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Tuesday 12pm - 5pm Wednesday 12pm - 5pm Thursday 12pm - 5pm Friday 12pm - 5pm

Public Trust, 4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA (2026)

10/21/2026

Join us at Public Trust for Democracy Under Siege, a film screening and conversation on Wednesday, October 28, 2026 from 5:30-7:30pm, about the power of political cartoons and the state of American democracy. The screening will be followed by a hybrid conversation with director Laura Nix and Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes, moderated by scholars Jeff Green and Aaron Levy. Presented in partnership with the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania and sponsored by Women Make Movies.

Directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Laura Nix, Democracy Under Siege features the sharp, darkly funny work of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes, formerly of the Washington Post. From her bird’s-eye view in the catbird seat of the nation’s capital, Telnaes offers a razor-sharp critique of political hypocrisy, as top political commentators lay bare the complex history and challenges of the world’s most influential political system.

Made on the eve of the 2024 election, the film trains its lens on one of the most extreme and vital moments in American democracy’s nearly 250 years of existence, tracing some of today’s urgent crises — including constitutional logjams, executive overreach, judicial ethics, a media environment saturated with disinformation, and a renewed backlash against multiracial democracy — to their roots in American history.

As the country grapples with fundamental challenges that transcend individual presidencies, the film asks a question that has only grown more urgent: can the nation preserve its democratic ideals amidst severe polarization, or will it fall prey to an authoritarian takeover?

Democracy Under Siege is the sixth and final film in the award-winning Draw for Change series, which pairs women filmmakers with women cartoonists working under censorship and repressive governments around the world.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/democracy-under-siege

Image: Film still from Democracy Under Siege of the work of editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes. Directed by Laura Nix, 2025. Courtesy of WMM.

10/16/2026

Join us at Public Trust for Gifts of the Longhouse, a public conversation on Tuesday, November 10, 2026 from 5:30-7:30pm, exploring Haudenosaunee influences on the early formation of US governance and the US constitution. Organized as Philadelphia commemorates the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, this hybrid panel brings leading Haudenosaunee and other Native American scholars together to illuminate an often-overlooked chapter in the story of American democracy.

This program features Dr. Donald Grinde and Dr. Carol Cornelius, two of the most important Native American historians in this field of inquiry; Iroquois scholar Rick Chavolla; and moderator Betty Lyons, Esquire, President & Executive Director of the American Indian Law Alliance. Presented in partnership with We Are the Seeds and Casa de Duende and jointly curated by Tailinh Agoyo, David Acosta, and Aaron Levy.

Gifts of the Longhouse invites audiences to reconsider the origins of American democratic thought by centering the governance traditions of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (often referred to historically as the Iroquois Confederacy). The program will examine how its sophisticated systems of governance, diplomacy, consensus-building, and shared power—developed centuries before European contact—were encountered and studied by colonial leaders. It will also explore how these systems have been identified by scholars and institutions as an important influence on early American political thought and the development of the U.S. Constitution.

Semiquincentennial storytelling often re-centers familiar founders and familiar rooms as the official story. Our goal through this program is to expand this narrative, showing that democratic imagination in the "birthplace of democracy" was also shaped through Indigenous diplomacy, political example, and contested interpretation, and to correct the omission of Native voices. Presenting this history during Philadelphia's 2026 commemorations situates a public-facing, evidence-based conversation exactly where the U.S. Constitution was debated—while also acknowledging the living sovereignty and intellectual traditions of Native nations today, consistent with the spirit of Congressional reaffirmations of government-to-government relationships.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/gifts-of-the-longhouse

Image: The Canandaigua, Two Row, and Haudenosaunee Confederacy Wampum Belts. Image by Lindsay Speer, 2008. Permission granted for use.

