On Sunday, May 27, ICA will present its Theme Film Program, a special one-day event, as part of the 57th Annual ICA Conference in San Francisco. The program, which will take all day (beginning at 9:00 a.m.) in Union Square 1 and 2 at the Hilton San Francisco, features four feature-length films produced by independent Bay Area filmmakers and two programs of selected scenes and shorts by local independent film collectives.

The films were selected to emphasize the conference's theme of "Creating Communication: Content, Control, and Critique." Particular importance lies in the fact that each feature is a local and independent production: examples of alternative and democratized communication. However, the films also highlight the diversification of content creation and distribution within diverse and complex communication environments.

In addition, the event demonstrates the relevance of film as a tool of communication, and examines how people-including marginalized voices-participate in the creative process.

The first installment (9:00 a.m.) in the Theme Film Program is "Queer Women of Color" (60 min.), a selection of highlights from the work of the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP). The Project's purpose is to promote the creation and exhibition of films that increase the visibility of women of color, reflect their life stories, and address the vital social justice issues that concern their community. QWOCMAP provides professional training, equipment, screening opportunities and resources free of charge to guarantee full access to our traditionally underserved community, particularly low-income and immigrant queer women of color.

At 10:30 a.m. Cine Accion, the Bay Area's media arts center for independent Latina / Latino film and video, presents the documentary film Romantico (2005, 80 min.). It tells the story of Mexican musician Carmelo Muniz Sanchez, who returns home to his beloved daughters after years spent playing in San Francisco's taquerias and hipster joints. Sanchez soon realizes he can't adequately support his family and plots a return to the U.S.

The third film in the program, Straight Outta Hunters Point (2001, 75 minutes), is another documentary. First-time San Francisco filmmaker Kevin Epps takes an insider tour of Hunters Point, one of San Francisco's public housing projects-this is where he grew up and still lives. Only an insider like Epps could shoot such personal footage about Hunter's Point's hustlers, gang members, and residents. Straight Outta Hunters Point is "an emotionally intense reality check that focuses on the daily drama of gang-related rap wars plaguing a community fighting for social and economic survival." The film shows at 12:00 p.m.

Maquilapolis (2006, 68 minutes), a documentary by Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre, screens at 1:30 p.m. Carmen works the graveyard shift in one of Tijuana's maquiladoras, the multinationally owned factories that came to Mexico for its cheap labor. After making television components all night, Carmen comes home to a shack she built out of recycled garage doors, in a neighborhood with no sewage lines or electricity. She suffers from kidney damage and lead poisoning from her years of exposure to toxic chemicals. She earns six dollars a day. But Carmen is not a victim. She is a dynamic young woman, busy making a life for herself and her children. Maquilopolis confronts labor violations, environmental devastation, and urban chaos -- life on the frontier of the global economy.

The fifth segment of the Theme Film program is comprised of selections from the productions of Other Cinema (60 minutes, 3:00 p.m.) minutes). The Other Cinema exhibition and publication project provides an alternative platform for the dissemination of extraordinary film (and video) works. The Other Cinema celebrates peculiar visions and offbeat sensibilities, drawn from the contemporary underground as well as the archives. Be it auteur, exploitation, or industrial, OC delivers a decidedly different audio-visual experience -- ingenious, comic, critical...dangerous. (For those interested in the work of Other Cinema, the project will also screen a feature film on Saturday night, May 26, for $7 at 992 Valencia Street in San Francisco's Mission District.)

The final feature in the program is Weather Underground (2002, 92 minutes), an Academy Award-nominated documentary by Sam Green and Bill Siegel. "Hello. I'm going to read a declaration of war. Within the next 14 days we will attack a symbol of American justice." Thirty years ago, with these words, a group of young American radicals announced their intention to overthrow the U.S. government. Fueled by outrage over the Vietnam War and racism in America, they went underground during the 1970s, bombing targets across the country that they felt symbolized "the real violence" that the U.S. government and capitalist power were wreaking throughout the world. As former members reflect candidly about the idealistic passion that drove them to "bring the war home," they paint a compelling portrait of troubled and revolutionary times, with unexpected and often striking connections to the current world situation. Weather Underground screens at 4:30 p.m.