Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk (Online) – SHORT FILMS – Q&A with Akosua Adoma Owusu

Through documentary and dramatic forms, as well as installation, Akosua Adoma Owusu’s work addresses the collision of identities, where the African immigrant located in the United States has a “triple consciousness.” Owusu interprets Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness and creates a third cinematic space or consciousness, representing diverse identities including feminism, queerness and African immigrants interacting in African, white American, and black American culture. Her films range from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media.

Moderated by Lana Lin, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates: Cacau Araujo (Doc Studies ’22 & Media Studies ’23) and Tiffany Jiang (Doc Studies ’22 & Media Studies ’23).

Akosua Adoma Owusu is a Ghanaian-American filmmaker, producer, and cinematographer. She currently lectures at Harvard University and at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Aiming to create a third cinematic space or consciousness, Owusu explores the colliding identities of black immigrants in America through multiple forms, ranging from cinematic essays to experimental narratives to reconstructed Black popular media. In her works, feminism and African identities interact in African, white American and black American cultural spaces.

Since 2005, Owusu’s films have screened internationally in festivals and museums, including the New York Film Festival, Berlinale Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Locarno International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, MoMA, and the BFI London Film Festival. Named by IndieWire as one of six preeminent “avant-garde female filmmakers who redefined cinema,” she was a featured artist of the 56th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Her recent projects include Welcome to the Jungle (2019), a multi-channel video installation made in collaboration with the CCA Wattis Institute.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies
School of Media Studies, The New School

Doc Studies DOC TALKS, Uncategorized

Doc Talk (In-Person) – BAROBAR JAGTANA (Trilogy of Short Films) – Screening and Q&A with Suneil Sanzgiri

Shot with 16mm film stock that expired in 2002—the same year as the state-sponsored anti-Muslim genocide in Gujarat—and filmed amid the anti-CAA protests in Delhi, BAROBAR JAGTANA, Suneil Sanzgiri’s cinematic trilogy, traces lines and lineages of ancestral memory, poetry, history, songs, decoloniality and diaspora. AT HOME BUT NOT AT HOME (2019) utilizes various modes of seeing at a distance to question the construction of identity and anti-colonial solidarity across continents. LETTER FROM YOUR FAR-OFF COUNTRY (2020) blurs boundaries of the epistolary format through a letter written by the filmmaker directed towards a distant relative, who was a revolutionary freedom fighter, prisoner’s rights activist, and Communist party leader. GOLDEN JUBILEE (2021) takes as its starting point scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India, created using the same technologies of surveillance that mining companies use to map locations for iron ore in the region. A tool for extraction and exploitation becomes a method for preservation.

Moderated by Lana Lin, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates: Cacau Araujo (Doc Studies ’22 & Media Studies ’23) and Tiffany Jiang (Doc Studies ’22 & Media Studies ’23).

Suneil Sanzgiri is an Indian American artist, researcher, and filmmaker whose work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relation to structural violence. Sanzgiri’s work has been screened extensively at festivals and venues around the world including International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Fest, True/False Film Festival, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Doc Lisboa, Camden International Film Fest, Viennale, e-Flux, REDCAT, the Menil Collection, the Block Museum, Le Cinéma Club, and the Criterion Collection, and has won awards at BlackStar Film Fest, Open City Docs Fest, and VideoEx. His work has been supported by grants from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, Field of Vision, and the Foundation for Contemporary Art. He was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in Filmmaker Magazine’s Fall 2021 Issue, and in Art in America’s “New Talent” issue in 2022.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies
School of Media Studies, The New School

Doc Studies Uncategorized

DOC TALK (In-Person) – LANDFALL – Screening and Q&A with Cecilia Aldarondo

Through shard-like glimpses of everyday life in post-Hurricane María Puerto Rico, LANDFALL is a cautionary tale for our times. Set against the backdrop of protests that toppled the US colony’s governor in 2019, the film offers a prismatic portrait of collective trauma and resistance. While the devastation of María attracted a great deal of media coverage, the world has paid far less attention to the storm that preceded it: a 72-billion-dollar debt crisis crippling Puerto Rico well before the winds and waters hit. LANDFALL examines the kinship of these two storms—one  environmental, the other economic—juxtaposing competing utopian visions of recovery. Featuring intimate encounters with Puerto Ricans as well as the newcomers flooding the island, LANDFALL reflects on a question of  contemporary global relevance: when the world falls apart, who do we become?