10/15/2026

Join us at Public Trust for Pan-Africanisms and Exile, a film screening, performance reading, and conversation on Thursday, November 5, 2026 from 6:30–9:00pm exploring the cinema of the pioneering avant-garde Sudanese poet, painter, and filmmaker Hussein Shariffe and unexplored questions of exile and displacement in the African continent and its diaspora. The program opens with The Dislocation of Amber (1975), introduced by Shariffe's daughter, Eiman Shariffe, followed by a performance reading by Umniya Najaer and a conversation between Nisrin Elamin, Umniya Najaer, and project curator Mai Eltahir, moderated by Hakimah Abdul-Fattah.

Presented in partnership with the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. Sponsored by the Africana Studies at Penn and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies.

The Dislocation of Amber (1975), newly restored by Cimatheque – Alternative Film Center in Cairo and recently premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, appears at a moment when war has displaced millions of Sudanese, and when questions of solidarity across the Global South under contexts of authoritarianism and survival economies are pressing again. What social and political solidarities are possible between Sudan and the wider Global South? How is the present haunted by the past, and how is that haunting rendered visually and sonically? What trans-regional aesthetics might emerge from attunement to cosmology, spiritual entanglement, indigeneity, and collaborative cultural production? Umniya Najaer's performance reading, written in response to the film, carries its sung poetics into the present. The conversation that follows brings together anthropology, Black studies, and curatorial practice.

Hussein Shariffe (1934–2005) was a Sudanese painter, poet, and filmmaker whose work moved between Khartoum, London, and Cairo. He trained as a painter in London, then returned to Sudan in 1960 to teach and to found the arts periodical Twenty One. In the 1970s, he turned to cinema. He made The Dislocation of Amber (1975) at the UK's National Film School. The film offers a surrealist account of the ruined port city of Suakin, an archipelago located on the western coast of the Red Sea in eastern Sudan. It traces anti-colonial registers within the gradual states of exhaustion, contamination, and desertification imposed on every form of life, from scorpions and camels to coral, peacocks, and shells, moving between architectural close-ups and indigenous hauntings to unfold the land’s latent potency.

As Suakin is bound to the cycle of ingestion and digestion enacted by colonial extractivism and sedimentation, and slavery in the Red Sea, the film moves through this slow undoing, revealing the unsovereign arrested within post-colonial Sudan. The famous Sudanese singer and friend of the filmmaker, Abdel Aziz Dawood, renders the Sufi poem "The W**e Ode" by Ibn Al-Faridh in the film.

The film is both an elegy for a city and an early meditation on dispossession and exile. Those conditions would shape Shariffe's own life after Sudan's 1989 military coup forced him to Cairo, where he kept making films until his death. In revising Shariffe's practice today, this event also seeks to explore independent filmmaking as a form of cultural and political dissent and within contexts of authoritarianism, as well as possibilities for trans-regionalist aesthetics and decentered modes of cultural production today.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/pan-africanisms-and-exile

Image: Hussein Shariffe, film still from The Dislocation of Amber, 1975. Shared with permission of the rights holders. Courtesy of Eiman Shariffe and the Hussein Shariffe estate. Digital restoration by Cimatheque – Alternative Film Center, Cairo.

10/14/2026

Join us at Public Trust for The Landscape of Memory, a screening and conversation on Thursday, October 29, 2026 from 6:00-8:00pm exploring shifting relationships to place, history and home. The program will feature Maori Karmael Holmes, Lali Khalid, and Sama Alshaibi in conversation, moderated by Zehra Zehra, alongside screenings of works by Carrie Mae Weems, Khalid, and Alshaibi. Moving between artistic practice and cultural stewardship, the program asks what images preserve, what they leave behind, and who ultimately shapes what enters our collective memory.

Presented in partnership with Twelve Gates Arts and their exhibition Extended Constellations, opening October 30, 2026. Sponsored by the Penn Asian American Studies (ASAM), the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Wharton Art Club at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Landscape of Memory considers the image as a place where personal experience and collective history meet. Bringing together the perspectives of filmmaker and curator Maori Karmael Holmes and artists Lali Khalid and Sama Alshaibi, the program explores memory, migration, landscape, and the politics of looking through film, photography, and conversation. The discussion is accompanied by a screening of Carrie Mae Weems’ A Woman in Winter and Sama Alshaibi’s Iihyaa’ – إحياء (Revival), alongside images from Lali Khalid’s Letters to Azan.

