Samuels Center for Community Partnerships and Civic Transformation (COMPACT)

March 5, 2026

Documentary Screening
3:55 pm
Mandel G03

FLY ME TO THE MOON is a feature documentary by Jamaican independent filmmaker Esther Figueroa that takes us on a journey into the unexpected ways we are all connected on Planet Earth, by following aluminum - the metal of modernity - around the world and into space.
We travel for over one hundred years, visiting places as far flung as the Moon, Jamaica, India, Suriname, Canada, Cuba, Japan, Hungary, Iceland, Australia, Vietnam, the United States of America, encountering along the way human "triumphs", technological innovations, multiple wars, societal upheavals, environmental devastation. And in the urgent here and now of the climate crisis, the film challenges us to to think about the consequences of our consumption, to reimagine the ways in which we live, and to change our material culture  and political economy that is destroying the planet we all depend on.

Co-presented by AAAS and CAST.

March 29, 2026

Documentary Screening and Discussion
11:00 am- 1:30 pm 
Wasserman Cinematheque, inside Sachar International Center (International Business School)

In the Khmer language, the root word for “nature” and “country” is cheate, meaning “taste”: to truly understand the essence of the land, one must know it through the senses. Since fleeing Cambodia with her family during the Khmer Rouge regime, and a genocide which devastated an entire culture and displaced millions of people from their homes, award-winning documentary filmmaker Kalyanee Mam has spent much of her life searching for a rooted connection to place. This film follows her to the landscapes of her homeland—changing through deforestation, industrialization, urbanization and development—where she has spent years tenderly documenting the disappearing, relational ways of life held within them. As she comes to know these places not only through the lens of her camera, but through the intimate relationships she forms with the landscapes and people whose stories she shares, Kalyanee awakens an ancestral memory of the taste of the land that lies within.

This film is presented in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Middlesex Community College, and Cambodia Town Lowell as part of the Khmer Diaspora Conference.

April 26, 2026

Documentary Screening and Discussion
12:00 - 2:00 pm
Wasserman Cinematheque, inside Sachar International Center (International Business School)

Erhan Arik, a young Turkish photographer born in Ardahan, in eastern Turkey, grew up in a house where Armenians once lived, driven out by the massacres in 1915. He had never been interested in this episode of history. In a dream, a voice asks him: “Why did you turn that room into a barn, where my wife used to make bread, where my children used to play?” Erhan wakes up with a jolt.
The next day, the voice from the dream continues to haunt him. He then decides to set out to meet Armenians, in search of that voice. Driven out by the genocide, several families live not far away, a few kilometers from their original land.
This film by Diana Mkrtchyan tells the story of this journey, this quest.
On the other side of the border, on the other side of the silence...

September 19, 2025

Time: 2:20-3.30 pm
Room: Spingold 111

Samira Saraya is an actor, writer, director, spoken word artist, musician and LGBTQ activist. She was born in Haifa in 1975.  In her early twenties, she began performing as a drag king while working as a nurse. She won the Acco Festival Award for unique acting in 2012; Fringe Theatre Award for 2015 and 2017; Best Actress Award in the 2017 Jerusalem Film Festival (JFF); and the Best Script Award for her short film Polygraph of 2018 at TLVFest. Samira graduated from Tel Aviv University with a degree in directing and debuted with Polygraph in 2020. She is also a member of the System Ali band. She just completed shooting her second short film, Kisui (Cover).

resources for Additional learning

Co-presented with The Mandel Center for the Humanities and CAST.

October 16, 2025

Time: 2:20-3:50 pm
Room: Olin-Sang 101

Indigenous Canadian artist Jaime Black-Morsette (Red River Métis) created The REDress Project to bring attention to and inspire action against the enormous amount of violence inflicted against Indigenous women, girls, and 2-spirit people across Canada. She hung empty red dresses, representing those who are no longer here, in public spaces -- in parks, in front of libraries, by the roadside -- as well as in galleries and on university campuses. Her art spread throughout both Canada and the United States as a message to the missing and murdered themselves, as support to impacted families, and as a call to action. A new book, which she edited, highlights the REDress Project's impact, including its relationship to a national inquiry into this violence on the part of the Canadian government. 

Jaime Black-Morsette lives and works on her home territory near the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. She has been using their art practice as a way to gather community and create action and change around the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and girls across Turtle Island for more than 15 years. Black-Morsette’s interdisciplinary art practice includes immersive film and video, installation art, photography, and performance art practices. Her work explores themes of memory, identity, place and resistance.

Resources for Additional learning

October 28, 2024

Presentation by Maria Pinto, writer, collagist and naturalist

Time: 3:30 - 5:00 pm
Room: TBD

Maria Pinto is an author and educator living in the Boston area, originally from the Dominican Republic. She teaches for the literary nonprofit GrubStreet, and her work has appeared or will appear in Orion Magazine, Obsidian, Necessary Fiction, and Arnoldia, among other publications. She has led workshops and given lectures for mycological societies in New York, Texas, Wisconsin, and California, and she leads regular forays at Arnold Arboretum. Her book of essays inspired by mushrooms, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival is forthcoming from Great Circle Books this autumn.

Co-sponsored by AAAS and English.