Kennedy discusses Abu Ghraib, HIV, Iraq War
Award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer Rory Kennedy challenged the Hopkins community to have a heightened awareness of social issues including domestic violence, the AIDS epidemic and the Iraq war last night at the MSE Symposium.
Kennedy explained her experiences while filmmaking and the impact that she hopes they have, and included clips from four of her films.
"As a producer and director, I primarily focus my energies on societal problems," Kennedy said, "and I aim to create awareness and motivate people to act."
Most of her work focuses on people who are unable to speak for themselves.
"I try to give a voice to people who may not be heard outside of their own communities or families," she said.
"The statistics start to have real meaning … these are all real people facing real challenges, and in each story there is hope, in immediate and concrete terms," she said.
Kennedy added that her documentaries focused on the need for intervention, saying that it could be "the difference between hope and despair, self-sufficiency and dependence, and even, in some cases, life and death."
"These are all regular people standing up in the face of all too regular hardship, and we have a lot to learn from them," she added.
The first clip Kennedy showed was from American Hollow, a film about a family in Appalachia with a history of domestic abuse against its women, which she made with Moxie Firecracker Films with the support of HBO in 1999.
"I spent a year on and off filming the family, living with them and trying to get a sense of what they were like," Kennedy said. "Domestic violence affects women from all backgrounds, races and classes, but I do think that women who live in rural areas face specific obstacles as a result of their geographic locations.
"Police can take up to two or three hours to get there. Women have uneven work backgrounds because it is very hard to hold on to a job so they don't have the independence that work allows them, so they face very specific obstacles."
Kennedy explained her experiences while filmmaking and the impact that she hopes they have, and included clips from four of her films.
"As a producer and director, I primarily focus my energies on societal problems," Kennedy said, "and I aim to create awareness and motivate people to act."
Most of her work focuses on people who are unable to speak for themselves.
"I try to give a voice to people who may not be heard outside of their own communities or families," she said.
"The statistics start to have real meaning … these are all real people facing real challenges, and in each story there is hope, in immediate and concrete terms," she said.
Kennedy added that her documentaries focused on the need for intervention, saying that it could be "the difference between hope and despair, self-sufficiency and dependence, and even, in some cases, life and death."
"These are all regular people standing up in the face of all too regular hardship, and we have a lot to learn from them," she added.
The first clip Kennedy showed was from American Hollow, a film about a family in Appalachia with a history of domestic abuse against its women, which she made with Moxie Firecracker Films with the support of HBO in 1999.
"I spent a year on and off filming the family, living with them and trying to get a sense of what they were like," Kennedy said. "Domestic violence affects women from all backgrounds, races and classes, but I do think that women who live in rural areas face specific obstacles as a result of their geographic locations.
"Police can take up to two or three hours to get there. Women have uneven work backgrounds because it is very hard to hold on to a job so they don't have the independence that work allows them, so they face very specific obstacles."
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