Events

How Long is Long Enough: Screening and Conversation
2026-01-19 17:30 - 19:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos, 1817 Soquel Ave, Santa Cruz, 95062, United States
Join us for a screening of How Long is Long Enough: The Excessive Sentencing of Quntos & Layla, a short documentary created by Natalie Decena, Sarina Bozorgnia, Veler Brown, and Aiden Olivier from UC Santa Cruz with support from Michael Ademaro from Georgetown Law School as part of the Making an Exoneree initiative.
Quntos Wilson and Layla Roberts were sentenced to life without parole in 1995 at the ages of 18 and 19 for a robbery in which no one was physically harmed and a mere $301 was stolen. Now approaching 50, they have each become remarkable artists and mentors behind the prison bars of Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola).
In addition to the documentary screening, the event will include a conversation with Quntos Wilson and Layla Roberts, letter-writing, and collaborative art making.

Screening: Queering Movement, Stories Embodied Film Shorts
2026-01-25 17:00 - 19:30 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
The IAS, BBQueer Fest, and Motion Pacific invite you to attend “Queering Movement: Stories Embodied,” an evening celebrating short films by local Black, brown and queer artists and dancers. The screening and Q&A with filmmakers and participants showcases the interplay of activism, movement, and performance. Social hour to follow! Light snacks and (non-alcoholic) refreshments will be provided. Films are in English, with English subtitles. moss time, crip time includes audio description as voice over.
Films:
moss time, crip time (Cynthia Ling Lee.)
Taste her Fruit, Bless the Whore (Diana Mulan Zhu)
Liberating Movement: Black, Brown & Queer All Over (Helen Aldana & Megan Martinez Goltz)

"The Eternal Song" Film Screening
2026-02-11 18:30 - 21:00 | Merrill Cultural Center, 200 McLaughlin Dr, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The Eternal Song is a cinematic journey through timeless lands and Indigenous cultures. Voices from across generations and traditions invite us to witness the enduring scars of colonization on lands and peoples, and the healing pathways carried through ancestral wisdom. Entrusted with medicine stories, the film grapples with colonial legacies, intergenerational trauma, and the culture of separation that fragments our lives.

Film Screening: Sotong and Against this Messy World
2026-04-06 14:00 - 16:00 | Humanities 1 Building, 257 Cowell-Stevenson Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, United States
On April 6, 2026, the Graduate Training in Southeast Asia (GETSEA) consortium and UCSC’s Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions will host two short films highlighting the challenges to art and expression in Malaysia’s complex political, legal, and societal landscape.
Sotong follows four fierce local drag queens who were part of the 2022 Halloween party raided by the authorities. One of them, Juan, was arrested for ‘a man dressing up as a woman’. Two years later, they revisit on the fallout of that night as they continue to perform underground and nurture the Malaysian drag scene in all its beauty, joy, and pain.
Against This Messy World is a deeply introspective and visually captivating short documentary that delves into the heart and soul of artistic expression in Malaysia. A personal exploration, narrated by Malaysian artists, this documentary takes viewers on an evocative journey to understand the essence and purpose of being an artist in a world marked by chaos and uncertainty and piece together conversations and unfiltered moments in their lives.
Universities from across North America will come together to watch the films simultaneously, then connect via Zoom with the filmmakers for a post-screening discussion. Please join us in conversation!

Partners Film Screening
2026-04-09 18:00 - 20:00 | Oakes Learning Center
Join the Center for Labor and Community for a free film screening of the documentary, Partners: How Starbucks Baristas Started a Labor Revolution. Following the screening there will be a discussion with unionized Starbucks baristas. RSVP here

2026 Right Livelihood International Conference
2026-04-13 08:00 - 2026-05-08 17:00
The Right Livelihood International Conference is a four-week global conference exploring how education can strengthen democracy, collective intelligence, and just futures. Bringing together Right Livelihood Laureates, students, faculty, and community partners across continents, the conference combines asynchronous learning with participatory dialogue and collaborative action. Rather than advocating specific outcomes, the conference positions education as a democratic practice and the Right Livelihood College as a steward of dialogue, student voice, and long-term institutional learning.
Registration is free and open to the public. Sign up to receive conference updates, session links, and participation opportunities.

