Mark Jonathan Harris, “Documentary Explorations” by a Veteran Filmmaker and Oscar Winner April 13, 7 p.m. Griffith Film Theater, Bryan Center, West Campus, Duke University.

We are pleased to report that Mark Jonathan Harris, documentary filmmaker and Distinguished Professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, will be visiting Duke in April. The Center for Documentary Studies will host a public event at the Griffith Film Theater on Wednesday evening, April 13, 2011, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM, at which Harris will present a retrospective of his career, show film clips, and answer questions from the audience. The focus of his talk will be the power of documentary to record and effect social change.

Harris is best known for directing the Oscar-winning feature documentaries The Long Way Home, which documents what happened to concentration camp survivors in the period immediately following their liberation; and Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, which chronicles Britain’s rescue mission of 10,000 predominantly Jewish children in the nine months prior to World War II.

Harris’s early films document some of the most important and contentious political issues of the 60s. Huelga! is a portrait of Cesar Chavez’s United Farmworkers Union and the first year of the union’s historic Delano grape strike. The Oscar-winning short documentary The Redwoods presents the Sierra Club’s successful case for establishing a Redwoods National Park. The Foreigners explores the work of a group of Peace Corps volunteers confronting the contradictions of U.S. foreign policy as they try to bring about social change in Colombia.

Later films include The Homefront, which examines the social and economic impact of World War II on this country and Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives, a look at slavery in America. Recently, he produced the award-winning Darfur Now and executive produced the Oscar-nominated Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders.

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