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South of the Border

Acclaimed Hollywood director Oliver Stone, whose film credits include Platoon, JFK and Wall Street, recently turned his sights on politics in Latin America. His brand new documentary, South of the Border, is a sweeping overview of the dramatic shifts in electoral power all across South America over the past ten years. Creating an alternative to what Stone sees as US media bias against leaders like Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, the controversial American director paints an intimate portrait of the peaceful, almost entirely democratic revolution sweeping through South America. In fact Chavez, who is the Latin American leader most reviled by Fox News, CNN, the New York Times, and other mainstream news outlets, features heavily in South of the Border. The film, which is narrated by Oliver Stone, offers a rare opportunity for Americans to hear directly from Latin American leaders. As the film crew travels across the continent, Stone meets with Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia, Cristina Kirchner the president of Argentina, Fernando Lugo, the president of Paraguay, Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, and Raul Castro, Fidel Castro’s successor in Cuba. South of the Border opens in theaters in Los Angeles on July 2nd. But KPFK have a chance to watch an exclusive early screening of the film, with the film makers and your favorite KPFK programmers present on Wednesday June 30th at the Laemmle Santa Monica at 7:30 pm.

Find out more about the film at www.southoftheborderdoc.com.

Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela

In this vivid ethnography of social movements in the barrios, or poor shantytowns, of Caracas, Sujatha Fernandes reveals a significant dimension of political life in Venezuela since President Hugo Chávez was elected. Fernandes traces the histories of the barrios, from the guerrilla insurgency, movements against displacement, and cultural resistance of the 1960s and 1970s, through the debt crisis of the early 1980s and the neoliberal reforms that followed, to the Chávez period. She weaves barrio residents’ life stories into her account of movements for social and economic justice. Who Can Stop the Drums? demonstrates that the transformations under way in Venezuela are shaped by negotiations between the Chávez government and social movements with their own forms of historical memory, local organization, and consciousness.

GUEST: Sujatha Fernandes, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, author of Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez’s Venezuela

Thank you Gifts:

1 ticket to see June 30th screening of South of the Border – $60
2 tickets to see June 30th screening of South of the Border – $100
Who Can Stop the Drums? – book – $120
Book plus two tickets – $200

Call 818-985-5735 or visit www.kpfk.org to pledge.