Slought and the SP2 Social Justice and Arts Integration Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce No Mud, No Lotus, a screening series in collaboration with Louverture Films from November 2018 through April 2019. This retrospective features a series of twelve full-length screenings and related discussions with filmmakers at partner institutions across Philadelphia.

No Mud, No Lotus aims to facilitate conversation about how filmmakers, thinkers, and activists can use film and photography to engage and record some of the most devastating and urgent issues of our day—among others, the human costs of inequality and poverty, imprisonment and drug wars, the arms trade, racism and discrimination, ethnic, religious, and cultural conflict, the plight of refugees and migrations across all sorts of borders, and the devastating effects of capitalist imperialisms of all kinds—and help us imagine ways of overcoming them, or at least of understanding them better. This project takes its title from Thich Nhat Hanh's No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering (2014), which explores how we might embrace tenderness and recognize something beyond the seemingly endless destruction that increasingly appears to surround us. The series asks how cinema can help us acknowledge injustice and enable us to come together to lessen the world's suffering through collective action.

Co-founded by actor Danny Glover and film producer Joslyn Barnes, Louverture Films takes its name and inspiration from the leader of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture -- famous for always creating an "opening" in the face of enormous obstacles. Louverture Films partners with progressive filmmakers and producers around the world and particularly from the global South, and pro-actively supports the employment and training of cast and crew from communities of color in the United States. Since 2005, they have produced over 36 independent films of historical relevance, social purpose, commercial value, and artistic integrity. They have insisted on cinema as a strategy of complexity and plurality, as a means of resistance to constructed realities, and as a way to create meaning in an era in which agency is increasingly receding.

An opening event on Monday, November 12, 2018 from 6:30-9:30pm at Zellerbach Theatre at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts will feature a special screening of Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018). It will be followed by a conversation with actor Danny Glover and producer Joslyn Barnes, co-founders of Louverture Films, and Robb Moss, a member of the edit team, moderated by legal scholar Patricia J. Williams.