Please join us for a screening and Q&A with filmmaker Angelo Madsen to discuss his film A Body to Live In on November 17th at Kellen Auditorium.
The world of queer body modification and its intersection with BDSM is brought to life through this rich portrait of an artist and his philosophy of a spirit-body connection. Merging oral history with 16mm abstraction and photographic meditation, Angelo Madsen’s new film A BODY TO LIVE IN uses the life story and artworks of Fakir Musafar to guide us through pressing questions of belonging and the search for an authentic way of being.
Program Duration: 98 min
About the Filmmaker
Angelo Madsen (formerly Madsen Minax) is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator whose work explores how human relationships are shaped by history, culture, and kinship, with focus on subcultural experience and the politics of desire. His films and installations have screened at Berlinale, Sundance, TIFF, NYFF, MCA Chicago, Museum of the Moving Image, and numerous festivals worldwide. A Creative Capital Fellow (2025), United States Artists Fellow (2023), and Guggenheim Fellow (2022), he has held residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Pioneer Works, Headlands, Skowhegan, and the Core Program (MFA Houston). His film North By Current (2021), a New York Times Critics Pick, aired on PBS’s POV, won Cinema Eye and IDA awards, and was praised by Rolling Stone as “a beautiful, complex wonder.” In 2024, the Video Data Bank released CHICAGO SEX CHANGE, a compilation of Madsen’s early works. He is Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont, based between Burlington and New York.
Please join us for this screening and Q&A, hosted and moderated by Amir Husak, Director of Documentary Studies and Assistant Professor of Media Studies.
Please join us for a special screening of short films that bring together a range of contemporary voices exploring the everyday, the poetic, and the political in African life through the moving image on November 3rd at 1pm at Kellen Auditorium.
The program is selected and curated by Christian Nyampeta, who will join us for a conversation following the screening.
Presented in collaboration with The African Film Institute, this screening is part of a growing effort to cultivate a sustained and intimate engagement with African cinema in New York.
The African Film Institute aims to create a home and a place of intimacy with African cinema in New York, through developing gradually and organically a viewing program animated by fellowships; a growing library; an active writers’ room; and an expanding catalog of recorded dialogues. The African Film Institute draws from the visual cultures that view cinema as an evening school: a popular information system in the service of education, aesthetic experience, and public dissemination—employing a methodology concerning the use of cinema’s collective production, and investing in viewing methods informed by different uses of time, visual and textual histories, and social struggles and hopes in mutuality between their own locality and the world at large.
Program Duration: 70 min
About the Curator
Christian Nyampeta is an artist living in New York, where he organizes programs, exhibitions, screenings, performances, and publications, which are conceived as hosting structures for collective feeling, cooperative thinking, and mutual action. Nyampeta convenes the Nyanza Working Group of ARAC — Another Roadmap School, which participated in documenta fifteen, and he is the convener of Boda Boda Lounge 2022–24, a trans-African film and video art festival. His recent exhibitions include the 14th Shanghai Biennale (2024), Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2016); Dakar Biennale Dak’Art, Dakar, Senegal (2018); 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019) and Risquons-Tout, WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Belgium (2021). Nyampeta was awarded the European Union Prize at the 12th Bamako Encounters — African Biennial of Photography in 2019.
Please join us for this screening and Q&A, hosted and moderated by Amir Husak, Director of Documentary Studies and Assistant Professor of Media Studies.
Please join us for our next screening of Violet Du Feng’s film The Dating Game on October 20th at 7pm at Kellen Auditorium.
Following the screening, the filmmaker will be in conversation with Amir Husak, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies, and Judith Hefland, filmmaker and co-founder of Chicken & Egg Films.
NOTE: Open to TNS Students, Faculty and Staff ONLY.
Set against the backdrop of China’s evolving dating culture, The Dating Game delves into the personal journeys of Zhou, Li, and Wu as they navigate the challenges of finding companionship in a society where traditional norms and modern expectations collide. Under the guidance of coach Hao and his wife Wen, the men confront their insecurities, societal pressures, and the complexities of human connection.
