Schedule of films + speakers

Join us for five days full of festival goodness April 24 - 28, 2013. All screenings will take place at Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, Simon Fraser University, located at 149 West Hastings Street in Vancouver.

Screening DateFriday, April 26 at 9pm

Liberia ’77

Photo Exhibit + Reception at Lost + Found Cafe – 7pm

Join us for a pre-screening reception at Lost + Found Cafe – 33 West Hastings St. Featuring wine, beer and snacks, meeting and greeting with filmmakers, and a selection of the Liberia 77 photo exhibition ‘Photo is Life’ that is currently showing at the National Museum in Monrovia. Admission is included with your ticket. Films to follow at 9PM.

 

Screening 1: When The Guns Fall Silent

When the guns fall silent movie poster
This film tells the story of Ugandan woman, Lillian Akwero, who was abducted at age eight, forced to be a child soldier for the Lord’s Resistance Army, impregnated by rebel leader Joseph Kony, and later escaped; only to live in an Internally Displaced Persons camp in Gulu, sharing a small hut with her four children. This is the story of one woman’s struggle to go back home, to overcome the horrors of war, and provide a better life for her children.

Lillian is one of the thousands of human trafficking victims (who continue to be) enslaved in Uganda, DRC and Sudan by the LRA rebels. Her story illustrates the difficult process of post-war reconstruction one doesn’t often hear about in the press, because the international media moves on to the next hot-spot, the next war.

Director:                                Jake Herrle
Director of Photography:      Jake Herrle
Editor:                                   Bazyl Dripps

Screening 2: Liberia ’77

Jeff Topham
Liberia in the 1970s was a childhood paradise for brothers Jeff and Andrew Topham. Endless beaches, thick jungle – even a pet chimp. Their father worked for a Canadian company that made explosives for the Liberian mining industry, and also took thousands of photographs – recording not only his ex-pat family’s African experience, but also a country and a people on the edge of destruction. A bloody coup d’etat and two brutal civil wars would soon devastate the nation. 30 years later, and now both photographers themselves, Jeff and Andrew return to Liberia to revisit and re-shoot their childhood Eden.

year:          2011
country:     Liberia, Canada
director:    Jeff Topham
length:      74 min

Purchase tickets

Speaker Panel

Jeff Topham - Writer, Photographer and Filmmaker
Vancouver based writer, photographer and documentary filmmaker Jeff Topham has fought bugs in the Amazon, ridden camels in Timbuktu, talked African politics with George Clooney, fished with David Suzuki, and tailed William Shatner around a Star Trek convention. He recently directed his first feature length documentary for the Knowledge Network - the award-winning Liberia '77. Other TV credits he’s proud of include Eat St. for the Food Channel; the CTV Olympics documentary series The Difference Makers; Carbon Hunters - a documentary for CBC/BBC on carbon offsetting, and the award-winning CBC teen activism series Make Some Noise. A frequent contributor to Westworld magazine, he once spent six months producing TV news in Accra, Ghana with Journalists for Human Rights. Jeff also enjoys surfing, guitars, and cheeseburgers.