Documentary filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal gives the 2015 Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College. (Jim Panou)

Jennifer Baichwal, a filmmaker whose award-winning documentaries have explored subjects as diverse as the life of writer Paul Bowles, the nature of indebtedness and the metaphysics of being struck by lightning, offers the annual Otis Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 5, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Baichwal’s talk at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is titled Plans are Subject to Change: An Existential Approach to Documentary Filmmaking.

Made possible by the Philip J. Otis ’95 Endowment, the talk is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required, available at . A reception follows the lecture in the Olin Arts Center Lobby. For more information, please call 207-786-8371.

The Philip J. Otis Endowment was established in 1996 by a gift from Margaret V.B. and C. Angus Wurtele in memory of their son, Philip, a member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ class of 1995 who died attempting to rescue injured climbers on Mount Rainier.

Baichwal has directed and produced documentaries for 20 years. “While much contemporary documentary filmmaking is polemical . . . Baichwal’s work is decidedly different,” Daniel Baird wrote in the magazine Canadian Art in 2013.

“I’m just not a polemical kind of person,” Baichwal told Baird. “I tend to see complexity. I think this comes from my philosophical background — I believe one can embrace complexity and sustain meditation.”

Her first film, Looking You in the Back of the Head (1995),” examined the problem of personal identity as Baichwal asked 13 women to try to describe themselves. It premiered to critical acclaim on TVOntario and was subsequently sold for broadcast across Canada.

Baichwal’s feature documentary debut was 1998’s Let it Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, which a New York Times reviewer called the “definitive film biography” of the expatriate novelist and composer. Winner of a 1999 International Emmy for Best Arts Documentary, the film has been broadcast and selected for film and television festivals all over the world.

Baichwal and cinematographer Nick de Pencier, her husband, have twice collaborated with photographer Edward Burtynsky. Named Best Canadian Feature Film at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, Manufactured Landscapes is a critically acclaimed examination of the often-appalling industrial environments that Burtynsky renders as strikingly beautiful images.

‘I believe one can embrace complexity and sustain meditation’

The trio’s second collaboration is 2014’s Watermark, a feature documentary about human interactions with water around the world. Baichwal and Burtynsky co-directed, and de Pencier produced and shot the film. A box office success in Canada, Watermark won the Toronto Film Critics Association prize for Best Canadian Film in 2014.

Baichwal is currently conducting research for another collaboration with de Pencier and Edward Burtynsky: Anthropocene, planned for a 2017 release.

Her other films include:
• The Holier It Gets (1999), Baichwal’s most personal work, documenting a trek she took with her siblings to the source of the Ganges river with her father’s ashes;
• 2002’s The True Meaning of Pictures, a feature-length film on the work of Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams;
• Act of God, a 2009 exploration of the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning;
• and 2011’s Payback, a documentary adaptation of Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

Baichwal was born in Montreal and grew up in Victoria, British Columbia. She studied philosophy and theology at McGill University and received a master’s of arts degree in 1994, supported by a McGill Major Fellowship and a two-year FCAR Master’s Scholarship.

In recognition of Philip Otis’ appreciation for nature, the Otis Endowment helps support ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ programs with an environmental focus, in particular those exploring the spiritual and moral dimensions of humanity’s relationship with the environment.

Stacey Kabat ’85, co-producer of the Academy Award-winning film Defending Our Lives, returns to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for a visit that includes a public screening and discussion of this powerful documentary focusing on domestic violence.

The event takes place at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 16, in Pettigrew Hall’s Room 301 (Filene Room). Co-sponsored by the rhetoric department, the women and gender studies program and the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the event is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-8294.

Kabat appears in the 1994 documentary and co-produced it with directors Margaret Lazarus and Renner Wunderlich of Cambridge Documentary Films.

Kabat, the Los Angeles Times‘ Elizabeth Mehren wrote in 1994, “describes herself as the daughter and granddaughter of women who were beaten by their husbands. But when she headed off to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College at age 18, ‘it wasn’t acceptable’ to talk about such things, not even the nightmares that plagued her about killing the father who told her, ‘Well, Stacey, people just have violent tempers, that’s all.'”

Kabat won a Reebok Human Rights Award and the Clara Barton Award from the American Red Cross’s New England chapter for her work against domestic violence. She presented at the UN’s Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 and founded a human rights agency for domestic abuse. She now works as a nurse in Boston. .