Program Duration: 90 min
Violet Du Feng is an Emmy® Award-winning independent filmmaker, AMPAS Documentary Branch member, and adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School. She directed the Oscar®-shortlisted Hidden Letters (Tribeca 2022), broadcast in over 15 countries, and Harbor From the Holocaust (PBS/CPB, 2020) with music by Yo-Yo Ma. Over the past decade, she has directed, produced, or executive produced more than ten films, including Maineland (SXSW Jury Award) and Please Remember Me (DocImpactHi5). Her films have received support from Sundance DFP, ITVS, IDA, and Ford Foundation, and screened at over 100 international festivals.
Judith Helfand is an Emmy-nominated, Peabody Award-winning filmmaker celebrated for her open-hearted, humorous approach to urgent social issues. Her acclaimed films—A Healthy Baby Girl, Blue Vinyl, Cooked: Survival by Zip Code, and Love & Stuff—explore the human costs of environmental, public health, and structural crises. A co-founder of Working Films and Chicken & Egg Pictures, Helfand is also a dedicated educator and field-builder in documentary storytelling.
Please join us for this screening and Q&A, hosted and moderated by Amir Husak, Director of Documentary Studies and Assistant Professor of Media Studies.
We’re thrilled to announce our full DOC TALKS line-up for Fall 2025. Filmmakers include Masha Chernaya, Kamal Aljafari, Violet Du Feng, Christian Nyampeta, Angelo Madsen, Kumjana Novakova.
Please join us for our next screening of A Fidai Film, followed by a Q&A with filmmaker Kamal Aljafari on October 6th at 1pm in Kellen Auditorium.
In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut. During this time, it raided the Palestinian Research Center and looted its entire archive. The archive contained historical documents of Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images. Taking this as a premise, ‘A Fidai Film’ aims to create a counter-narrative to this loss, presenting a form of cinematic sabotage that seeks to reclaim and restore the looted memories of Palestinian history. It’s a poignant exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, told through a unique blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques. (Doha Film Institute)
Program Duration: 80 min
About Kamal Aljafari
Kamal Aljafari is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist. His films have screened at major festivals and museums, including Locarno, London, Viennale, and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo. He has received prestigious awards from FIDMarseille, Pesaro, and Visions du Réel. In 2024, IndieLisboa hosted a full retrospective of his work. Aljafari has taught at The New School and DFFB in Berlin and was a Film Study Center fellow at Harvard. Currently a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, he is developing “Beirut 1931,” a fiction film to be shot in Jaffa.
Please join us for this screening and Q&A, hosted and moderated by Amir Husak, Director of Documentary Studies and Assistant Professor of Media Studies.
We’re excited to open the Fall 2025 Doc Talks screening season with The Shards by Masha Chernaya, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker.
In Spring 2022 Masha prepares to leave Russia – her homeland that has changed. It turns into a chain of unexpected farewells: her mom dies of cancer, her lover flees army conscription, everything including her own old self is falling apart. Her way to cope with the grief is to fixate everything with her camera. Her anger guides her to inner emigration to the local underground scene, which became an escape for young Russians. This kaleidoscope of shards chronicles not only the spirit of the time, but the director’s personality crumbling against the backdrop of global turmoil.
With a multifaceted background, Masha Chernaya works as a director and cinematographer, editor, text author, photographer, and illustrator, blending her diverse talents to create compelling visual narratives. Her most recent feature documentary The Shards (2024) has won the Doc Alliance award for Best Feature Film.
Please join us for this screening and Q&A, hosted and moderated by Amir Husak, Director of Documentary Studies and Assistant Professor in the School of Media Studies.
We are thrilled to announce that several alumni of the Doc Studies program have been selected to showcase their films at DOC NYC, the largest documentary festival in America, this November! Orgy Every Other Day by Samuel Döring (Class of 2024) and If I’m Being Honest by B.A. Williams (Class of 2024) have been chosen for the shorts programs, while Dark Chambers by Jordan Salyers (Class of 2024) was competitively selected for DOC NYC U. All three short films were previously featured during our 17th annual Doc Studies showcase, Truth Be Told 2024. Congratulations to our talented alumni!
