Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

The screening of Esther Figueroa’s film Fly Me to the Moon (2019) is available to registered participants through Vimeo March 23 -27.

Register here

FLY ME TO THE MOON (2019), 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. Winner of 2019 Awareness Festival Merit Award. Trailers for the film are available on Esther Figueroa’s YouTube channel.

ESTHER FIGUEROA PH.D, is a Jamaican independent film maker, writer, educator 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 environment, social injustice, and community empowerment. Figueroa’s films are screened and televised 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. She recently created and co-hosted GEFF 2020, the first online film festival focused on global extraction. In 2013, Figueroa was Distinguished Writer in Residence at University of Hawai’i English Department. Her environmental novel Limbo (2013), was a finalist in the 2014 National Indie Excellence Awards for Multi-cultural Fiction.

This event series is sponsored by the Department of English, the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, the Center for Latin American Studies, Jack E. Davis, Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities, Imagining Climate Change and the Graduate Film Studies Group