Soup & Hope, local leaders back Thursday

Hei Hei Depew, chair of the Cornell University Employee Assembly, will talk about how she chooses to be hopeful in the face of life’s difficulties Feb. 4 in the first installment of this year’s Soup and Hope lunchtime speaker series.

Depew will be followed later this month by the CEO of the Community Foundation of Tompkins County and the president and CEO of Cayuga Health System, details below.

Now in its 14th year, the series — this year on Zoom — is open to the public and features speakers and stories of hope. The series’ six talks will be on Thursdays through April 8, all beginning at 12:15 p.m.

Depew, a financial analyst in the College of Human Ecology, said the racial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are too great to be ignored.

“We are in such strange and unprecedented times,” she said. “In the wake of this horrible pandemic,… racism and xenophobia against Asian Pacific Islanders not only nationally but globally has increased. As a Chinese American, I find myself in a bit of a precarious situation. … I’ve looked inward and thought a great deal about my experience as a Chinese American and I’ve reflected on hope. What is my hope for the future? How do I maintain this hope? Where does this hope come from?”

Other speakers in this year’s series include George P. Ferrari Jr., CEO of the Community Foundation of Tompkins County, on Feb. 11; Dr. Martin Stallone, president and CEO of Cayuga Health System, on Feb. 25; Eric Acree, director of Cornell’s John Henrik Clarke Africana Library and coordinator of fine arts and music libraries, on March 11; Amaris Janel Henderson ’21, a performing and media arts major in the College of Arts and Sciences and a communications assistant in A&S, on March 25; and Sarah Brylinsky, communications and integration manager for the Campus Sustainability Office, on April 8.

More than 60 speakers — encompassing Cornell staff, faculty, students, alumni and community members from the greater Ithaca area — have touched, inspired and motivated campus and community members who’ve attended the annual winter series since it began in 2008.
To access: https://scl.cornell.edu/soup-hope-0

Updates from Cornell Cinema

Cornell Cinema will continue to offer a wide variety of films with Cornell course connections this spring, and virtual screenings will begin this month, including “Escher,” a documentary about Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher.

Highlights of the spring semester include “The World of Wong Kar Wai,” a seven-film series of early work by the Hong Kong auteur, all recently restored. Some titles include “Chungking Express,” “Happy Together” and “In the Mood for Love.”

Also on tap: “A Francophone Film Festival,” in which Cornell Cinema will team up with faculty in the Department of Romance Studies. This lineup of six films, supported by a grant from the French-American Cultural Exchange in Education and the Arts, includes “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” “The Freshmen” and “Varda by Agnès,” a survey of work by the late French filmmaker Agnès Varda.

For more information: https://cinema.cornell.edu.

East Hill Notes are published the first and third Wednesdays of each month in Tompkins Weekly.