Arts & Events

Never one to shut up and tend to her knitting, Anne Braden made a place for herself in the history of American radicalism when she and her husband, Carl, were charged with sedition for a buying a house in a white Louisville, Ky. suburb in 1954 and turning it over to a black family. The Supreme Court eventually ruled state sedition laws invalid, but not before Carl served time in prison and lost his job at the Louisville Times.

From then on Carl and Anne worked fulltime for the civil rights movement as field organizers for the Southern Conference Educational Fund. After Carl's death, Anne went on writing, speaking, and marching for her vision of a better world.

Braden could not have asked for better tellers of her story than the filmmakers who pay tribute to her radical life in "Anne Braden: Southern Patriot": Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering began working together at Appalshop, a media production center in the tiny Kentucky mountain town of Whitesburg, where Pickering is still based while Lewis teaches at the University of Texas. Both have already produced a stream of award-winning documentaries that uncover the seamy side of American life. -more-

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival returns this week with an eclectic and compelling program of movies from the medium's first golden era. From blockbusters to romance, from comedy to melodrama, from cartoons to documentaries, the festival, as it does every year, showcases the breadth and depth of film's first few decades. -more-