Carrie Mae Weems’ A Woman in Winter provides a conceptual point of departure for the conversation. In the work, history is not simply something left behind: past, present, and future appear to coexist as a woman moves through memory in order to arrive at the present. This relationship between memory and time resonates across the practices of Alshaibi and Khalid. Alshaibi engages the body in relation to contested landscapes, migration, displacement and inherited histories, while Khalid approaches memory through the more intimate terrain of home, family, distance and the experience of living between places. Across these works, landscape is understood not simply as physical geography but as a repository for histories that can be carried, transformed, contested or lost.

Holmes’ work as a filmmaker, curator, and founder of BlackStar expands these questions from the personal and geographic to the collective and institutional. Her participation introduces the question of how cultural memory is formed: who is given the opportunity to make images, where those images circulate and which stories are preserved and allowed to enter the historical record. In bringing these perspectives together, The Landscape of Memory moves beyond a generalized conversation about identity or diaspora to consider the role images themselves play in constructing memory across generations and geographies.

The program asks: Where does memory live when it is no longer possible to return to the place where it was made? Who enters collective memory, and who disappears from it? What responsibility do artists, curators, and cultural institutions have in determining what survives? Moving between personal memory, historical memory, and cultural memory, the conversation ultimately turns toward the future: What do we want remembered from this moment?

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/the-landscape-of-memory

Image: Sama Alshaibi, iihya’ – إحياء(revival), 2023 (film still)

10/13/2026

Join us at Public Trust for The Private Life of Fascism, the 2026 Robert Cargni Lecture, on Tuesday, October 27, 2026 from 4:30-8:00 p.m. The program explores how authoritarian power moves between public spectacle and everyday life. A screening of Ettore Scola’s film A Special Day begins at 4:30 p.m., followed at 6:45 p.m. by a lecture by Millicent Marcus, Sarai Ribicoff Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University, moderated by Filippo Trentin.

Presented in partnership with the Center for Italian Studies, Departments of Cinema & Media Studies as well as Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies, and Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania.

On May 6 1938, Italians crowded the streets of Rome to welcome Adolf Hi**er and celebrate the alliance between N**i Germany and Fascist Italy. Ettore Scola’s film A Special Day opens with newsreel footage of this grandiose political choreography before turning away from it. In the almost surreal and empty silence of a huge apartment complex, Antonietta – a housewife and mother played by Sophia Loren – encounters her gay neighbor Gabriele – a former radio announcer played by Marcello Mastroianni. Over the course of a single day, their encounter develops into an unexpected intimacy that reveals how fascist power manifests itself not only in public forms but also in the most private spaces of people’s lives.

At a moment when fascism has returned as an urgent category of political debate, A Special Day invites us to consider how fascist power manufactures unity through spectacles of authoritarian power—and how those public spectacles are entangled with the gestures, relationships, and forms of everyday life through which that power takes hold.

Following the screening, Millicent Marcus, the Sarai Ribicoff Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University, will discuss how Scola’s film brings public history into conversation with private lives. Her lecture will also consider how Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni—two icons of Italian cinema—are cast against their familiar star personas to portray individuals excluded from fascism’s public image of national unity. How can cinema show us the intimate processes through which an authoritarian culture takes shape? What possibilities of recognition and solidarity can emerge among those whom it isolates, disciplines, and excludes?

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/the-private-life-of-fascism

Image: From Una giornata particolare (A Special Day), 1977. Directed by Ettore Scola.

10/09/2026

Join us at Public Trust for The Hidden Life of Labor, a film screening and conversation on Thursday, October 22, 2026 from 6:30-8pm about global child labor, girls education, and the power of storytelling. This event will feature a screening of the Oscar-nominated live action short film Anuja (2024), followed by a conversation with director Adam J. Graves and scholars Deven Patel, Sonal Khullar, and Jean-Michel Rabaté. Presented in partnership with the Center for the Advanced Study of India, the South Asia Studies Department, and the Program for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and nonprofit production company Shine Global Inc..

