Faculty member Christine Acham is spending her sabbatical on the film festival circuit, and next week she will be back in her own neighborhood — at the Sacramento International Film Festival.

She and her life partner, Clifford Ward, are presenting their documentary, Infiltrating Hollywood: The Rise and Fall of The Spook Who Sat By the Door. The Sacramento screening is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, April 14, at the Artisan Building, 1901 Del Paso Blvd., in Part II of the festival's Cine Soul program. Infiltrating Hollywood runs for 57 minutes; watch the trailer.

Acham joined the UC Davis faculty in 2000; she is an associate professor in African American and African Studies program, teaching film, television and popular culture.

And now she has become one of the filmmakers whom she studies. And an award-winning filmmaker at that, with Infiltrating Hollywood having been named best film in the San Diego Black Film Festival in January.

Friday (April 8), Acham and Ward are presenting their documentary in the Beverly Hills Film Festival, where Infiltrating Hollywood is an official selection. The documentary is also an official selection of the Athens (Ohio) International Film and Video Fest, April 22-28.

Infiltrating Hollywood grew out of Acham’s paper on The Spook Who Sat By the Door, “the controversial and repressed 1973 film,” as described on Acham and Ward’s Facebook page for their documentary. Acham published the paper in Screening Noir in 2005; Screening Noir, a journal of black film, television and new media culture, is published by UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Black Studies.

With interviews of many of the people involved in making the film, and with academics, and with archival footage and production documents, Infiltrating Hollywood “tells the story of The Spook Who Sat by the Door from its inception as a novel to its release and repression,” Acham and Ward write on the Facebook page.

“Repressed” because, after The Spook Who Sat by the Door came out, movie houses stopped showing it and copies began disappearing. The film lives on today (released on DVD in 2004, because the director, Ivan Dixon, had stashed away the negative, under an assumed name.

The movie, based on Sam Greenlee’s 1969 novel of the same name, tells the fictional story of a man who became the first black CIA agent, only to leave the agency and take his CIA training to the streets — during the Black Power movement.

The filmmakers had tricked a major studio into financing the film, by passing it off as a “blaxploitation” film — typical of the era.

“The Spook used the veil of the blaxploitation film era to create an oppositional narrative,” Acham and Ward wrote in a synopsis of Infiltrating Hollywood. “Instead of images of pimps and prostitutes perpetuated by Hollywood during the 1970s, the film portrayed black people who were willing to fight for their beliefs, to achieve freedom from oppression.

“Although often satirical in presentation, the film was still considered too dangerous for black consumption. In the era of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO, exhibitors reported that the FBI and local police demanded the cancellation of screenings and most copies of the film were destroyed.”

Sacramento International Film Festival tickets.

Davis Feminist Film Festival

The Davis Feminist Film Festival, sponsored by the Consortium for Women and Research, is scheduled for next Thursday and Friday, April 14 and 15.

"Now in its sixth year and increasingly international in scope, the festival provides an inclusive public space for under-represented artists — particularly women and people of color — to raise consciousness about gender, race, class, sexuality, and other dimensions of social inequality," the organizers said in a news release.

"It is a fun, inspiring, community-building event for artists and audiences alike!"

The Davis Feminist Film Festival "puts Davis on the map for promoting feminist filmmaking," the organizers said. This year's festival drew more than 100 submissions, from Davis and other cities and towns across the United States, and from many other countries.

The 19 selected films are from the United States, Argentina, China, Ghana, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Spain and Sweden. The filmmakers range from film studies students and faculty, to independent artists and activists.

This year's films are variously funny, sad, charming, quirky, disturbing, thought-provoking and entertaining, said Michelle Yates, a doctoral candidate in cultural studies and director of the 2011 festival.

She described a few of the standouts:

• Overnight Stay — A beautifully hand-painted film that explores human nature through an elderly Jewish woman’s reminiscence about a small act of kindness in Krakow, Poland, in 1941.

• Pro-Homo — A rap video in which teens espouse staying true to one's self in expressing idetity.

• Long Haul — Three dynamic, female truck drivers share their views on working in a male-dominated occupation and how the job affects the women's lives and families.

• Attached to You — This film uses claymation to illustrate the varied experiences of parenthood, from pregnancy and birth, to parents seeing their children grow up, to letting go — all while emphasizing the lasting bond between parent and child.

• The Witches of Gambaga — An award-winning documentary about the plight of some Ghanaian women, often those who are strong-willed and successful, who are accused of being witches. Professor Amina Mama, director of Women and Gender Studies at UC Davis, co-produced the film, and is scheduled to participate in a question-and-answer session after the screening. The Witches of Gambaga (55 minutes) is last on the festival's Thursday night program.

The screenings, along with a silent auction, are planned at the Veterans Memorial Theatre, 203 E. 14th St. Each day's film program is scheduled to begin at 6 p.m., after a no-host reception with food and beverages starting at 5.

Advance tickets, $7 for students and $10 for general admission (per night), are available at Armadillo Music, 205 F St. Tickets at the door will cost $10 for students and $15 for general admission (per night).

The festival also offers tickets for $5 to $15, on a sliding scale, meaning that you  pay what you can afford). These are available at the Women’s Resources and Research Center, North Hall, and the Davis Farmers Market.

More information, including descriptions for all of the films.

The music matters in Der Untertang

Hitler's final days are depicted in Der Untergang (Downfall), the last of the 2010-11 Focus on Film series at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts.

For 2010-11, the center chose films telling intimate stories about men at the most crucial times in their lives, with music that transcends the "soundtrack" tag — instead taking a central role in the aesthetic experience. Der Untergang features music by Stephan Zacharias.

The Mondavi Center's presentation is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, April 21, in the Vanderhoef Studio Theatre. Der Untertang is in German with English subtitles.

The film, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, tells of Hitler's final 10 days,during which he raged against his powerlessness to stop the fall of Berlin, and with it, World War II and the Third Reich.

Housed in an underground bunker, he cajoled his generals and isolated himself with his mistress, Eva Braun, as the situation left him increasingly unhinged. An intense, award-winning performance by Bruno Ganz as Hitler is the centerpiece of the film, which is based on numerous books, most notably the firsthand account of Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s secretaries.

The film runs for 156 minutes and is rated R (for “restricted”), a national rating that says children under 17 must be accompanied by a parent or adult guardian.

Tickets are available online, or by visiting or calling the Mondavi Center box office, (530) 754-2787 or (866) 754-2787. Box office hours: noon-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday.