Sen. Chuck Hagel headlines World Affairs Conference

Crowd-pleaser Roger Ebert to return as well

The Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder is proud to announce the kick-off of its Sixty-first year with an opening keynote address by Senator Chuck Hagel on “Twenty-First Century International Relations” at 11:30 a.m. on Monday, April 6 in Macky Auditorium.

Senator Hagel is currently the chairman of the Atlantic Council of the United States. He served as a Republican representative from Nebraska in the U. S. Senate from 1997 to 2009 and was a senior member of three Senate committees: Foreign Relations; Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs; and Intelligence. Hagel also served as the chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the Senate Climate Change Observer Group.

Hagel is a Vietnam combat veteran and former deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration. He is also the author of America: Our Next Chapter, a straightforward examination of the current state of our nation that provides substantial proposals for the challenges of the 21st century.

Monday, April 6 will also mark the return of Roger Ebert to the Conference on World Affairs. Ebert previously participated in 38 consecutive years of CWA before surgery sidelined him in 2006. He says, “Here I have learned nearly everything I know and contributed even more than that.” Ebert created the Cinema Interruptus, one of the Conference’s most distinctive and interactive series of sessions. Every year a movie is selected and shown late Monday afternoon, in a normal, uninterrupted way. Then, for a total of 8 hours spread over the following four afternoons, the movie is dissected almost on a frame-by-frame basis. Ebert, or anybody else in the audience may direct the projectionist to freeze frame by yelling, “Stop!” in order to make comments about any aspect of the movie: plot points, acting or directing techniques, camera movement, frame composition, etc.

During Ebert’s absence in 2007 and 2008, film critic Jim Emerson took over as host of Cinema Interruptus. To celebrate his re-debut, Ebert has selected one of his favorite movies of 2007, Chop Shop, an independent film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Ramin Bahrani, the writer and director of the movie will also be joining Ebert and Emerson at this year’s Interruptus.  This year, the Cinema Interruptus will run Monday, April 6 through Thursday, April 9 at 4 p.m. in Macky Auditorium.

Ebert’s annual shot-by-shot film analysis at CWA has inspired the commentary tracks for DVDs of Dark City, Casablanca, Floating Weeds and Citizen Kane, which won Variety’s Video Premiere award as the best DVD commentary of the year.
The Conference on World Affairs was founded in 1948, originally as a forum on international affairs.  It quickly gained fame in its early years with such notable participants as Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Miller and Henry Kissinger. Over the second half of the century, it has expanded to encompass music, literature, environment, science, journalism, visual arts, diplomacy, technology, spirituality, film, politics, business, medicine, human rights and recently has brought such names as Joe Biden, Charles Krauthammer, Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow to Boulder.

All Conference on World Affairs sessions are free and open to the public, making the CWA the largest, most accessible event of its kind in the country.

This year’s Conference will be held April 6-10, 2009. A biographical listing of all Conference on World Affairs participants is now online at www.colorado.edu/cwa.  The full CWA schedule will be posted to that site by March 20, 2009.