ZYZZYVA Movie Night with Ingrid Rojas Contreras: Songs of Earth

Co-presented by Zyzzyva Magazine and Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary Festival

This year’s Litquake festival will take place October 8th-24th! For more information about Litquake’s festival and year-round programs, visit litquake.org.

The series wherein famous authors choose a film that intersects with their artistic obsessions

Rebecca Solnit is a writer whose stunning breadth of spirit and mind has inspired and enlightened generations. As part of the Roxie’s Fiftieth Anniversary, Solnit, who has been coming to the Roxie for its whole life, calls herself such a rare thing as a longtime fan. For Movie Night, Solnit introduces Songs of Earth, a poetic, unspeakably beautiful film by director Margreth Olin, executive produced by Liv Ullman and Wim Wenders.

On the screen, the great scale of majestic fjord rural landscape, which Olin’s father sets to love deeply through all seasons, is interwoven with the minute scale of human history—the tale of impoverished, rugged farmers in the region and the couple’s own marriage.

In Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, the author plays with timescale in similar ways. In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit writes into the macro-scale of the last 65 years of social progress, and what this progress means now. “In her telling,” says the New York Times, “the current rise of authoritarianism is the dying gasp of an old world order, and we are on the precipice of living in a multicultural and interconnected world.”

Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
Show starts promptly at 6:00 pm.
Q&A with the author follows the movie.
Book signing and a chance to shop Rebecca Solnit’s recommended reading list (courtesy of Dog Eared Books) will be available both before and after the show.

Zyzzyva Movie Night was created and is produced by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A longtime climate and human rights activist, she serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act. Solnit has won numerous awards, including Yale’s Windham Campbell Literature Prize and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It won a California Book Award. Her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was a National Bestseller, and a recipient of a California Book Award. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.