With the US war in Afghanistan about to enter its second decade, filmmaker and Emerson professor John Gianvito felt compelled to mark the milestone cinematically by turning to an influential example of anti-war cinema for inspiration: Far from Vietnam, the 1967 collective omnibus spearheaded by the great film-essayist Chris Marker, who edited the work of a number of collaborators into a dynamic fusion of documentary, activism and cinematic experiment addressed to a war that seemed curiously near and far at the same time. Similarly, Gianvito has fashioned a parallel response to the present state of affairs. This program juxtaposes both films in hopes that spectators will be provoked to compare the responses to US aggression then and now, by filmmakers and the population at large. — David Pendleton