The War at Home: Then and Now

Watch the film here.  

Then the postscript here.

Then the webinar about the film here.

Friday, December 18, 5 p.m. ET

Program

A cross generational conversation about "The War at Home", the film that dramatically captured the evolution of the movement against the Vietnam War in Madison, Wisconsin.  Half a century later, what do we make of the history it portrays and how does it relate to contemporary protests for peace and social justice?

• Glenn Silber, co-Producer/Director: The War at Home
• Heather Booth, President of the Midwest Academy, VPCC 2015 conference organizer
• Eve Levenson, Policy & Government Affairs Manager. March for Our Lives
• Jessica Pierce, cofounder, Piece by Piece Strategies;  National Chair, Black Youth Project 100
• John McAuliff, Coordinator, Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee (VPCC)

       Special guests who will comment based on their personal experience portrayed in the film:

• Paul Soglin, former mayor of Madison, Wisconsin
• Karl Armstrong, imprisoned for the bombing of the Army Math Research Center, paroled because of community pressure
• Doug Bradley,  Vietnam Veteran in the film
• Artesimio Romero y Carver,  environmental activist in Santa Fe, NM
  

https://www.thewarathome.tv

for trailer and streaming links

Platforms for watching the film before the Zoom 

https://linktr.ee/thewarathome 

After seeing the film, watch "The War at Home Epilogue" produced for PBS by Chuck France to see how its release led to parole for Karl Armstrong, download by clicking here.

https://vimeo.com/341810933/8dddb431f0 

The webinar discussion of the film is here      

https://youtu.be/1um-TUoYELU

The chat and Q & A from the webinar is here  

https://vnpeacecomm.blogspot.com/2020/12/chat-q-from-war-at-home-webinar.html

Please share the link to this page with friends, family, colleagues, mailing lists 

and on social media:  https://tinyurl.com/HomeatWar

"Meticulously constructed ... One of the great works of American documentary moviemaking."
 New York Film Festival (2018)

"The reflective narrative offered by The War at Home, about the charged, escalating battleground that was the University of Wisconsin campus in Madison is an invaluable one. Never more so than today. "    Los Angeles Times (2018)

"The War at Home documentary returns with a message that still resonates."
 Detroit Free Press (2018)

"Restored version of 1979 documentary The War at Home shows necessity of protest"    Los Angeles Times

"The War at Home is worth rediscovering"   Charleston City Paper

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Tax deductible contributions to support this

and future film zoom programs can be made here.

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Speakers

Glenn Silber 

Glenn Silber is a documentary filmmaker and former network TV producer who has produced more than 90 prime-time newsmagazine stories for various CBS News and ABC News, as well as several independent feature documentaries for PBS.

Silber has been twice Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary.  He has received two national Emmy Awards, the George Polk Award for National Television, the Columbia-DuPont Silver Baton, the I.R.E. (Investigative Reporters & Editors) Award; the Mongerson Prize from Northwestern School of Journalism and a Writers Guild Award, among dozens of awards, nominations and citations for his work.

Silber was the Writer, Producer/Director on, “A Death in St. Augustine” for Frontline and the N.Y. Times, Nominated for an Emmy (2014) for Best Investigative Reporting--Long Form.  In 2016, he was Senior Producer & Writer for “Adnan Syed: Innocent or Guilty”, a one-hour special for ABC and the Investigation Discovery channel (I.D.).

Silber was a Directing Fellow at the AFI’s Center for Advanced Film Studies; and the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for Filmmaking.  He was a founding board member of the Independent Feature Project (IFP); co-founder of First Run Features distribution company; and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (Documentary Branch).

Glenn@Catalyst-Media.com   

 

Heather Booth

Heather Booth is one of the country's leading strategists about progressive issue campaigns and driving issues in elections.  She was most recently the Director of Progressive and Senior Outreach in the Biden/Harris Campaign.

She started organizing in the civil rights, anti-Vietnam war (or the American War as the Vietnamese call it) and women's movements of the 1960s.

She was the founding Director and is now President of the Midwest Academy, training social change leaders and organizers. She has been involved in and managed political campaigns and was the Training Director of the Democratic National Committee. In 2000, she was the Director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, which helped to increase African American election turnout. She was the lead consultant, directing the founding of the Campaign for Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2005.

In 2008, she was the director of the Health Care Campaign for the AFL-CIO. In 2009, she directed the campaign passing President Obama’s first budget. She was the lead consultant for the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare to save Social Security from privatization. In 2010 she was the founding director of Americans for Financial Reform, fighting to regulate the financial industry. She was the national coordinator for the coalition around marriage equality and the 2013 Supreme Court decision. She was strategic advisor to the Alliance for Citizenship (the largest coalition of the immigration reform campaign). She was the field director for the 2017 campaign to stop the tax giveaways to millionaires and billionaires. She was recently working on a campaign to lower prescription drug prices. She has been a consultant on many other issues and with many other organizations.

