Film screening: "The Volunteers" – Mountain Rescue Brings Us Home
The documentary The Volunteers explores big philosophical, ethical, and political issues through an unlikely subject: mountain rescue. This example of volunteering offers a positive, inspiring way of thinking about civic life that can help us transcend political differences and build more sustainable liberal democratic societies—volunteering to build character, community, and society. Take a journey with historian Mark S. Weiner and explore the connections between two mountain rescue organizations, one near Seattle, Washington, and other in Tyrol, Austria. These connections run through World War II, Nazism, and the translation of a book. The Volunteers is a philosophical, poetic, and historical meditation that grows from mountain experience and leads to lessons for today.
About the Filmmaker
Mark Weiner has served as a Fulbright Scholar in Akureyri, Iceland; Salzburg, Austria; and Uppsala, Sweden. He received an A.B. from Stanford University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. He is the author of The Rule of the Clan: What an Ancient Form of Social Organization Reveals about the Future of Individual Freedom (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the End of Caste (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), and Americans without Law: The Racial Boundaries of Citizenship (New York University Press, 2006). He is co-editor of the exhibition catalog Law's Picture Books: The Yale Law Library Collection (2017), which is based on a critically acclaimed rare books exhibition at the Grolier Club in New York City. All these works have won awards.
Sponsored by: Scheller College's Law Ethics Area, the Office of the Associate Vice Provost of the Arts, the Ethics, Technology, and Human Interaction Center (ETHICx), and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication.