Park Drive, in Tampa, Florida. The event is free and open to the public.
Included in the program is The Longest Walk (7 minutes, 2017), with the late American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders, Dennis Banks and Lehman Brightman preparing a pipe ceremony prior to leading a peaceful walk across the U.S to protest forced sterilization of Native Americans, prevalent in the 1970s, and legislation that was before Congress. Winner of an Impact Doc Award, and Social Docs award screened at the American Indian Film Festival, and Social Justice Film Festival), and filmed by Plays on Alcatraz Island in 1978, released 40 years later.
Euthanasia (2016, 6min.4K), a death with dignity film crime film, involving a couple who takes on a suicide, gone wrong, after the wife finds she is faced with a rare terminally ill disease, is directed by Plays with the assistance of her students who acted in the film and performed the cinematography.
Birth of a Pipe Organ (2017, 30min) winner of Milan Best Director of a Short Documentary and a Hollywood International Independent Documentary Award,
Plays climbed 50 foot scaffolds to document the building of the organ in timelapse and macro-cinematography, captured candid interview at dinner with Lynn Dobson, leading pipe organ builder, and filmed virtuoso performance by Haig Mardirosian, on the pipe organ we see being built. The film had its international premiere at the 2017 Lund International Architecture Film Festival in Sweden.
Demise of Sugar (2015, 30 min), winner of Best Director Award at 2015 Madrid International Film Festival, covers the history of the Caribbean Islands sugar, and slave trade and transformation to tourism, narrated by Antiguan author and historian Sir Keithlyn Smith, of Antigua.
Plays will also present a reel consisting of segments of her short experimental films that were filmed on 16mm and scanned to 2K for re-release this year, as a mini retrospective of her work, including Love Stories My Grandmother Tells, Don’t Means Do, Nuclear Family, Zero Hour, and more.
Professor Dana Plays teaches film production and women and gender studies, in the Film, Animation and New Media (FMX) Department that offers BFA programs in Film, Animation and New Media, at The University of Tampa.
For more information contact Gregg Perkins, gperkins@ut.edu.