Site of the Community Consultation in Kailahun, where Fambul Tok Staff met with local stakeholders to ask whether they wanted to launch the program in their district. Photograph by Sara Terry.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College presents Fambul Tok, an award-winning documentary depicting a journey of reconciliation in post-conflict Sierra Leone, at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 22, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St.

Libby Hoffman, executive producer of the film, will take part in a discussion after the screening. Open to the public at no cost, the event is sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ anthropology and politics departments and the “Considering Africa” general education concentration. For more information, please contact 207-786-8295.

Decades of corrupt government left the Western African nation of Sierra Leone vulnerable to a civil war that began in 1991 and lasted for 11 years, leaving the resource-rich nation impoverished and traumatized.

“Fambul Tok,” or “family talk,” is the term for an unprecedented grassroots peace-building program revived from an ancient tradition in Sierra Leone. It rebuilds communities by bringing perpetrators and victims face-to-face in ceremonies of truth-telling and forgiveness.

The first feature-length film by producer-director Sara Terry, Fambul Tok follows John Caulker, a Sierra Leonean who has committed his life to the practice of fambul tok, and his team of volunteers who travel miles of destroyed roads and jungle footpaths to implement it.

Viewers witness raw and painfully intimate moments and learn about the horrific toll of war. More importantly, they are privy to a culture of forgiveness — one that seeks to heal the nation through the restoration of relationships and community instead of punishment and retribution.

This film paints a vivid, accurate and respectful portrait of healing by telling this story through the eyes of family, friends and community leaders. Ideally, viewers experience the transformative effects of fambul tok and gain insights into an original model for peacemaking that’s applicable to the rest of the world.

“It was a tricky thing to make a film that tries to let a culture speak for itself while being mindful of a Western audience that I fully expected would be baffled by the idea that truth-telling and forgiveness equate with justice,” Terry explains.

Terry was an award-winning reporter who transitioned into documentary production in the late 1990s. Her work has been published internationally, and her book Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace (Channel Photographics, 2005) was named one of the best books of the year by Photo District News.

Terry is also the founder of The Aftermath Project, a nonprofit grant program that helps photographers cover the aftermath of conflict and build educational outreach.

Formerly a political science professor at Principia College, Hoffman left academia to focus on the practice of peace-building, with an emphasis on the link between individual and community transformation. She has developed and led conflict-resolution training programs in a variety of settings.

In 2003 she founded Catalyst for Peace, a private foundation based in Portland that supports locally rooted peace-building around the world as well as the means to share stories of this work. It was in her capacity as president of Catalyst for Peace that she began working with Terry to document stories of forgiveness and reconciliation in post-conflict Africa.

In the course of this work, she met Caulker and they began the partnership that led to the founding of the Fambul Tok program in Sierra Leone, alongside the commitment to document the process in film.

Fambul Tok International incorporated as an international organization in 2009, with Hoffman serving as president.

Following the screening of the 89-minute documentary Climate Refugees, there will be a panel discussion including filmmaker Michael Nash and several ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty members. For more information, please call 207-786-6289.

A climate refugee is someone displaced by climatically induced environmental disasters — disasters that result from both gradual and rapid ecological changes. These include increased droughts, desertification, sea level rise and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, cyclones, fires, mass flooding and tornadoes.

The International Organization for Migration has estimated that climate change would drive a billion people worldwide from their homes in the next four decades, according to Reuters. In 2008, 20 million people became homeless in environmental disasters. The Pentagon now considers climate change a national security risk, and the term “climate wars” has become common currency in Washington, D.C.

Nash traversed the globe for two years capturing the suffering of cultures whose very survival is challenged by effects of global warming. The film depicts the dire circumstances of these climate refugees.

Among the cases examined in the film are the South Pacific’s Tuvalu Islands, threatened with obliteration by rising water levels; drought-affected regions of Sudan; storm-susceptible coastlines of Bangladesh; and rapidly expanding deserts in China that are forcing mass relocations.

Nash was inspired to make the film after reading a study by the United Nations University stating that there are currently more environmental refugees in the world than refugees from political or religious persecution. “I just thought that was crazy,” says Nash.

The film includes testimonials from politicians, scientists, relief organizations and authors who call for new policies and new cooperation to find solutions for this crisis. The United Nations held a private screening of the film for world leaders and scientists at the 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen.

Sherri Quinn of National Public Radio called the film “a resounding wake-up call for every human being to go green immediately. It is a must-see film that puts the human soul in the science of climate change.”

