Join us as we view this 55-minute documentary portrait of the Hmong community from 1982 followed by a talk and discussion with co-director Peter O’Neil as he explains his recent work documenting his subjects over 20 years later.

The film explores the challenges of several Hmong individuals and shows some of their involvement with the local community. It documents how weddings, funerals, shamanic ceremonies, rock bands and soccer games were done during the early phase of Hmong settlement in the United States.

This is week two of a four-week series called, “Common Threads: From Vietnam to Iraq”, co-sponsored by The Office of Public Engagement of RISD and The Swearer Center of Brown University. The event is hosted by The Genesis Center. Click here to see photos from last week’s pandau exhibit at RISD. For more info contact Mike Ritz at mike@gencenter.org

Free screening and discussion, 6:30pm to 8:30 pm, Thursday, Jan. 29th, Center for Integrative Technology, 169 Weybosset Street

The first trailer for documentary filmmakers T. L. Hurley and Nick Marcoux’s Happy Endings? about the infamous and legal spa/massage/prostitution industry in Rhode Island, has been watched over 100,000 times on YouTube in the past two months, and a second trailer has just been released. The doc follows several “characters” involved with the trade; spa owners, workers, clients, even Mayor David Cicilline and Representative Joanne Giannini weigh in on the issue. From the trailers, it seems like a well made film, except for a few comically voice-altered interviews with some of the workers and proprietors. Although the film seems to exist only in the form of these two trailers for now, let’s hope it gets released in a full format sometime soon.

Happy Endings official website, YouTube trailers