There is a film about her life in organizing, "Heather Booth: Changing the World." It has been shown on PBS/World Channel stations around the country.

Jessica Pierce 

Jessica is a national leader in civil rights, holding expertise in youth engagement, organizational development, and training. Jessica’s passion for organizing started at UC Santa Cruz where she was elected as Student Union Assembly President for two terms. After graduating, Jessica served as the Organizing Director for the United States Student Association (USSA) where she led campaigns in over 15 states. During her tenure USSA led efforts to pass the College Cost Reduction and Access Act – the largest increase to grant aid since the passing of the G.I. bill in 1944. With leaders of the Generational Alliance (GA), Jessica led efforts to develop Generation Vote, a coalition of 20 organizations invested in building a youth voting bloc that generated over 1 million youth contacts. Jessica then served as the National Training Director for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) where she helped to coordinate national election efforts for the 2012 election to turnout over 1.2 million Black voters and build uniform capacity & training programs for the national, state, and local levels. Most recently, Jessica was the National Chair for Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) where she focused on capacity-building and sustainability efforts through civic engagement, convenings, and trainings. Outside of organizing, Jessica has committed herself to building power through training, working with organizations such as Wellstone Action, Midwest Academy, and the Center for American Progress. Jessica has been featured in national, state, and local media outlets including Ebony, PBS Newshour, BET, CNN, and Buzzfeed and has won numerous awards including the 21st Century Innovator Award from the Midwest Academy. Throughout her career and to-date, she has personally trained more than 20,000 people.   https://piecebypiecestrategies.org/

Eve Levenson

Policy and Government Affairs Manager at March For Our Lives

Experienced in coalition building, grassroots organizing, policy advocacy, issue advocacy, and youth organizing.

Dual degree student at George Washington University pursuing a B.A. in Political Science with a minor in Peace Studies, and a Masters in Public Administration (M.P.A.) at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. 

John McAuliff

John McAuliff is the executive director of the Fund for Reconciliation and Development and coordinator of the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee.  As a student at Carleton College, he organized support for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and participation in the Mississippi Summer Project of 1964.  After serving in the Peace Corps in Peru, he became the first President of the Committee of Returned Volunteers, leading its participation in the Vietnam anti-war movement, including the demonstration at the Chicago Democratic Convention.  He represented CRV in national anti-war coalitions and the U.S coalition at international conferences in Sweden.  For ten years he directed the Indochina Program in the Peace Education Division of the American Friends Service Committee, traveling on its behalf to Hanoi with a delegation that arrived on April 30, 1975, the last day of the war.  In 1985 he founded the Fund for Reconciliation and Development to continue his AFSC work for normalization of relations with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.  After that was accomplished in 2005, he refocused most of his work on a similar goal with Cuba.  He was "detained" at the March on the Pentagon and the Mayday civil disobedience action and while demonstrating against George Wallace during his Presidential campaign in New York. 

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About THE WAR AT HOME  In the mid to late 1960s, the U.S. anti-war movement transformed America's heartland. Student protests at the University of Wisconsin escalated from civil  disobedience to violent rebellion when a bomb exploded at the Army Math Research facility. "The War at Home" shows how political resistance against the war started small in 1963 and grew into a mass movement that helped bring peace. Today, protests against racially oppressive policing, gun violence and the climate crisis have emerged as the new 'war at home'. This Oscar-nominated film documents a turning point in American history using a treasure trove of 16mm newsreel footage from the 1960s. The  film resonates today more than ever and reminds us of the importance of preserving media archives. The film had its World Premiere at the Majestic Theater in Madison on October 12, 1979.  It was restored from the original 16mm format to a new 4K Digital Cinema Package by the non-profit, IndieCollect and had its 4K “premiere” at the 2018 New York Film Festival. The NYFF Film Festival listing: "This meticulously constructed 1979 film recounts the development of the movement against the American war in Vietnam on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin, from 1963 to 1970. Using carefully assembled archival and news footage and thoughtful interviews with many of the participants, it culminates in the 1967 Dow Chemical sit-in and the bombing of the Army Math Research Center three years later. One of the great works of American documentary moviemaking, The War at Home has also become a time capsule of the moment of its own making, a welcome emanation from the era of analog editing, and a timely reminder of how much power people have when they take to the streets in protest."