CCDGB | Fly Me to the Moon: Film screening with Director Esther Figueroa

Please join the Climate Change, Decolonization, and Global Blackness Lab (CCDGB) at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute for our 2023-24 speaker series. CCDGB is part of The Entanglement Project, an FHI initiative focused on the intersections of race, health, and climate.

Register to attend in person at https://duke.is/yc4gm

Fly Me to the Moon (2019, 115 min) is a feature documentary by Jamaican independent filmmaker Esther Figueroa that takes us on a journey into the unexpected ways we are all connected on Planet Earth, by following aluminum - the metal of modernity - around the world and into space. We travel for over one hundred years, visiting places as far flung as the Moon, Jamaica, India, Suriname, Canada, Cuba, Japan, Hungary, Iceland, Australia, Vietnam, the United States of America, encountering along the way human "triumphs," technological innovations, multiple wars, societal upheavals, environmental devastation. And in the urgent here and now of the climate crisis, the film challenges us to think about the consequences of our consumption, to reimagine the ways in which we live, and to change our material culture and political economy that is destroying the planet we all depend on.

Esther Figueroa Ph.D, is a Jamaican independent film maker, writer, educator, curator and linguist with over thirty five years of media productions including television programming, documentaries, educational videos, multimedia and feature film. Her activist film making gives voice to those outside of mainstream media and focuses on the perpetuation of local and indigenous knowledge and cultures, the natural environment, social injustice, and community empowerment. Figueroa's films are screened all over the world and taught at numerous universities. They include Jamaica for Sale (2009), the award-winning feature documentary about tourism and unsustainable development. Her latest feature documentary Fly Me To The Moon (2019) is about modernity and the global aluminum industry. In 2020 she created and co-hosted Global Extraction Film Festival, the first online film festival focused on the impacts of extractive industries and extractivism. In 2013, Figueroa was Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of Hawai'i English Department. Her environmental novel Limbo (2014) was a finalist in the 2015 National Indie Excellence Awards for Multi-cultural Fiction.