Explore their backgrounds, the films’ synopses, and screening details below.
Orgy Every Other Day
Director/Writer: Samuel Döring
In basements and lofts NYC’s queer underground sex party community has created spaces where people can play and enjoy orgies in a safe and semi-public environment. The film explores what these places mean to people, where these parties originate from and why it might be important for them to remain underground. (USA 13 MIN)
Samuel Döring is a German-French filmmaker, festival programmer, and film critic. They graduated with their debut short film Orgy Every Other Day as part of the Documentary Studies class of 2024 at The New School, funded by the Fulbright Program. Sam worked as a cultural programmer at Goethe-Institut Senegal and as a program coordinator at DOK Leipzig and hosts the film podcast Nach dem Kino on Spotify.
If I’m Being Honest
Director/Writer: B.A. Williams
A filmmaker delves into their origin story, uncovering painful truths about their estranged mother. Weaving a vulnerable letter to their son and a recorded conversation with their mother, scenes of domestic life form a poignant backdrop to this exploration. (USA 16 MIN)
B.A. Williams (they/she) is a writer and filmmaker. Originally from Long Beach, CA, they now call New Jersey home, where they live with their wife, Nikki, and child, Morrison. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing and are pursuing their Master’s in Media Studies at The New School, where they wrote, filmed, and directed their first short film, If I’m Being Honest. B.A. is interested in exploring themes of Blackness, motherhood, belonging, and longing in their films and, at the same time, juggling the tall task of shifting and centering the narrative surrounding queerness by focusing on the beauty of mundane queer life. Their writing is featured in Rigorous Magazine, Every-Other Broadsides, The Rumpus, and The New York Times: Parenting. (photographed by: Michael DeJour)
Dark Chambers
Directors: Jordan & Kanette Salyers
In the shadow of covid-19, the filmmaker and his mother huddle around their family photo album, updating old media and transcribing written histories. But in preserving these dark chambers, what goes to rot?
Jordan Salyers (he/him) was born in Maryland, 1992, to an extraordinary, singular single-mother, Kanette. His first act of independence was flunking out of the local college. He then made the most regretful decision, in 2012, to enlist in the US Navy. He has a lot to say about that. In 2019, he grew out his hair and relocated to NYC as a student at The New School. He works with blended fictions; he likes found-footage film and video; he loves his partner, Victoria, and her cat, Uma. He hopes to remain a student indefinitely.
** As of May 5, 2024, the artist has cancelled this event in solidarity with the students demanding divestment from Israel, who were arrested and suspended after the police were called to clear the solidarity encampments. **
Join us for a virtual screening and Q+A with filmmaker, Maryam Tafakory, to discuss her films Mast-del, Irani Bag, Nazarbazi, and Chaste/UnChaste.
Through collages of original and found footage, Tafakory’s films reflect on identity and the censorship of intimacy and sexuality in post-Revolution Iran. Mast-del explores queer identity inside and outside of post-Revolution Iran through altered visuals, new and archival. Irani Bag is a video essay, focusing on the restriction of physical intimacy and demonstrating to its viewers “how to touch without touching.” Nazarbazi tells a story of desire, control, and love in Iran through a collage of found footage. Chaste/UnChaste examines the limitations of labeling women’s bodies as chaste/unchaste through depiction of Iranian women in film.
Maryam Tafakory [b. Shiraz/Iran] works with film and performance. Screenings of her work include MoMA, Tate Modern, Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Locarno, Toronto International Film Festival, FICUNAM, Oberhausen, and Anthology Film Archives, amongst others. She was awarded the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago Int’l Film Festival, the Tiger Short Award at the 51st IFFR, the Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Best Experimental Short Film at the 70th and 71st Melbourne International Film Festival, amongst others.
The New School Doc Studies 