Two-day Film Festival Focuses on
Promoting Dialogue About Racism

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. – The ALATNA (African, Latino, Native, and Asian) Film Festival: Contemporary Films for the Hip-Hop Generation, organized to promote dialogue about exposing and eliminating racism, takes place April 8 at Mount Holyoke College and April 9 at Holyoke’s Talking Drum Café. The festival is free, and the public is invited.

The festival, organized primarily for the ALATNA community and its allies of other cultural backgrounds, begins April 8 at 6:30 pm with a screening of the 1996 film Follow Me Home in Gamble Auditorium of Mount Holyoke’s Art Building. A discussion and refreshments will follow.

On April 9th films will be shown from 10 AM until 9 PM at the Talking Drum Cafe, 413 Main Street, Holyoke. Food will be available for purchase. The schedule includes: “The Boy Who Painted Christ Black” from the America’s Dream trilogy, 10:00 AM; The Bronze Screen: 100 Years of the Latino Image in American Cinema, 11:00 AM; Performance by Jesús “Popoleto” Meléndez, 2:00 PM; Conakry Kas, 2:30 PM; The Leech and the Earthworm, 4:30 PM; and Welcome to the Terrordome, 7:00 PM.

The festival is sponsored by the Mount Holyoke College dean of students office; Enoch Page, associate professor of Anthropology, at the University of Massachusetts; Julius Ford, Director of the Harriet Project; Eduardo Suarez of NetValley Networks; Talking Drum Café; and Community Partnerships for Social Change at Hampshire College.