The short film Anuja turns on a deceptively simple problem: what does it mean to choose when material, social and economic conditions of agency have already been radically constrained? A gifted nine-year-old working beside her sister in a Delhi garment factory is offered a chance to return to school—but education, work, family obligation, and survival pull her in different directions. Around that intimate decision lies a much larger political economy: nearly 138 million children remain in child labour worldwide, while the clothes and commodities produced by their hands move through a global supply chain deliberately structured to distance consumers from the conditions of production—to make it difficult to track or trace who made what, where, and under what circumstances. Anuja invites its audiences to confront these realities by drawing us into the fictional world of a single child, whose story is singular but whose circumstances are, in many ways, all too common.

But the film is also interested in what cinema does with such realities. Moving between social realism and fable, work and play, necessity and imagination, Anuja draws on the textures of South Asian life and storytelling while resisting the reduction of its young protagonists to the status of mere victim. What happens when structural violence is given the shape of a story? How does narrative distribute agency, responsibility, and blame? Can humor, beauty, suspense, and even magic make political realities more visible? And what kind of knowledge can fiction produce that empirical reports and statistics cannot? These questions place the film within a larger conversation about political cinema: not simply what stories should be told, but how the medium of film shapes the ways we see, understand, and engage with the world.

Following the screening, writer and director Adam J. Graves will be joined by Deven Patel, Sonal Khullar, and Jean-Michel Rabaté for a conversation ranging from child labor, globalization, the structures of labor, and the politics of education to narrative agency, film theory, folklore, and the pleasures and responsibilities of storytelling. Their discussion will consider Anuja both as an intervention into a pressing social reality and as a work of cinema—asking where art and politics meet, and what happens when a film refuses to choose between the two.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/the-hidden-life-of-labor

Image: Film still from Anuja, directed by Adam J. Graves (2024)

10/08/2026

Join us at Public Trust for Rethinking our Political Inheritances, a conversation on Wednesday, October 21, 2026 from 5-6:30pm about listening at the edges of history and the political resonances of non-alignment. This event will feature filmmaker Mila Turajlić and scholar Kristen Ghodsee in conversation, and has been organized in conjunction with A General Assembly, an archival installation on display at Public Trust through December 1, 2026. Presented in partnership with the Center for Experimental Ethnography, the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication, and the Department of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Non-alignment is often misremembered as neutrality, a way of staying out of the Cold War. For the countries that gathered in Belgrade in 1961, it meant the opposite. It was a third position, taken against colonialism, apartheid, and bloc politics, in support of the right of peoples to decide their own futures. As part of A General Assembly, historian and ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee and filmmaker Mila Turajlić revisit this largely forgotten chapter of the twentieth century by looking at particular people rather than abstract positions. Working across ethnography, oral history and personal archives, they have both spent years with the lives of people who worked in the space the Cold War said didn't exist.

This conversation follows that path through three lives. Elena Lagadinova, a teenage partisan in Bulgaria, went on to build alliances between women in the socialist East and the Global South. Stevan Labudović, Tito's cameraman, filmed the Algerian revolution and the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement. Elaine Mokhtefi, a New Yorker, joined the Algerian struggle and later chose exile over betraying a colleague. Each believed in a larger project. Each also kept a sense of personal judgment within it, and each outlived the era that shaped them, seeing the worlds that gave their work meaning disappear. Kristen Ghodsee and Mila Turajlić sought them out decades later, at the edges of history and listened to what they wanted to pass on. They will discuss what these lives can tell us now, what these networks of solidarity achieved, why they were written out of Cold War histories, and what they might offer a present in which global cooperation feels increasingly fragile.

Rethinking our Political Inheritances is part of the 2026-2027 series HEAR (HERE), organized by the Center for Experimental Ethnography (CEE) at the University of Pennsylvania. The series comprises a year of public programming that traces south-south collaborations and non-aligned solidarities through sonic, visual, and haptic archives.

