Film Festival and Lecture Series: Author Eugene Lim and SAVE THE GREEN PLANET!

Friday, November 2
Reading/Q&A with Eugene Lim — 6 p.m., The Linda, WAMC's Performing Arts Studio, 339 Central Ave., Albany, followed by a film screening of SAVE THE GREEN PLANET! at 7:15 p.m.

Free and open to the public.

Eugene Lim, acclaimed science fiction and experimental fiction author, will be the keynote speaker at the University at Albany's Writing and Critical Inquiry's Film Festival and Lecture Series to be held Thursday through Sunday, Nov. 1-4.

For a complete schedule of events, visit The Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry at www.albany.edu/wci/

Lim is author of the underground bestselling novel, Dear Cyborgs (2017), which presents the story of two Asian American boys—social outcasts who bond over a love of comic books. Meanwhile, in an alternate universe, a team of superheroes ponders the state of modern society during breaks between black-ops missions and rescuing hostages.

Writing in The New Yorker, author Hua Hsu called Dear Cyborgs “wondrous" and praised Lim's style: "writing is confident and tranquil; he has a knack for making everyday life seem strange―or, in the case of Dear Cyborgs, for making revolution seem like the most natural thing possible. His writing is transfixing from page to page, filled with digressive meditations on small talk and social protest, superheroes, terrorism, the art world, and the status of being marginal . . . There’s an intoxicating, whimsical energy on every page. Everything from radical art to political protest gets absorbed into the rhythms of everyday life . . . [A] sense of the erratic and tangential quality of everyday life―even if it’s displaced into a bizarre, parallel world―drifts off the page, into the world you see, after reading Dear Cyborgs."

Following the Eugene Lim talk, he will also introduce one of his favorite films, SAVE THE GREEN PLANET! (South Korea, 2003, 118 minutes, color), the tale of a troubled young man who believes he must save the world from an alien invasion.

The WCI Film Festival and Lecture Series is cosponsored by the UAlbany Program in Writing and Critical Inquiry and the NYS Writers Institute, with support provided by WAMC, the Office of the Vice Provost and Dean for Undergraduate Education, the Institute for Experiential Education, the Office of Student Engagement, the Vice President for Research, the Alumni Association, Capitalize Albany Corporation, City of Albany Capital Resource Corporation, Humanities New York, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.