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Takeover

Educational Only Screening

with Emma Francis-Snyder, Sebastian Diaz, and Cleo Silvers

Nov 12, 2021, 02:30 PM Eventive Virtual Platform Free

Students get the opportunity to see the documentary Takeover and talk with the director Emma Francis-Snyder, Editor Sebastian Diaz, and one of the subjects of the film Cleo Silvers.

This event is closed to the public and only available for participating students.

Takeover takes place during the twelve historic hours on July 14, 1970, in which fifty members of the Young Lords Party stormed the dilapidated Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, drove out their administrative staff, barricaded entrances and windows, and made their cries for decent healthcare known to the world. The activists raised the Puerto Rican flag atop the building, and hung a banner reading "The People's Hospital"—a nom de guerre still used today. Through archival footage, seamless reenactments, and modern-day interviews, we tell the story of the Young Lords’ resistance against institutions curated by wealth and white supremacy, and their fight for the most basic of human rights: the right to accessible, quality healthcare. The Young Lords' bold act of civil disobedience resulted in no loss of life and the Patient's Bill of Rights, though watered down is still in use today.

Country, Year United States, 2021
DirectorEmma Francis-Snyder
WriterFrancisco Bello, Emma Francis-Snyder
CastMiguel "Mickey" Melendez, Iris Morales, Juan Gonzalez, Denise Oliver-Velez, Carlos "Carlito" Rovira, Cleo Silvers, Felipe Luciano
ProducerTony Gerber, Emma Francis-Snyder
LanguageEnglish
Runtime37 MINS, SECS
GenreDocumentary
SubjectFilm
Event TypeFilm, Panel
Special Guests

Emma Francis-Snyder

Emma Francis-Snyder is a New York based activist and documentary filmmaker. With Takeover she is a 2020 Ford Foundation: Just Films and Open Society Foundation grantee. She attended the 2019 Reykjavik International Film Festival Talent Lab. She is a 2017 UnionDocs Summer Fellow and the winner of the 2017 Brooklyn Film Festival Exchange pitch. In 2012 Emma, and co-director, Sara Beth Curtis, received the Rosen Fellowship and traveled to Santiago, Chile and Montreal, Quebec to film the simultaneous student movements. She is the co-producer of the film, Straight/Curve, and the associate producer of Yoruba Richen’s award-winning I Rise series.

Sebastian Diaz

Sebastián Díaz is a New York-based filmmaker originally from Mexico. He received an Emmy for his editorial work on the interactive documentary The And in 2015. His short documentary Toñita’s premiered at MoMA Documentary Fortnight. His feature documentary Brilliant Soil won the Material Culture & Archeology Film Prize at the RAI Fest of Ethnographic Film in 2011. Sebastián edited the New York Times Op-Doc Atención! Murderer Next Door. He has edited projects for the BBC, Retro Report and Guggenheim Museum. He co-founded BULBO Art Collective (2001-2011), which produced a documentary series broadcast in US and Mexico about Tijuana-San Diego border culture where he was raised (Univision & Channel 22). Sebastián was a fellow of the 2019 Karen Schmeer Diversity in the Edit Room fellowship and sits on the board of directors of UnionDocs. He curates Mexican cinema in different venues in New York with his Proyector film series.

Cleo Silvers

Cleo Silvers began her career in community and labor organizing as a VISTA Volunteer and activist in the South Bronx beginning in 1966.  Her training as an organizer was based on the Saul Alinsky organizing method of going door-to-door meeting and listening to people in the community.

She was co-founder of the Trinity Avenue Block Association, the Jackson Avenue Block Association and the Kelly Street Block Association, Lincoln Detox, and the Think Lincoln Committee (TLC), a coalition of members of the community, interns and doctors, Young Lords and Black Panthers and hospital workers).  Cleo as co-chairperson of HRUM (Health Revolutionary Unity Movement) and the Think Lincoln Committee collectively penned the Patient’s Bill of Rights (watered-down version now seen in every hospital across the country). She participated in the three take-over protests of Lincoln Hospital.

Today she works as a consultant at Cossitt Library in downtown Memphis, Tennessee. She is part of a mentoring program for sixth graders thru high schoolers.  She will be helping youngsters design and implement a podcast on the need for protests and how to do it.  Black people in Memphis were allowed to use libraries in town only after students from Rhodes and Owens Colleges lead sit-ins at the library in 1961. Cleo is also trying to complete her memoirs within the next few years.