Between the Lines, a 2001 award-winning documentary film by Yifat Kedar about Amira Hass, the only Israeli journalist living in the Occupied Territories, will be screened as part of the 2004 Maine Jewish Film Festival at 7 p.m. Sunday, March 14, in the Keck Classroom (G52) of Pettengill Hall. A facilitated discussion with the filmmaker will follow the 58-minute screening (in Hebrew and Arabic, with English subtitles), and the public is invited to attend free of charge.

Interested in reporting the truth, the Jerusalem-born Hass writes for the daily newspaper, Ha’aretz, from her home in Ramallah, 30 miles north of Jerusalem. Filmmaker Yifat Kedar documents the dangerous and often lonely life of this courageous woman.

Hass is the only child of a mother who survived the Holocaust and is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about the Territories since 1991. Originally produced for Israeli television, the film follows her for two years, beginning in 1999, when there was a period of optimism and euphoria in Israel. The worsening political situation affects her daily life as well as the lives of those she covers. Tanks pass her apartment and bombing disturbs her sleep, but she stays to live among the Palestinians and to report from the inside.

“Even if you don’t agree with her, it is hard not to admire the courage of this solitary, brave, and tenacious woman who attempts to share her perspective about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict under dangerous and difficult conditions,” writes Sheera LaBelle in a review essay for the 2004 Maine Jewish Film Festival program.

Their lecture, “Video/Democracy: Civic Life in the Age of YouTube,” is open to the public and admission is free. It is part of the Working Knowledge Series sponsored by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the office at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ charged with the college’s civic engagement and community-based education in Lewiston-Auburn.

The lecture will address whether documentary storytelling through film and video can enable students to pursue social activism and civic engagement in a time when colleges such as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ are placing public work at the heart of undergraduate education.

Tatge and Lasseur are founders of the nonprofit production company Global Village Media. They will present excerpts from their own cultural and public-affairs documentaries and discuss the Civic Life Project, an innovative international initiative that trains college and high school students to become videographers of their own civic involvement. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ will take part in the project in 2010-11.

In addition, the two manage a documentary studio creating programming for outlets such as the Public Broadcasting Service. Tatge/Lasseur Productions has produced films and television series for more than two decades on subjects ranging from dance to politics. One of their most notable productions was the miniseries “The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud with Dr. Armand Nicholi,” which aired on PBS in 2004.

Chinese-born scholar and director Carma Hinton screens her new two-hour film about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Morning Sun, at 6 p.m. Monday, March 22, in Room 104 of the Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell Street. Sponsored by the Asian studies program and the Freeman Foundation, the film and subsequent discussion led by the filmmaker are open to the public at no charge. For more information, call 207-786-8296.

Morning Sun is not a comprehensive or chronological history of the Cultural Revolution as such; nor is it a study of elite politics or of student factionalism. Instead, it presents a psychological history of the period as experienced by Cultural Revolution participants. It explores cultures and convictions as well as history.

“To my knowledge, there is nothing else like Morning Sun available that concentrates specifically on the Cultural Revolution,” says Maggie Maurer-Fazio, associate professor of economics and chair of Asian studies at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, whose research focuses on labor market developments in China.

Morning Sun attempts to create an inner history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1964-76). The film provides a view of a tumultuous period through the eyes — and reflected in the hearts and minds — of members of the high-school generation born around the time of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, in 1949, and that came of age in the 1960s. Others join them in creating in the film’s conversation about the period and the psycho-emotional topography of China, as well as the enduring legacy of that period.

A BBC reviewer called Morning Sun one of  “the best studies of Maoism but also a strong contender for the award of most significant documentary about contemporary history.”

Hinton co-directed Morning Sun with Geremie R. Barmé and Richard Gordon. Born in Beijing in 1949, Hinton lived there until she was 21. Chinese is Hinton’s first language and culture. She has a Ph.D. in art history from Harvard University and has taught Chinese language, history and culture at Wellesley, Swarthmore and MIT. This project has been deeply influenced by Hinton’s personal, first-hand understanding of the politics and history of the period, and her direct witness of and participation in many of the events of the Cultural Revolution, which began when she was 16 years old. All interviews were conducted by Hinton in Chinese.

