"Seized" at The Santa Fe International Film Festival

 

Balancing the absurdity of small-town politics with the gravity of a constitutional crisis, SEIZED, set in the small town of Marion, Kansas, is thrust into the international spotlight after a police raid on the Marion County Record and the death of its 98-year-old co-owner,

Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026 2pm - info & tickets

SEIZED is a gripping, stranger-than-fiction investigative thriller that plunges audiences inside the troubling police raid on the Marion County Record. What begins as a shocking small-town incident quickly spirals into a national story, exposing how corruption, politics, and decades-long tensions turned a quaint Kansas community into a battleground over the First and Fourth Amendments. The film unfolds in real time through police body-cam and surveillance footage, revealing the raid’s chaos, the bombshells that followed, and the devastating personal toll on the newsroom, including the tragic death of its 98-year-old co-owner.

Director Sharon Liese allows the story to unfold with nuance, surprises, eccentric characters, and humor. By letting each voice speak for itself, she crafts a rare documentary in which sympathies shift moment to moment, revealing how truth, ego, and fear collide in real time. Blending the juicy intrigue of a classic muckraking narrative with a clear-eyed exploration of power, politics, and the fragility of a free press, SEIZED transforms a headline-grabbing event into a deeply human story that is urgent, unsettling, and impossible to ignore.

See article in the Santa Fe New Mexican: The First, Foremost: Documentary revisits police raid on a Kansas newspaper, shining a light on press freedom

Do you need to go to journalism school?

 Via LightHouse Reports

October 13, 3036

Last month we asked two early career journalists how they got in the field. This month we take the conversation to the other side of the classroom.

We speak to two educators from two very different corners of the field who are doing their best to prepare students for a changing industry landscape.

We discuss the pros and cons of formal training and the skills journalists need to be industry-read. It’s what you need to know to thrive in today’s media landscape.

Part 2 of a two-part series.

Interviewees:

Lam Thuy Vo, Associate Professor in Data Journalism, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism (CUNY),

Investigative Reporter at Documented

Ron Haviv, Photojournalist and Co-founder of The VII Foundation

Hosts: Beatriz Ramalho da Silva, Tessa Pang

Produced by Lara Bodger

Sound design, mixing and editing: Elli Xypolitaki

Music by mobygratis

Reporting on the Health and Environmental Impacts of Data Centers: Panel With Nina Berman

 Via Tow Center for Digital Journalism

Online event

Monday, October 19  •  Starts at 10:30 AM MDT

The data center roll out to power AI is having immediate and long term health and environmental impacts

The data center roll out to power AI is having immediate and long term health and environmental impacts. To report on these impacts journalists need to understand how air, noise and water pollution impacts human health, the way those pollutants are measured and how corporations are exploiting the permitting process to get their projects approved.

Reserve a spot

Panel

Nina Berman

Evan Simon

Jamie Banks

Michael Cork

Natasha De Jarnett

Celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day with the 4th Annual Honoring Native Nations Powwow on the Santa Fe Plaza

 

On Monday, October 12th, The Santa Fe Indigenous Center invites you to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day with the 4th Annual Honoring Native Nations Powwow on the Santa Fe Plaza. This special event will hold space for tribal members from all Native Nations across Turtle Island to come together and celebrate Indigenous joy and cultural resilience on the Santa Fe Plaza beginning at 9AM through 4:30PM. 

Diné (Navajo) artist Eugene Tapahe's: ART HEALS The Jingle Dress Project and Standing Rock Movement exhibit will be on view at Monroe Gallery through November 1, 2026.

 

Stacey Patton discusses her new book "Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children" with Dean Jelani Cobb and Prof. Nina Berman

 Via Columbia Journalism School

Friday, October 9, 2026, 12:00 - 1:15pm

Registration required. Box lunch will be provided.

Columbia Journalism School, Brown Institute, 2nd Floor, Pulitzer Hall, 2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

Dr. Stacey Patton discusses her new book with Dean Jelani Cobb and Prof. Nina Berman.


Strung Up examines how the lynching of Black children became not an aberration, but a normalized feature of American racial violence. Drawing on meticulous archival research and vivid narrative storytelling, Strung Up traces how white supremacy trained itself socially, culturally, and psychologically to tolerate and ritualize the destruction of Black childhood, including the unborn.

Nationally recognized child advocate Dr. Stacey Patton locates the roots of this violence not solely in the United States, but in Europe’s long history of anti-child brutality. She reveals how centuries of public executions, corporal punishment, religious spectacle, and sanctioned cruelty exposed white children to extreme violence early and often. This violence, she argues, conditioned them to associate pain, domination, and death with moral order.

Patton traces this desensitization across the Atlantic where white children raised within these traditions became adults primed to reproduce racial terror, transforming inherited practices of child cruelty into instruments of white supremacy in the post-emancipation United States.

Blending history with developmental psychology, neuroscience, epigenetics, and research on adverse childhood experiences, Strung Up shows how violence is not only taught, but biologically and psychologically embedded across generations. Patton demonstrates how racial terror functioned as a system of socialization that shaped perception, behavior, and moral reasoning long before it produced the mob, the rope, or the fire.

This event is sponsored by the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights at Columbia University.

"POOL POSITIONS" Exhibit Features Gallery Photographer Anna Boyiazis

Via Kunstkreis Gräfelfing e.V.

October 8 – November 1, 2026

The exhibition features site-specific works by 30 renowned international artists inside a defunct indoor swimming pool. The installations, sculptures, and paintings inherently focus on themes of bathing, water, human body culture, and spatial perception.

The exhibit includes a special installation in the water, an interactive photographic series, videos in niches and adjoining rooms, photography, painting, printmaking, sculpture and objects.

In this way, the walls, shower rooms, lockers, changing rooms, stairs and corridors of the place can be experienced by visitors as new experience spaces.

Vernissage

Thursday, 08.10.2026
From 6 p.m.
Admission is free.

Opening hours
every Thursday to Sunday from 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
on Thursday, October 8, the exhibition opens with the vernissage at 6 p.m.

Exhibition Venue
Old swimming pool in the Lochham primary school
Adalbert Stifter Platz 1
82166 Gräfelfing

Anna Boyiazis is a documentary photographer working between Southern California and East Africa. Her work focuses on conservation, human rights, public health, and women and girls, drawing on long-term, community-embedded storytelling.

The Zanzibar archipelago, where the pictures were taken, is economically and spiritually closely linked to the sea. But half of its population does not dare to go into the water for fear of drowning!

While many boys acquire basic swimming skills by the age of 10, girls have so far been discouraged from learning to swim because there were no swimsuits to cover the body. Swimming lessons also challenge a patriarchal system that prevents women from engaging in activities other than domestic tasks.

Thanks to some grassroots organizations that provide full-body swimsuits and promote swimming lessons, women and girls are now taking to the water. The participants are thus empowered to teach others, creating a cycle that makes the sea accessible to all.