‘Citizens’ – Film Screening and Discussion with Director/Producer Richard W. Adams
Tuesday, April 23, 2024, 6:30PM to 8:30PM (EDT)
Open to the Public
RSVPs are required.
You are invited to the documentary screening of ‘Citizens‘ (1986) followed by a discussion with Director/Producer Richard W. Adams.
This film portrays human dimensions of Poland’s Solidarity movement in 1980-81 that were obscured by Cold-War rhetoric: the efforts of workers, artists and intellectuals who joined together to create a thriving civil society within a totalitarian state. Solidarity activists describe how they learned that to protect their own interests they had to fight for the interests of Polish society as a whole. Their self-governing trade union won the trust and support of virtually all segments of society by providing the only available channel for the local grass-roots initiatives, open debate, and democratic action that ultimately led to non-violent systemic change in Poland and beyond.
Location: Wolff Conference Room, D1103 (11th floor)
6 East 16th Street
New York, NY 10003
Discussion and Q&A with:
Director/Producer:
Richard Ware Adams began early with 8mm murder movies. He later co-edited the Oscar-winning three-screen To Be Alive!, a hit of the 1964 NY World’s Fair. While on a Fulbright in film in 1965 Poland he captured an encounter at the language barrier between American and Polish students in Exchange of Words (1967). He shot and edited the feature-length Asylum (1972) about life in R.D.Laing’s therapeutic commune in London, now a cult classic. As cameraman/editor he helped the late William Miles make his first two films, Men of Bronze (1977) and the four-hour PBS mini-series I Remember Harlem (1981), both classics of black history. Richard produced, shot, and edited Citizens (1986) on the birth of Poland’s Solidarity movement, which premiered at the New School and MoMA.
in conversation with:
Irena Grudzińska Gross, literary critic and historian of ideas, Princeton University and The Institute of Slavic Studies, Polish Academy of Science.
Andrzej W. Tymowski, president of the EEPS Foundation, which sponsors the quarterly East European Politics, Societies, and Cultures Journal.
Presented by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and the Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility at The New School.