The movie follows Helfand and her co-director, Daniel B. Gold, as they travel, with humor and a piece of vinyl siding in their hand, from Helfand’s Long Island hometown to America’s vinyl manufacturing capital, Lake Charles, La., and beyond in search of answers about the nature of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Her parents’ decision to “re-side” their house with this seemingly benign cure-all for many suburban homes turns into a toxic odyssey with twists and turns that most ordinary homeowners would never dare to take.

“Blue Vinyl manages to be charming and chilling in equal measure,” wrote a Toronto Sun reviewer about this feature that won the cinematography award in documentary competition at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and received two Emmy nominations for best documentary and best research.

Acclaimed for making films that are simultaneously humorous and inquisitive, Helfand is as recognized for her environmental health activism and community organizing as she is for her filmmaking. Co-founder of the nonprofit Working Films, Helfand links documentary filmmaking to long-term social change.

Blue Vinyl is the second collaboration for Gold and Helfand  — herself a cancer survivor who underwent a hysterectomy at 25 after contracting a rare form of cervical cancer due to her mother’s ingestion of the drug DES, a synthetic estrogen that was supposed to prevent miscarriage. With Gold, Helfand chronicled that period in her life, exploring the personal impact of toxic chemical exposure on her relationship with her mother, in her documentary, A Healthy Baby Girl (Sundance, 1997), which garnered her a Peabody Award for excellence in journalism and public education.

A sequel of sorts, Blue Vinyl picks up essentially where A Healthy Baby Girl left off in front of the Helfands’ house as they are putting up the blue vinyl siding.

A non-narrative film investigating death and the power of photography, “El Día Que Me Quieras” is a meditation on the last pictures of Ernesto Ché Guevara, taken in 1967 as he lay dead on a table surrounded by his captors in Bolivia. Not a political documentary in the traditional sense, the film alternates between evocation and straight reportage, centering on an interview with the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta, who made the famous image. Suffused with a sense of mystery, “El Día Que Me Quieras” is about our assimilation of history.

“Visually exquisite and deeply moving…Leandro Katz’s film is at once an elegy to the passing of the age of revolution in Latin America and an investigation into the history and mythos surrounding the infamous photograph of the beatific corpse of its central icon: Ché Guevara,” wrote Jeffrey Skoller in the journal AfterImage.

The film had its world premiere at the Festival del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana, where it won the International Jury’s Coral Prize. It has also won the “Best Documentary” prize in the Festival Internacional de Cine de Valdivia, Chile. The film has been included in festivals in the Holland, Italy, Spain, Norway, Germany, Germany and France. It was part of the Visible Evidence Conference at San Francisco State University and also the New Documentaries Series at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. For more information, call the film’s sponsor, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Multicultural Center, at 207-786-8215.

Prior to her visit, several of Hinton’s films will be shown in the Keck Classroom. Small Happiness, focusing on the lives of women in China, and China’s Only Child will be shown at 4:10 p.m. Monday, Feb. 28. The Dying Rooms, about the conditions of Shanghai orphanages and Good Fortune, about successful adoptions of Chinese infants by American families, will be shown at 4:10 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 29. These, too, are open to the public and free of charge.

Hinton has produced and directed Hong Kong on Stage (1997), a short film about an avant-garde theater group in Hong Kong on the eve of the 1997 transfer of sovereignty to China and The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995), a three-hour film about the 1989 Chinese democracy movement. She also has produced and directed Abode of Illusion (1992), First Moon (1991), Stilt Dancers (1981) and One Village in China (1987), a three-part series that includes Small Happiness, To Taste A Hundred Herbs and All Under Heaven. Hinton also produced Acrobats (1997), Chinese Environmental Film Project (1994) and Little Plum (1994).

The Boston Globe described Small Happiness, a hit at the 1985 New Directors/New Films festival at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as a film that “fills the screen with things that are new, illuminating, startling and rooted in humanity.” At the close of this film, Hinton narrates: “As long as a woman must leave her own family, marry into a man’s household and continue his family line, she will be considered a small happiness from the day she is born.”

Hinton’s films have appeared at festivals throughout the world and garnered various prizes. The Gate of Heavenly Peace received the George Foster Peabody Award, the International Critics Prize and the Best Social and Political Documentary Award at the Banff Film Festival.

Hinton has lectured on China and film at MIT and Wellesley and taught Chinese language at Swarthmore. She received a bachelor’s degree in Oriental studies from the University of Pennsylvania and is a doctoral candidate in Chinese art history at Harvard.