“As [documentary filmmakers] we have a chance to make something that transcends straight [journalistic] storytelling. We have the opportunity to bear witness to incredibly messy situations and to interrogate our own placement within that.”
Stephen Maing was a Doc Talk guest on September 17th, 2018. He is an Emmy-nominated Brooklyn-based filmmaker. His film Crime + Punishment chronicles the real lives and struggles of The NYPD 12; a group of black and Latino whistleblower cops and the young minorities they are pressured to arrest and summons in New York City.
Crime + Punishment received a Special Jury Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage. For filmmaker Nina Davenport, that old playground song didn’t go as planned. Single at age forty-one, she decides to have a baby on her own, never minding the odds stacked against her or the extra hurdles of living in New York City…
Nina has spent over a decade turning her life experiences into cinematic essays, following the path of her mentors, documentarian Ross McElwee (Sherman’s March) and Robb Moss (The Same River Twice). Her combined talents as a cinematographer, editor, and storyteller set her apart from the average first-person filmmaker. She develops characters and story arcs better than most Hollywood screenwriters do. In her quest for motherhood, Nina enlists her best friend Amy as a birth partner and her gay friend Eric as a sperm donor. While pregnant, Nina winds up dating the film critic John Anderson in an unusual display of sympathy between a director and a reviewer. The process of baby-making affects all their lives profoundly. Additionally, Nina struggles to cope with the recent death of her mother, who had been a source of strength, and seeks to improve relations with her father, a source of discouragement.
The film taps into the zeitgeist topic of how the modern family is being re-imagined in the early twenty-first century. They say it takes a village to raise a child. In Nina’s case, that village is populated by urban sophisticates who have delayed procreation for as long as possible and are late in confronting its joys and chores. Nina is unflinching at exposing her inner and outer self as a case study. She’s refreshingly frank and funny about the trials that women endure in order to get pregnant, give birth and manage the early years of parenting. After watching, you’ll want to thank your mother.
— Thom Powers, Toronto International Film Festival
Doc Studies graduate and editor Maya Mumma discusses the making of the HBO documentary on photographer Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya shortly after the release of his 2011 Oscar-nominated film Restrepo. Maya describes her role in the researching, shooting and editing of Which Way Is The Frontline From Here?, a tribute to Hetherington’s singular work by his close friend and Restrepo co-director Sebastian Junger.
A documentary about three brothers who run a petrol and service station in Queens, NY. The film examines this unique working environment as a home to discussing economic and global issues, migration, and the idea of family legacy.
Originally from Budapest, Ambrus Hernádi studied film theory and worked on feature productions as a camera assistant. His desire to tell real life stories led him to The New School’s Documentary Studies program.
The Weight of the Sky by Uwa Iduozee
Growing up in East New York, 10-year old Allyssa creates her own fantastical universe to escape the pressures of reality as she witnesses her single father Artrell struggling with unemployment and childhood trauma.
Uwa Iduozee is a Finnish-Nigerian filmmaker & cinematographer with a passion for intimate, character-driven visual storytelling. Before moving to New York, he has worked for the Finnish Broadcasting Company. www.uwaiduozee.com
The Newcomers Club
M.S.131 middle school in Chinatown has the largest number of Chinese immigrant students in Manhattan. Following three such students, this documentary provides a glimpse into the challenges they face and the process of adjusting to their new surroundings.
Tyche Zhuge is a woman, a Chinese, a rebel, an advocate, a life- time social worker, an artist and an admirer of all the creativeness on this planet.
Plenty by Catharina Schürenberg
A visual meditation on the process of recycling in a capitalist economy. From micro to macro, Plenty makes hidden processes visible and challenges our understanding of eco-friendliness.
Born in Germany and now based in New York, Catharina Schürenberg is a filmmaker whose work focuses on social and environmental issues. Over the last 7 years she has worked in the wardrobe and art department on numerous Film and TV productions including the award winning documentary “Casting JonBenet”.
cj.schurenberg@gmail.com
Falling Forward by Caroline Macfarlane
Caroline sets out to make a film about one of New York City’s most eccentric characters Jane Marx. Along the way, the filmmaker and subject discover they have much more in common, including the loss of a brother. This film is an unusual and colorful portrait of friendship, aging and living life amidst death.
