VC Connect #18: Lessons Learned from GRASSROOTS RISING

Welcome to VC CONNECT, an online destination through which just some of the hundreds of films and media productions created by Visual Communications can be found for your enjoyment. Featured films include some of our VC Classics, as well as films made in the Digital Histories production program for older adults and the Armed With a Camera Fellowship for Emerging Artists. Each week, we’ll roll out a new batch, specially themed for our audience’s diverse cinematic palate. Click here to watch the complete showcase.

Monday Nite VC: Lessons Learned from GRASSROOTS RISING

We’re excited to bring back a special Monday Nite VC presentation featuring GRASSROOTS RISING, a documentary produced by Visual Communications and directed by Robert C. Winn. We hosted a conversation on Monday, September 7, 2020 at 11am PT with director Robert C. Winn and special guests whose work in various labor fronts are as vital today as they were when GRASSROOTS RISING was first screened in 2005. In the face of perhaps the most consequential Presidential election in over a generation, the lessons learned from the various organizing actions depicted in the film are sure to resonate strongly today.

FEATURED GUESTS

Robert C. Winn is a documentary filmmaker and consultant who is grateful to work with incredible people and groups telling stories, building power and making change. Projects include GRASSROOTS RISING, SAIGON, USA and CHILDHOOD IN TRANSLATION. Organizational co-conspirators include VC, Global Action Project, Ford’s JustFilms team, and the Asian American Documentary Network.

Parvesh Cheena is on the National Advisory Board of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance and a SAG/AFTRA member.

Sophia Cheng is an organizing coach at the Chinese Progressive Association in the Tenant and Worker Center. Founded in 1972, CPA educates, organizes and empowers the low income and working class immigrant Chinese community in San Francisco to build collective power with other oppressed communities to demand better living and working conditions and justice for all people. Sophia is also a lecturer in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and an active member of the UC-AFT union.

Aquilina Soriano Versoza is Executive Director of the Pilipino Workers Center of Southern California, a nonprofit serving and organizing Pilipino immigrant workers in Los Angeles. Aquilina is also serving as the current President of the Board of Directors of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and a general Board Member of Mission Assets. She was a recipient of the 2018 Frederick Douglass 200 Abolitionist award. She studied her BA in Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Watch the recording of the conversation below.

GRASSROOTS RISING, directed by Robert C. Winn, explores the re-emergence of Asian Pacific American labor activism in Los Angeles among people from all walks of life, from a Pilipino American domestic worker, a Chinese American laundry worker-turned-union activist, a Korean American restaurant waitress fighting wage theft, a group of Thai women forced to labor in an underground sweatshop, to Korean American and Mexican American grocery store workers fighting for safer working conditions.

Funding for VC CONNECT has been provided by California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act economic stabilization plan of 2020.