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Film Series: Exit Zero

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What:
Event
When:
20:00, Monday 6 Jun 2016 (1 hour 35 minutes)
Where:
Theme:
Public event
Directed by Christine Walley and Chris Boebel
Presented by Michelle Stefano

When the steel mills began closing on Chicago's Southeast Side, residents could feel the American Dream slipping away. Decades later, the loss of the steel industry has left permanent scars. The documentary film, Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story, is named for the highway exit number for Chicago’s old steel mill neighbourhoods and captures the feeling of a region passed over. In poignant and sometimes humorous terms, the film tracks the stories of multiple generations of a single family, as they build lives in a community once dependent on the mills, deal with the fallout caused by the mills’ collapse, and face the environmental devastation that remains. Interweaving home movies, archival footage, verite sequences, and a first person narrative, the film offers an intimate look at one family's experience with growing inequality in the United States and the uncertain future faced by working people. Its story reflects some of the most crucial issues facing the contemporary United States: the widening gap between rich and poor, the collapse of the American Dream for many formerly “middle class” communities, and the toxic legacy of the industrial past. 

The Exit Zero Project (www.exitzeroproject.org) includes the documentary film by Chris Boebel and Christine Walley, as well as an Exit Zero book by Walley, and an in-progress online archive and storytelling site about deindustrialization being made in collaboration with the all-volunteer Southeast Chicago Historical Museum.


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The Film Series is sponsored by the Department of American Studies of the University of Maryland and the Association of Critical Heritage Studies United States Chapter

Who's Attending

Samuel Mathieu
Ministère de la Culture et des Communications du Québec
Dr. Cynthia Scott
Independent Historian and Heritage Scholar
Marie-Paule Macdonald
university of waterloo
Dr Lionel Prigent
Maître de conférences
Institut de Géoarchitecture
Dr Stefan Moitra
Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum (DBM)
Mathieu Fribault
Ethnologue
EHESS Paris / Centre Norbert Elias
Mr Colm Murray
The Heritage Council of Ireland
lisa taylor
Bishops University
Jianping (Elaine) Yang
Institute of Cross-cultural and Regional Studies, Zhejiang University
Patrick Giromini
PhD Candidate
EPFL
Dominique Schoeni
Anthropologue et muséographe
Laboratório de Etnografia Metropolitana (LeMetro) IFCS - UFRJ (Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro)
Yaryna Yuryk
Lviv Polytechnic National University
t s Beall
Artist and Collaborative Doctoral Award recipient
University of Glasgow and The Riverside Museum, Glasgow Museums
Ms Lucy Brown
Scottish Oral History Centre
Dr Marie-Blanche Fourcade
Cheffe conservation et expositions (MHM) et professeure associée (UQAM)
Musée de l'Holocauste Montréal et UQAM
Eman Shokry Hesham
PhD Candidate
Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus- Senftenberg, Germany
Candace Iron
Professor of Arts & Humanities; Program Coordinator - Liberal Studies
Humber College
Aline Hémond
Professeur en Anthropologie
Université de Picardie-Jules Verne
Ms Iezora Edwards
The University of the West Indies
Zara Fournier
Phd candidate in geography
Université François Rabelais Tours
Caecilia Alexandre
PhD Student
Université Laval, Université de Montréal, Faculté de Droit
Dr Gabriella Olshammar
Researcher
University of Gothenburg
Tessa Pijnaker
University of Amsterdan
Tanya Southcott
McGill University
Sharon Roseman
Professor of Anthropology
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Dr Robyn Clinch
Heritage planner
University of Melbourne
Dr Jessica Mace
Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Toronto

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