Film Screening: No
April 29, 2025 - 6:00 pm
Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Film screening followed by a Q&A Session
No (2012), directed by Pablo Larraín, is a historical drama based on Antonio Skármeta’s unpublished play El plebiscito. The film follows René Saavedra, a young advertising executive who spearheads the “No” campaign in Chile’s 1988 referendum to end Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Using innovative marketing strategies, the campaign counters fear and repression with hope and creativity. Featuring Gael García Bernal in the lead role, No captures a pivotal moment in history when a creative media campaign played a key role in restoring democracy. The film was critically acclaimed and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Álvaro Baquero-Pecino (Ph.D., Georgetown University) is Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. His research focuses on contemporary Latin American and Peninsular literature and culture, with an emphasis on film studies, violence, and trauma narratives. He is the author of Sicarios en la pantalla: familia y violencia globalizada en la era neoliberal (2023), and has published widely on migratory cinema, memory, and representations of violence. He has also served in leadership roles within the Latin American Studies Association and as a jury member at The Americas Film Festival of New York.
Jerry W. Carlson (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor and a historian of narrative forms with special expertise in narrative theory, the history of the novel, global independent film, and the cinemas of the Americas. From 2013 to 2022 he served as Chair of the Department of Media & Communication Arts at The City College CUNY. In addition, at the CUNY Graduate Center he is a member of the doctoral faculties of French, Comparative Literature, and Film & Media Cultures and a Senior Fellow at the Bildner Center for Western Hemispheric Studies. He has lectured at Stanford, Columbia, Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (Cuba), the University of Paris, and the University of Sao Paulo, among others. His current research is focused on how film and prose fiction from the Global South portray the histories and legacies of slavery, imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, he is an active producer, director, and writer with multiple Emmy Awards. As a Senior Producer for City University Television (CUNY-TV), he created the series City Cinematheque about film history, Canapé about French-American cultural relations, and Nueva York (in Spanish) about the Latino cultures of New York City. As an independent producer, his work includes the Showtime Networks production Dirt directed by Nancy Savoca and Looking for Palladin directed by Andrzej Krakowski. In 1998, he was inducted by France as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques.
Moderator: Álvaro Baquero-Pecino, Associate Professor, College of Staten Island, CUNY
Curator: Jerry W. Carlson, Senior Fellow, The Bildner Center for Western Hemispheric Studies & Professor, The City College & Graduate Center, CUNY
TO REGISTER send email to bildner@gc.cuny.edu
