Film Description--Homo Sapiens 1900

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March 10 - 18, 2001

Film Description

Sweden, 1999
85 min, 35mm
Peter Cohen, Director

Wednesday, March 14, 7:00 pm

Special Guests: Dr. Marshall Horwitz, Associate Professor, Division of Medical Genetics, University of Washington School of Medicine; Phillip Thurtle, School of Communications, UW; Professor Maynard V. Olson, Genome Center and Medicine, UW; Professor Emeritus Arno G. Motulsky, Medicine and Genetics, UW

Homo Sapiens 1900

A deliberately paced, devastatingly effective telling of the rise and fall of the Eugenics movement, the “science” of improving the human race by selective breeding. Eugenics found enthusiastic support in the US, where by 1907 over 20 states had enacted compulsory sterilization laws; in Sweden, which integrated the ideology into the social policies of a welfare state; in communist Russia, where eugenics theorists were first celebrated and then brutally silenced; and finally in Nazi Germany, which made “racial hygiene” a crucial part of its agenda. With today’s rise of genetic technology already resurrecting many of the principles underlying the Eugenics movement, this is a must-see film.