March 7 was a big night for "friends of CISAC" at this year's Academy Awards. The work of two people with CISAC ties--Daniel Ellsberg and Kimberly Theidon--revealed how academia can connect with the Silver Screen in compelling and meaningful ways.

Ellsberg (who spoke at a packed CISAC Seminar in January), was the subject of a film nominated for Documentary Feature: The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. As the film synopsis states, "When ex-Marine and military analyst Daniel Ellsberg came to oppose the war in Vietnam, he smuggled thousands of pages of photocopied documents out of the Pentagon and leaked them to the press. What they revealed was a history of government policy in the region that had long been kept secret from the American public."

In addition, The Milk of Sorrow ("La Teta Asustada"), Peru's entry this year for Best Foreign Language Film, was partly influenced by Theidon's first book, Entre Prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú. Theidon, an associate professor of anthropology at Harvard, was a Hamburg Fellow at CISAC in 1999-2000. Her research focuses on sexual violence, gender and memory.

According to an interview published on twitch.net, Theidon, "Compiled testimonies of women who were mistreated or violated during the political violence that took place in the Andean highlands in the 1980s. In some of these testimonies the women spoke of an illness "la teta asustada"--wherein trauma experienced by women who were raped by members of the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) was passed on to their children through breast milk. These captivating testimonies motivated [Director Claudia] Llosa to research further and to eventually script 'The Milk of Sorrow.'"

Although neither film captured an Oscar, their nominations for this year's top film prizes are a testimony to the efforts of Ellsberg and Theidon to bring critical issues into the public discourse.