Caroline Macfarlane is an artist, filmmaker and urbanist from Toronto, Canada. After working as director of Ignite gallery at OCAD University (Toronto), she moved to New York City to obtain an MS in Design and Urban Ecologies and a Graduate Certi cate in Documentary Studies at The New School.
SUPER by Callie Rose Hanau
This film follows one of New York’s unsung heroes as he struggles to maintain an apartment building in a rapidly changing neighborhood.
Callie Rose Hanau is a New York based creative with proud Pittsburgh roots. Currently, she is a production intern with Meerkat Media, where she is working on projects centered around social and economic justice.
La Lupita by Maria Mayo
When her mother is diagnosed with an illness, Maria travels across the country to be by her side. Blending personal and historical, the film shows how mutual wounds have the power to forge the strongest bonds.
Maria Mayo is a Xicana from California, currently working on her second documentary exploring womyn breaking the taboo that surrounds ancestral spiritual beliefs and reclaiming bruja feminism.
This essay film is an exploration of the difference between nonverbal and verbal existence, and the way language and our internal nature influences our ways of seeing.
Rebekka Rafnsdóttir is an Icelandic writer and a filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is rooted in philosophy and literature, although you will find traces from all creative arts in her experimental streams of consciousness.
As BETTY – a feminist pop rock a cappella trio – approaches its 34th year together, band members Alyson Palmer, Amy Ziff, and Elizabeth Ziff look back at their intertwined lives. After 3+ decades of highs, lows, and everything in between, BETTY continues to rock, roll, and inspire.
Julia Mann was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and recently moved back to the US after three years in Tel Aviv, Israel. Julia’s lifelong interest in documentary storytelling led her to courses at several film schools. She currently works as a production assistant for the award-winning producer and director Eden Wurmfeld.
The film follows one very surprising New Yorker as he attempts to modernize magic for millennials and find his tribe in the process.
Zoe Hutton began her career at the BBC in London, working on social issue films. In 2018, she came to New York thanks to the Fulbright Alistair Cooke Award in Journalism, which has confirmed for her the magic of filmmaking – in more ways than one.
We are delighted to inform you that our beloved Documentary Studies program will be featured at this year’s DOC NYC, with four films by the last year’s graduate filmmakers in the ‘University Showcase‘, screening on Friday, Nov 8th, 12:15pm at Cinepolis Chelsea.
Kudos to our outstanding students, our remarkable Doc Studies faculty – Deirdre Boyle, Rafael Parra, Peter Sillen, Simone Maurrice, Erin Greenwell and our exceptional program associates and student assistants of Fall 2018/Spring 2019 – Mimi Vargas, Setare Gholipur, Jordan Unverzagt, and Johanna Case. Special thanks to our current program assistant, Marcos Echeverria Ortiz, who helped compile the films for the screening.
The first Doc Talk of this fall 2019 semester was with Berlin based artist and filmmaker Angela Anderson. The works in this screening address the extraction of two highly contested substances – gold and oil – mapping out affective cartographies which are rendered invisible within capitalist calculations of value:
Anderson’s most recent film, “Three (or more) Ecologies: A Feminist Articulation of Eco-intersectionality – Part I: For the World to Live, Patriarchy Must Die” contrasts the highly industrial/technical nature of the destructive fracking industry in North Dakota’s Bakken oil boom on the Ft. Berthhold – Three Affiliated Tribes Reservation with voices from Jinwar, a women’s village project in the autonomous region of Rojava (Northern Syria). The first chapter of this ongoing research project emphasizes the urgent necessity of redefining value and for a societal shift towards relations of empathy and care. The film features interviews with feminist activist and writer, Silvia Federici.
In 2013, Angela Anderson and Angela Melitopoulos began documenting the environmental, social and psychological damage inflicted on the region of Halkidiki in north eastern Greece by the construction of a massive open pit gold mine by the Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold in the pristine forests of the Skouries-Kakkavos mountains. Unearthing Disaster I (2013) captures the literal pulverization of the natural and cultural environment and its social form of expression. The video accompanies local activists on a journey through their once familiar landscape, transformed into something they no longer recognize.
