C ornell Cinema continues its semester-long International Women film series in this calendar with two powerful documentaries. Lumo tells the story of 20-year-old Lumo Sinai, who is left with a fistula after she is brutally attacked by marauding soldiers in her home of eastern Congo, where rape is used as a weapon of terror. The condition renders her incontinent and threatens her ability to give birth. The documentary, a highlight of last year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, follows Lumo as she travels to a hospital for rape survivors and bonds with other women who have undergone the special surgery required to cure this devastating condition.
The following week we welcome Boston-based filmmaker Jane Gillooly with her new documentary, Today the Hawk Takes One Chick, which captures life in a rural society on the threshold of simultaneous collapse and reinvention. The Lubombo region of Swaziland suffers from the world's highest prevalence of HIV and the lowest life expectancy. Gillooly’s observational film highlights the lives of three grandmothers or “gogos” who have become instrumental in defining a new world order dictated by HIV/AIDS.
The series is cosponsored with the Cornell Women's Resource Center, FGSS and the International Students Programming Board, who is providing free tickets to the first 15 students who arrive at any of these screenings! Jane Gillooly’s visit is additionally cosponsored with the Institute for African Development, Cornell’s Global Health Program, the student group Cornell Health International and Ithaca City of Asylum.