Moderated by Lana Lin, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates Cacau Araujo (Doc Studies ’22 & Media Studies ’23) and Tiffany Jiang (Doc Studies ’22 & Media Studies ’23).

Cecilia Aldarondo is a director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora who works at the intersection of poetics and politics. Her feature documentaries MEMORIES OF A PENITENT HEART (2016) and LANDFALL (2020) premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and were co-produced by the award-winning PBS series POV. LANDFALL’s many awards include the 2020 DOC NYC Film Festival Viewfinders Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary, as well as Cinema Eye and Film Independent Spirit Award nominations. Currently she is directing her third feature, a co-production with HBO. Among Aldarondo’s fellowships and honors are the 2022 IDA Emerging Filmmaker Award, the Guggenheim, a two-time MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the 2021 New America Fellowship, and Women at Sundance 2017. In 2019 she was named to DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 list and is one of 2015’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. She teaches at Williams College.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies
School of Media Studies, The New School

Doc Studies Events, Latest News, NEWS/BLOG

Jessica Kingdon’s (MA Media Studies 2014) Award Winning Doc “Ascension” Nominated for 2022 Best Documentary Oscar

After winning the Best Documentary Film Award and the Albert Maysles Award for best new documentary director at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and numerous other accolades, Ascension, the documentary feature directed and produced  MA Media Studies alum Jessica Kingdon has been nominated for the 2022 Oscar for best documentary feature film.

Ascension examines the contemporary “Chinese Dream” through staggering observations of labor, consumerism and wealth. In cinematically exploring the aspiration that drives today’s People’s Republic of China, the film plunges into universal paradoxes of economic progress.

Ascension is an impressionistic portrait of China’s industrial supply chain that reveals the country’s growing class divide through staggering observations of labor, consumerism and wealth. The documentary portrays capitalism in China across the levels of its operation, from the crudest mine to the most rarefied forms of leisure. Accordingly, the film is structured in three parts, ascending through the levels of the capitalist structure: workers running factory production, the middle class training for and selling to aspirational consumers, and the elites reveling in a new level of hedonistic enjoyment. In traveling up the rungs of China’s social ladder, we see how each level supports and makes possible the next while recognizing the contemporary “Chinese Dream” remains an elusive fantasy for most.

Doc Studies Uncategorized

DOC TALK (ONLINE) – MINDING THE GAP – Q&A with BING LIU

Welcome to Rockford, Illinois, in the heart of Rust-Belt America, home to filmmaker Bing Liu. With over 12 years of footage, Liu discovers connections between two of his skateboarder friends’ volatile upbringings and the complexities of modern-day masculinity. As the film unfolds, Liu captures 23-year-old Zack’s tumultuous relationship with his girlfriend as it deteriorates after the birth of their son, and 17-year-old Keire struggling with his racial identity as he faces new responsibilities following the death of his father. While navigating a difficult relationship between his camera and his friends, Liu weaves a story of generational forgiveness while exploring the precarious gap between childhood and adulthood.

Bing Liu is a Chicago-based director and cinematographer who Variety Magazine listed as one of 10 documentary filmmakers to watch. His 2018 critically acclaimed documentary Minding the Gap has earned a total of 28 award recognitions since its world premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, where it took home the Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Filmmaking. He is also a segment director on America To Me, a 10-hour documentary series examining racial inequities in America’s education system, set to premiere on Starz. His most recent film, All These Sons, has screened at IDFA, Doc10 and the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies

@tnsdocstudies


Doc Studies @ Instagram

School of Media Studies
The New School


https://newschooldocstudies.wordpress.com/


http://www.newschool.edu/public-engagement/documentary-media-graduate-certificate/


http://www.newschool.edu/public-engagement/media-studies/


http://www.truthbetoldfilmfestival.com

Doc Studies Uncategorized

DOC TALK (ONLINE) – YEH FREEDOM LIFE – Q&A with PRIYA SEN

Filmed in the dense streets and neighborhoods of Ambedkar Nagar in New Delhi, Yeh Freedom Life (This Freedom Life) (2019, 70 min) tries to keep up with its protagonists, as they maneuver erratic and unpredictable love. One of them works at a local beauty parlour, the other runs the family kiosk at a crowded intersection. They are surrounded by a cacophonous city; they are both in love with other women. The film stays with them and their desire for ‘freedom lives’, outside society and family’s constant scrutiny and sanction. But this ‘freedom life’ also leaves them vulnerable to the precariousness of love, when it refuses such constraints.

