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On Friday, April 4, UCCS will be hosting a dual screening and director conversation of the Award Winning Documentary, Eat your Catfish.
The first screening and conversation will be held on Campus in Centennial Hall at 12:00pm.
The second screening and conversation will be held at First Congregational Church at 20 E. St. Vrain St.
The event is free and open to the public! All are welcome!
 
Sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Communications, and Sociology; The Office of Strategic Initiatives, The Social Science Symposium Series, and First Congregational Church.
 
SYNOPSIS 
Years with ALS have left Kathryn paralyzed and needing 24-hour care. With her mind intact and having opted for mechanical breathing, she could live like this indefinitely. But the situation has embittered and alienated her husband Said, and proved too much for many nurses and aides. Her grown son Noah, who lives with Kathryn and Said in their New York City apartment, struggles to balance his academic obligations with those he feels to his mother. The disease has also been a destructive force complicating relations between everyone in her family. Kathryn often falls into despair, but she has been holding on to see her daughter’s wedding day. This project draws on 930 hours of footage—all filmed without any crew present from a fixed camera from Kathryn’s point of view. The result is a profoundly intimate, layered and wryly funny portrait of a family at its breaking point. 
DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT 
This film is structured as a first-person account of Kathryn’s final stage before death. It is, in its totality, her plea for the wider world to understand what she went through, why she persisted, and finally why she gave up. So, rather than turning and looking at Kathryn, or asking others to sit down and tell us about her, we aim to bring the viewer as close as possible to actually being Kathryn and experiencing what she experienced. 
Through Kathryn’s own narration, we enter the inner world of a severely disabled woman and mother facing her own mortality. We wanted to break from earlier documentaries on these themes by telling a true story, without contrived heroics, of the brutality of the daily challenges—both practical and emotional—of in-home care for a disabled and terminally ill person. 
We hope viewers’ assumptions and feelings will shift as the film progresses from pinning all the blame on any one family member to appreciating that each, in their way, is responsible for their collective pain and each, in turn, is to be forgiven for their shortcomings. Kathryn’s story should also have particular resonance at this unique global moment where we all have faced isolation and the fear of a lonely death. 
Senem Tüzen & Adam Isenberg, Noah Amir Arjomand
Noah Amir Arjomand 
Noah Amir Arjomand is an Iranian-American sociologist  with degrees from Columbia and Princeton universities. He is currently a chancellor’s distinguished fellow in creative writing and writing for the performing arts at the University of California - Riverside. Noah’s photography has been published in The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and PBS Frontline. Cambridge University Press published his first book, Fixing Stories, on news fixers who assist foreign journalists in Turkey and Syria, in 2022. Eat Your Catfish is his film debut. 

Hosted by: Department of Anthropology

Additional Information can be found at: https://mlc.uccs.edu/event/11172645

Arts