In an era of unprecedented mobility, Tony Buba is committed to staying in one place. He has been chronicling the decline of his hometown, Braddock, PA, for some forty years in documentaries including J. Roy-New and Used Furniture, the better-known Lightning Over Braddock, and his most recent film, We Are Alive! It is one of the reel world's fine ironies that, in its death, this once-booming steel town survives, and brilliantly, in the spunky, humorous, and penetrating observations that are Buba's stock-in-trade.
As Anthology Film Archives noted, “One of the most singular, and egregiously overlooked, filmmakers in the U.S., Tony Buba is a national treasure, the prime representative of the blue-collar, populist, politically committed yet outrageously entertaining American filmmaking movement that's largely missing-in-action.”
We are pleased that Buba will be joined in conversation by Rick Ayers, a professor of education at the University of San Francisco in the Urban Education and Social Justice cohort; author of, among other books, Studs Terkel's Working: A Teacher's Guide; and a regular blogger on education for the Huffington Post.