Join us at Public Trust and other partner sites across Philadelphia including the Barnes Foundation and the ICA as we dialogue with filmmakers, poets, theorists, and artists whose shared attention to how archives sound and resound in the present and can inspire us to think the world anew.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/rethinking-our-political-inheritances

Image: Stevan Labudovic, Screenshot from outtakes of material filmed for Filmske Novosti during President TIto's tour of Africa, 1961. Courtesy of Filmske Novosti.

09/28/2026

Join us at Public Trust for The Borders of Belonging, a conversation on Thursday, October 1, 2026 from 4:00-6:00pm exploring how ideas of citizenship, assimilation, and belonging have shaped the nation's past and continue to influence debates about identity, inclusion, and community today. This event will feature scholars Yoosun Park and Michael Reisch in dialogue, moderated by Ben Jealous and with introductory remarks by Dean Sara S. Bachman. Presented with the School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2) and the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of Pennsylvania.

Join us for a series of conversations about belonging, poverty, work, and technology as the country begins its next 250 years — beginning with who gets to become American, and who gets to decide.

This event is part of America at 250: Where Do We Go From Here?, the annual University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2) speaker series. This year's series comprises four events, all moderated by Ben Jealous, Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. It is co-sponsored by the Andrea Mitchell Center, continuing the partnership established last year on the Politics of Well-Being series.

Penn's School of Social Policy & Practice (SP2) brings together social work, social policy, and nonprofit leadership in an interdisciplinary learning environment. Through a network of research centers and collaborations across Penn, SP2 translates innovative scholarship into actionable solutions to pressing social challenges.

The Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy aims not just to promote, but to understand, democracy. Global in its outlook, multifaceted in its purposes, the Mitchell Center seeks to contribute to the ongoing quest for democratic values, ideas, and institutions throughout the world.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/the-borders-of-belonging

09/25/2026

Join us at Public Trust for A General Assembly, an archival installation from September 1 - December 1, 2026 gathering footage from the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement. Conceived by artist Mila Turajlić, the installation will take the form of a working research space: a selection of materials compiled and activated through six years of research and workshops. Presented with the Department of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College and the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

In September 1961, twenty-five nations gathered in Belgrade, Yugoslavia for the inaugural summit of the Non-Aligned Movement — the most ambitious collective attempt of the postwar era to imagine a world beyond the binary logic of the Cold War. In the ensuing weeks, the movement’s leaders - Tito, Nehru, Nkrumah, Nasser, Sukarno carried their declaration to the floor of the United Nations General Assembly, where they sought to make their voices heard before the world.

As world leaders again convene in New York in September, Public Trust and A General Assembly invite us to attend to this muted and orphaned archive and its contemporary resonances. The installation functions as a site for the assembly and reactivation of archival remnants, showcasing a selection of research materials and the process of their transmission.

The video Voices (Muted), from 2022, centers on the discovery of 26 reels of silent footage from the original summit, preserved in the vaults of Filmske Novosti (the former Yugoslav Newsreels) in Belgrade. Roughly half of the reels contained silent images of speeches by the leaders of the 25 nations present. The video is the culmination of a forensic process to synchronize these fragments with audio of the speeches of Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah, Sihanouk, and Keita recovered in the archives of Radio Belgrade. Accompanying annotated transcripts further map what survives in image and in sound, and what is lost.

Learn more at: https://publictrust.org/a-general-assembly

Image: Video still, Children of the Non-Aligned: the Belgrade sessions, 2002. 2-channel video installation, Belgrade Biennale

09/17/2026

Public Trust is deeply grateful to have received a 2026 grant from the Philadelphia Cultural Fund! Thank you so much for your continued support as we bring the arts into dialogue with health, education, and ecology, and with the lived realities of the communities around us. We will begin announcing our upcoming events for the fall very shortly. Stay tuned as we are incredibly excited for the programs we will be hosting this year enabled by PCF’s generosity!

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Tuesday	12pm - 5pm
Wednesday	12pm - 5pm
Thursday	12pm - 5pm
Friday	12pm - 5pm