Priya Sen & Nicolás Grandi‘s Faasla (2020, 50 min) is a conversation in epistolary form using video, an exchange over a distance of countries and time zones, and at the time of a global pandemic which has meant a sudden re-ordering of our lives as we knew it. “We speak of distances, of intimacies we can no longer access, of the state of suspended freedoms, of memory, images and sensations. Our bodies themselves have become receptacles of these uncertainties, the archives we have haphazardly been building over the years, are having to speak for us. Maybe this dialogue is between the archives themselves, what we have seen, what we see now.”

Priya Sen is a New Delhi based filmmaker and artist who works with nonfiction forms across film /video, sound and installation. Her films explore forms for tenuousness, ambiguity and un-settling, as modes of navigating urban lives and experience. Sen’s work has been presented at the Flaherty Seminar 2019, among other festivals and venues that include the BFI London Film Festival, Forum Expanded Berlinale, Bangalore Queer Fest, Experimenta, Images Festival Toronto and the Dharamshala International Film Festival.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies

@tnsdocstudies


Doc Studies @ Instagram

School of Media Studies
The New School


https://newschooldocstudies.wordpress.com/


http://www.newschool.edu/public-engagement/documentary-media-graduate-certificate/


http://www.newschool.edu/public-engagement/media-studies/


http://www.truthbetoldfilmfestival.com

Doc Studies Events, Latest News, NEWS/BLOG

Maliyamungu Muhande, Doc Studies ’20 Selected as a Sundance Ignite x Adobe Fellow

Maliyamungu Muhande, Doc Studies ’20 was selected as a Sundance Ignite x Adobe Fellow, where she will engage with a year of mentorship and support from the Sundance Institute and Sundance Ignite founding partner Adobe.

Fellows were selected from a one- to 15-minute short film submitted to the Sundance Ignite x Adobe Short Film Challenge, hosted on the Institute’s digital community platform, Sundance Collab. The 10 fellows were selected for their deeply original voices, creativity in storytelling, and rigor of their craft.

The Fellowship centers artists in its curriculum, with a goal of supporting each fellow as they continue their respective artistic and professional development as filmmakers and storytellers. The fellows will kick off their fellowship year with the digital Sundance Ignite x Adobe Filmmakers Lab, which runs from July 26 to July 30 on Sundance Collab with a particular focus on project advancement and deepening the fellows’ character development skill sets.

Maliyamungu Gift Muhande is a Congolese Documentary filmmaker and Artist based in New York City. In 2020 she Directed a 6-week, film program for under-represented teens in Monticello, NY. From that program came her documentary-in-progress Near Broadway, co-created with her students, about their lives in the economically depressed town and in the U.S. as it exists today. Muhande’s short documentary on the 80-year-old African American New York City street photographer, Louis Mendes, was screened in the fall of 2020 as part of the Doc NYC film festival and was selected by the National Board of Review. She is currently working on expanding this short into a feature film.

Watch the trailer below!

Please share widely, and congratulations again to our exceptional New School alumna ! 

Doc Studies

Doc Studies Events, Latest News, NEWS/BLOG

Doc Studies at DOC NYC, America’s Largest Documentary Festival!

Dear all, 

It is with great pleasure that I write to share some good news: 
Our beloved Documentary Studies program will be featured at this year’s (Online) DOC NYC, with four films by the last year’s graduate filmmakers in the ‘University Showcase‘. Kudos to our outstanding students Valerie Neck, Taylor-Alexis Gillard, Samantha Schulte and Simon Tchoukriel whose films are in the showcase, and who managed to complete their work under very difficult circumstances. 

“All That Is” by Valerie Neck
“The Silent Willow” by Taylor-Alexis Gillard
“That Change I Have Seen” by Samantha Schulte
“Empire State of Chess” by Simon Tchoukriel

Please share widely, and tune in to enjoy the work of our exceptional New School filmmakers and alumni! 

Doc Studies