Registration: To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.
Speakers:
Alan Adelson, Producer and Director
Kate Taverna, Producer, Director, and Editor
Madam Tran To Nga, French-Vietnamese Activist
Carol van Strum, American Activist
Moderator: Hoang Minh Vu, Postdoctoral Research Scholar, WEAI, Columbia University
The Agent Orange catastrophe did not end with the Vietnam War. Today, a primary chemical of the toxic defoliant causes deformed births and deadly cancers. Two heroic women fight to hold the manufacturers accountable. This will be a screening of the documentary “The People Vs. Agent Orange” with a panel discussion/Q&A afterwards with the producers, two activists from the documentary, and Hoang Vu who was the consultant on the film.
Speaker Bios:
Alan Adelson works in both film and print. His film and television credits include: One Survivor Remembers, (HBO,) 1995, European production coordinator, winner of the Best Short Documentary Oscar and three Emmy Awards; as producer, director and writer: Lodz Ghetto, (PBS, Channel Four, 9 other countries) short-listed for Best Feature Length Documentary Oscar, 1989, winner, International Film Critics Prize, 8 international film festivals; Two Villages in Kosovo, 2006, (ARTE, RTE), and In Bed With Ulysses, 2012. The People vs. Agent Orange won the Jury Award in the 2020 Eugene Environmental Film Festival. Adelson made worldwide headlines with his investigative articles in Esquire and the Wall Street Journal revealing the disappearance of enriched plutonium from a nuclear reprocessing plant.
Kate Taverna is a socially conscious documentary filmmaker and sculptor. She has co-directed and edited 4 films with Alan Adelson which have received festival awards and have had theatrical releases nationwide as well as been broadcast nationally and internationally. Kate has also edited more than 50 documentaries, feature length and shorts, two of which have been nominated for Academy awards and others have won Emmy awards and festival prizes over her career. As a sculptor, she weaves metal strip into human and architectural forms for installations. Haunted by children lost to gun violence and war, her continuing series of woven child-sized armor continue to garner media attention.
Carol Van Strum is a writer, bookseller, ruthless editor, chronic book reviewer, Agéd Parent and seasoned troublemaker. Her books include “A Bitter Fog: Herbicides and Human Rights” (Sierra Club Books, 1983, Jericho Hill 2014, 2021), The Oreo File (Jericho Hill 2016), “No Margin of Safety” (Greenpeace 1987), and “The Politics of Penta (Greenpeace 1989). She has been a book reviewer for USA Today, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Department of the Planet Earth; a proof-reader and toxics and legal researcher for environmental lawyers since 1975; and researcher and copy editor for Mongabay.com, and Tropical Conservation Science Journal. She lives in the Coast
Range of Oregon with a beloved animal family.
Courtesy of the Mach Family Gift for Global Vietnamese Studies
This talk is part of the Legacies of the Vietnam War 75th Anniversary series and the 75th Anniversary Global Asia Film Series Learn more about WEAI's 75th anniversary. It co-sponsored by the Columbia Journalism School, Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, SIPA Technology, Media, and Communications, and NYSEAN.
For more information on the other talks of the series, please click here: https://weai.columbia.edu/content/legacies-vietnam-war-75th-anniversary-series.
