UT Filmmaker Series Continues with Award-Winning Filmmaker Dana Plays April 9

On Monday, April 9, The University of Tampa FMX Filmmaker Series continues with Dana Plays, UT professor of film, animation and new media. The event begins at 7 p.m. in Reeves Theater on the second floor of the Vaughn Center, and is free and open to the public.

The program will feature Plays’ eclectic approach to filmmaking, which covers a range of humanistic and social topics, from Native American rights, death with dignity laws and the history of sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean, to music biopics. She will screen her internationally awarded short documentary, narrative and experimental films, including The Longest Walk, Euthanasia, Demise of Sugar and Birth of a Pipe Organ, and a short retrospective reel of her 16mm experimental films (in 2K).

The Longest Walk (7 minutes, 2017) was filmed by Plays on Alcatraz Island in 1978 and released 40 years later. The film features the late American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders Dennis Banks and Lehman Brightman preparing a pipe ceremony before leading a peaceful walk across the U.S to protest anti-Indian legislation that was before Congress. The film won an Impact Docs Award and a Social Docs Award, and was screened at the American Indian Film Festival and Social Justice Film Festival.

Plays will also present a reel consisting of segments of her short experimental films that were filmed on 16mm and scanned to 2K for re-release this year, as a mini retrospective of her work, including Love Stories My Grandmother Tells, Don’t Means Do, Nuclear Family, Zero Hour and more.

Plays teaches film production and women and gender studies in the UT film, animation and new media department (FMX).

For more information, contact Gregg Perkins, chair/associate professor of film, animation and new media, at gperkins@ut.edu.