Life at the Stream – February 26th
Film at 6:30pm – Wednesday, February 26th.
Room 137, Isenberg School of Management
UMass Amherst
Life at the Stream
(1989, Peter Rocha, German Democratic Republic, 30 min, in German w/ English subtitles)
Reinhard Schmidt, a Spreewald barge driver, and his four-generation Sorbian family live at a canal in the Lusatia region. Their daily life is influenced by a strong sense of community and cultural tradition. Reinhard talks about people’s dependence on and connection with nature, as well as about the ongoing devastation of the environment by open cast mines and power stations, a taboo topic in East Germany at the time. While Reinhard’s family tries to earn their living in the rural area, many neighbors are leaving for the city.
Film Screening
Wednesday, February 26th
Free and open to the public
Introduced by Dr. Victoria Rizo Lenshyn (Associate Director of DEFA Film Library)
Co-Sponsored by:
\
Victoria Rizo Lenshyn
Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
Victoria Rizo Lenshyn, Associate Director of the UMass Amherst DEFA Film Library and Associate Professor of History at UMass, is a scholar of (East) German cinema focusing on topics such as the role of women and film stars in socialist filmmaking.
After receiving her doctorate from UMass Amherst, she taught at Amherst College before being awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellowship to work at the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University in 2021-22.
There she was able to more fully explore her long-standing research interests in both environmentalism and migration in a research project examining threads between the environmental crisis in East Germany, GDR (German Democratic Republic) activism and German environmental policy today, as well as a film and discussion series on border wall environments.
While she was a graduate student, the DEFA Film Library benefited from Rizo Lenshyn’s contributions in a variety of different roles. For example, she co-directed its 2015 Summer Film Institute on Sex, Gender & Videotape: Love, Eroticism and Romance in East Germany with Kyle Frackman (University of British Columbia); she mentored interns and student employees and fulfilled a range of administrative duties; she organized panels and event series; and she presented DEFA films at the Goethe-Institut Boston and her own work at conferences of the German Studies Association, the Coalition of Women in German, American Association of Teachers of German and the Canadian Association of University Teachers of German. Thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship from the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, she worked on the Jörg Foth Collection, establishing a baseline structure for DEFA- and GDR-related collections at Special Collections and University Archives.
The breadth of Rizo Lenshyn’s professional experience and her intimate knowledge of East German history and cinema, as well as her administrative acumen represent tremendous assets for the DEFA Film Library moving forward, the organization says.