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Maintained by pioweb@ucsc.edu |
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February 22, 2007 Contact: Jennifer McNulty (831) 459-2495; jmcnulty@ucsc.edu Special UCSC screening of new documentary about Jonestown on Tuesday, March 6
For Immediate Release SANTA CRUZ, CA--The public is invited to a free advance screening of the major new documentary, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple, on Tuesday, March 6, at 7 p.m. in Classroom Unit 2 on the UC Santa Cruz campus. Director Stanley Nelson and writer Marcia A. Smith will attend the screening, which takes place in advance of the film's April 9 public-television premiere. The screening is being cosponsored by the UCSC Community Studies Department/Social Documentation Program and the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community (CJTC). A powerful film, Jonestown explores the story of the Rev. Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple who led his congregation from a utopian dream of racial unity in San Francisco to the jungles of Guyana, where 909 followers committed mass suicide in 1978 by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. Jonestown features interviews with Jonestown survivors, rare footage of Jones himself, and previously unseen footage from the final days in Guyana. Newsweek critic David Ansen called the film a "deeply unsettling portrait of Jim Jones's tragic transformation from an idealistic, socially progressive Indiana preacher to the megalomaniac, drug-addled monster who choreographed the mass suicide of his followers. Stanley Nelson's haunting film, informed by the voices of the few survivors of Jonestown, can give you nightmares." The Hollywood Reporter review of the film said Nelson and Smith "dig a good deal deeper into the workings of Peoples Temple and the paradox at its core -- the visionary quest for social justice and the extreme personality disorder that together drove Jones and held his followers in sway." Nelson, a 2002 MacArthur "genius" fellow, is an award-winning filmmaker whose 2003 film The Murder of Emmett Till won a Primetime Emmy, the special jury prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, an International Documentary Association Award, and the George Foster Peabody Award. Smith won a Writers Guild Award and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for writing The Murder of Emmett Till, which aired on PBS. Nelson and Smith run Firelight Media, a not-for-profit documentary production company. On Wednesday, March 7, at noon, Nelson and Smith will participate in a colloquium, "How To Write History: Research and Representation in the Historical Documentary," that will take place in the Mural Room at Oakes College on the UCSC campus. For more information, call (831) 459-4706 or 459-2371. High-resolution photos of the Jonestown images above are available here: first image; second image.
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