Angela Anderson is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of the fields of philosophy, ecology, economics, migration, and feminist & queer theory. Recent video works include the audio-visual research projects Unearthing Disaster (2013-2015) and The Refrain (2015) with the video artist Angela Melitopoulos, The Sea Between You and Me (2016) and as a co-author in the project Crossings (2017) by Angela Melitopoulos shown in documenta 14. During 2018-2019 she was an Art and Theory Fellow at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (Innsbruck, AT). Recent exhibitions include Tiroler Kunstpavillion (Innsbruck, 2019), Tallinn Photomonth Biennial (Tallinn, EE, 2019), CAAC (Sevilla, 2018), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco, 2017), Holbaek Images (Holbaek, DK, 2016) Framer Framed (Amsterdam) and the Thessaloniki Biennale (2015). She is also the exhibition designer for Forum Expanded at the Berlin International Film Festival. She holds an MA in Film and Media Studies from the New School (NYC) and is pursuing her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Originally from Wisconsin, USA, she lives and works in Berlin.
Delighted to introduce to you the future documentary filmmakers in our Documentary Studies Certificate Program at The New School, in New York City! Meet our wonderful 14th cohort, whose final projects will be screening at the annual public film festival Truth be Told, at the end of Spring 2020:
Amrit Cheng came to the New School with a background in reporting and nonprofit advocacy. She most recently worked at the ACLU where she produced documentaries and news videos focused on voting and immigrants’ rights. With her own films, she will continue to tell visual stories that advance social change.
Claire Haughey’s previous engagements as an outdoor and experiential educator for kids and teenagers showed her the power of storytelling as a means of processing experiences and building resiliency. Combined with her love of photography and film, she became interested in the intersections of narrative therapy and filmmaking, with clear-eyed appreciation for intimate, first person narratives. She was the cinematographer and co-director for “Renga for the West” (2017), supported by the Tribeca Film Institute and broadcast on Al Jazeera’s Witness series. In previous iterations of herself, she has also been a sheep farmer, a photography teacher, and an architectural photographer.
Edward Clem is a 26-year-old filmmaker from Seattle, Washington. After studying photojournalism, he dove into the world of sports and action cinematography making daring backcountry ski movies. He is passionate about non-fiction storytelling and meeting people from all walks of life, in New York and beyond.
Johanna Case is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, photographer, an interdisciplinary designer, and a musician. She completed her BA at the New School, where she studied photography, oral history, and Arabic. Her interests focus on using arts to address anti-immigrant sentiments in the US, and interrogations of the western liberal model of documentary and humanitarianism. Most recently, Johanna was a fellow with the International Rescue Committee’s Amman-based Middle East Research and Development Hub, creating videos for Syrian and Jordanian community innovators.
Lauren McKenna is an Austalian filmmaker residing in New York. In her work, Lauren explores collaborative and community aspects of documentary filmmaking. Currently she is working on a short documentary film about queer perspectives on consent and sex education.
Lillian Xuege Li is a Chinese filmmaker living in New York. With a background in both film and graphic design, Lillian has developed a passion towards visual communications and media experimentation. She understands time as an architectural structure, and the act of building as a way to connect with others and the world.
Maliyamungu Muhande is a Congolese creative thinker with a background in advertising as an art director. She is passionate about using creative arts to affect social change. Through documentary filmmaking, Maliyamungu hopes to capture human stories that can provide us with deeper insights into history.
Sarah Wolfe has a background in journalism and the performing arts. Inspired by the works of filmmakers such as Harrod Blank (“Why Can’t I Be me? Around You)”, David Sutherland (“Marcos Doesn’t Live here Anymore”), and Tracy Droz Tragos (“Rich Hill”), she came to The New School to expand her skills in documentary filmmaking, a realm she’s long been drawn to. Sarah is particularly committed to making documentaries that remove the barriers that lead to “us vs. them” thinking; to allow people to connect with each other through their shared humanity
The New School Doc Studies 