CANCELLED: Supervising producer of Fahrenheit 911 and Bowling for Columbine speaks at UC Santa Cruz June 3

Documentary filmmaker Tia Lessin, supervising producer of Michael Moore's new documentary Fahrenheit 911, will give a free public lecture on Thursday, June 3, at UC Santa Cruz.

Lessin's talk, "Documentary Film & Human Rights," will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Room 240 at College Eight.

UPDATE: This event has been cancelled.

An accomplished filmmaker in her own right, Lessin has been part of Moore's team for almost 10 years, working as supervising producer on Fahrenheit 911, which just took the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine. She was coordinating producer of The Big One, and won two Emmy Award nominations--and one arrest--for her work as senior producer of The Awful Truth. Lessin was also a segment producer on the Emmy Award-winning TV Nation.

Lessin has produced and directed her own documentaries, including Behind the Labels about sweatshops in the United States, for which she received the 2002 Sidney Hillman Award for broadcast journalism. Her film A Family Divided tells the story of a Pakistani truck driver who remains jailed following his arrest by the FBI after September 11.

Among her other film credits, Lessin was co-producer of the Academy Award-nominated Shadows of Hate, distributed free to high schools around the country as part of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance Curriculum.

Lessin is a graduate of Cornell University and a former labor organizer.

Lessin's visit is being sponsored by the UCSC Community Studies Department. In addition to the lecture, she will be meeting with UCSC faculty and students interested in documentary and social change. For more information about Lessin's visit, please call Paul Ortiz, assistant professor of community studies, at (831) 459-5583.