The Tallest Dwarf—film screening and talk with Julie Wyman
2026-04-20 19:00 - 21:30 | Communications Building, 7487 Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
UC Santa Cruz affiliates are invited to a screening and discussion with filmmaker Julie Forrest Wyman. The Tallest Dwarf charts the filmmaker’s quest to find her place within the little people (LP) community at a moment when dwarf identity is poised to radically change. Wyman’s work engages issues of embodiment, body image, and the possibilities and problematics of media spectatorship—all informed by her experience of living with hypochondroplasia dwarfism. Julie Wyman will be in conversation after the screening with Pooja Rangan (Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Amherst College and Visiting Scholar of Visualizing Abolition) and Cynthia Ling Lee (Associate Professor of Performance, Play & Design, UC Santa Cruz).
Co-organized/co-sponsored by “Abolition Medicine and Disability Justice,” collaborative initiative of five UC campuses—Riverside, Irvine, Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco—to addresses health disparities in institutions and policy.
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ADMISSION
– Free and open to UC Santa Cruz affiliates only
– Attend in person at Communications Studio C
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PARKING
– Parking via UCSC permit or ParkMobile
– Core West is the lot closest to the event
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ABOUT THE FILM
As Wyman unpacks the rumors of “partial dwarfism” in her family, she finds that hers is the last of a body type she has inherited. She joins forces with a group of dwarf artists to confront the legacy of being fetishized and put on display. Together they create films that reclaim a complicated history and speak back to the echoes of eugenics in the newly emerging pharmaceutical interventions that make little people taller. Through its personal and expanding perspective, the film invites audiences to a new way of seeing.
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ABOUT THE FILMMAKER
Julie Forrest Wyman’s 2012 documentary STRONG! premiered at AFI Silverdocs and was broadcast nationally on PBS’s Emmy award-winning series, Independent Lens, where it won the series’ Audience Award. Wyman’s work has been awarded support from Sundance, Sandbox, IDA, SF Film Society, Points North, ITVS, the Creative Capital Foundation, The Princess Grace Foundation, California Humanities, and NEH. She has been a fellow at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute and a resident of SF Film Society’s Filmhouse, Siena Art Institute, Logan Nonfiction and Points North. Her films, including FatMob (2016), Buoyant (2005), and A Boy Named Sue (2000), have aired on Showtime, MTV’s LOGO-TV, and have been exhibited on five continents. She serves as Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media at UC Davis.
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Download and share the event flyer here.
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photographer credit: Gabriella Garcia-Pardo; image description: A group of six LP (little people) performers regard their paper body cut outs on the wall.

A Sacred Place: Film Screening and Conversation with Dr. Dolly Kikon
2026-04-21 17:30 - 19:30 | Communications Building, 7487 Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Please join us for American premiere of A Sacred Place (2026), by Professor Dolly Kikon (Anthropology). The film tells the story of stones, spirits, and salt springs in Makhel. The film focuses on intergenerational storytellers and their relationship with the land. It integrates visual ethnography, oral tradition, and geological features of Makhel to center Indigenous pedagogy, community history, and ecology. After the screening, Professor Clementine Bordeaux (HAVC) will provide comments and facilitate a conversation with Kikon and audience member participants.
Makhel in Mao Naga language means a sacred place. Can sacredness exist amid ecocide in our times? Seeking an answer, the film follows life as it unfolds in the mountains of Makhel, a Naga village in northern Manipur. These mountains are composed of sandstones, shales, and siltstones. The sandstone monoliths across the landscape are symbols of ancient alliance and kinship between spirits and humans. The story of the land is also stored in the salt springs, ancient seawater retained in shale soil, a geological feature of these mountains. Geographically part of the Eastern Himalayas, the salt springs of Makhel were formed through sedimentation under an ancient equatorial ocean around 50 million years ago. Naga ancestors regarded these geological features as abodes for spirit custodians and cared for them. A Sacred Place is the story of land narrated by Naga storytellers, as humans prioritize relentless development forgetting their relationship with human and other beings.
Learn more about A Sacred Place.

This screening is a hybrid event. Remote participants will receive a link to the film before the event to watch on their own. They may join the conversation via Zoom.
Please RSVP to register for this event. Register here. Any questions can be directed to seacoast@ucsc.edu
This event is graciously co-sponsored by UCSC’s Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions, Center for South Asian Studies, Indigenous Faculty Network, and The Humanities Institute.
