Doc Studies Events, NEWS/BLOG

Doc Talk: The Cancer Journals Revisited with filmmaker and Media Studies faculty LANA LIN

DOC STUDIES PRESENTS
@tnsdocstudies 

Monday, Mar. 9th at 1PM
Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Ave

Poetic and urgent, eye-opening and razor-sharp, THE CANCER JOURNALS, REVISITED is the cinematic embodiment of Lorde’s deep belief in collective power. 

  • Christina Ree, San Diego Asian Film Festival

Utilizing a non-narrative, poetic approach to the documentary form, the filmmaker channels a plurality of lived, felt experiences into a collective act of better world building.

  • Amber Power, BOMB Magazine

Join us for this special screening of filmmaker and Media Studies faculty Lana Lin’s award winning documentary, The Cancer Journals Revisited. The film is a poetic rumination on the precarious conditions of survival for women of color today. 27 artists, activists, health care advocates, and current and former patients recite Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde’s classic 1980 memoir of her breast cancer experience aloud on camera, collectively dramatizing it and producing an oration for the screen. The Cancer Journals Revisited reflects upon what it means to contend with the complex dimensions of illness and its afterlife.

Lana Lin is an artist, filmmaker and writer based in New York. Her work has been shown at international venues including the Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art, NY; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany; Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival; Gasworks, London; China-Taipei Film Archive; and the 2018 Busan Biennale. She has received awards from the New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Civitella Ranieri, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. A recent acquisition of Women Make Movies, her latest film, The Cancer Journals Revisited, premiered at BAMcinemaFest and won Best Documentary Feature, San Diego Asian Film Festival and Favorite Experimental Film Award, BlackStar Film Festival. The author of Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer (Fordham UP, 2017), Lin is currently an India China Institute and GIDEST fellow, and Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School. 

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.

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Doc Talk: Speak So I Can See You with filmmaker + Media Studies alumna MARIJA STOJNIĆ

“The film that took the top of my head off was Speak So I Can See You….It’s on another planet from character-driven narrative, in a good way…. Art museums should embrace it. Radio aficionados will fall in love with it, and historians will treasure it.” – Pat Auderheide, IDA journal

“Rich in…brilliant moments…. immersing the viewer in quite a unique cinematic experience. And, commendably, it also leaves some room for irony.” – David Abbatesciani, Cineuropa

Serbian filmmaker and Media Studies alumna Marija Stojnić will screen Speak So I Can See You, her new documentary feature on Friday, February 21st at 6:30pm in Kellen Auditorium.  The film premiered at International Documenary Film Festival in Amesterdam last fall, and it is featured at MoMA’s DocFortnight this month.  Stojnić, who brings her background in music and keen understanding of the art of documentary, has crafted an original work—a “cinematic soundscape” that captures the wonders of Radio Belgrade, Serbia’s long-lived radio station, which has kept history, culture and critical thinking alive in the former Yugoslavia.  Borrowing upon the cumulative effect of slow tracking shots and close-ups of cryptic technological grids and patient performers testing microphones, Stojnić portrays the station in the throes of change as it abandons the dilapidated equipment of its Tito-era studios for the bright newness of the now while clinging to all it holds dear.  Her observational visuals illuminate the sounds of the radio past and present, including moments from beloved shows like “The Invisible People” and “Journey through Words,” jazz tributes on “Needle on Vinyl” and live performances of opera, and dramatic readings of writers like Dostoyevsky and Carl Sagan. Stojnić’s underlying focus is on the people who keep Radio Belgrade going—audio engineers, actors, announcers, directors, moving men, and cleaning ladies—while inviting viewers into the haunting space, time, and sounds of  Radio Belgrade. Even if you never lived through ’68 or wondered about the future of the former USSR or listened through the night and in your dreams to the rambling thoughts of Radio Belgrade’s philosophical radio hosts, Stojnić’s film conjures a collective memory of the past through audio echoes personal and public. 

The film is a love letter to radiophonic art, subtly and playfully demonstrating how radio can make us remember, understand, think, and feel. 

Stojnić will join Media Studies faculty member Deirdre Boyle for a Q&A after the screening.  This program is open to all students and faculty of The New School.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk: RECORDER: THE MARION STOKES PROJECT with filmmaker MATT WOLF

“Outstanding… An information revolutionary, Stokes, despite her decades of isolation, touched the nerve center of the times.” – Best Films of 2019,  New Yorker

“Weirdly exhilarating… Enlightening and the stuff of madness.” Critic’s Pick – New York Times

“The Information Age has found a startling, eccentric heroine in the subject of Matt Wolf’s eye-opening documentary.” – LA Times

Marion Stokes was secretly recording television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years. It started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis at the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 while the Sandy Hook massacre played on television as Marion passed away. In between, Marion recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials that tell us who we were, and show how television shaped the world of today. 

Before “fake news” Marion was fighting to protect the truth by archiving everything that was said and shown on television. The public didn’t know it, but the networks were disposing their archives for decades into the trashcan of history. Remarkably Marion saved it, and now the Internet Archive will digitize her tapes and we’ll be able to search them online for free. 

This is a mystery in the form of a time capsule. It’s about a radical activist, who became a fabulously wealthy recluse archivist. Her work was crazy but it was also genius, and she would pay a profound price for dedicating her life to this visionary and maddening project. 

Matt Wolf is an award-winning filmmaker in New York whose feature documentaries include Wild Combination, about the cult cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell and Teenage, about early youth culture and the birth of teenagers. His new film Spaceship Earth about the controversial Biosphere 2 experiment is premiering at Sundance 2020. Matt’s short films include I Remember, about the artist and poet Joe Brainard, Time Magazine’s The Face of AIDS about a controversial Benetton advertisement, and Bayard & Me, about the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. He is also the director of HBO’s It’s Me, Hilary and is the co-curator of film for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. He is a Guggenheim Fellow.

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.

Doc Studies Events, NEWS/BLOG

Doc Talk: The Hottest August with Filmmaker Brett Story

The Hottest August (95 min)
Monday, January 27, 2020 @ 1:00 PM EST

Kellen Auditorium
66 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

A complex portrait of a city and its inhabitants, The Hottest August gives us a window into the collective consciousness of the present. The film’s point of departure is one city over one month: New York City, including its outer boroughs, during August 2017. It’s a month heavy with the tension of a new President, growing anxiety over everything from rising rents to marching white nationalists, and unrelenting news of either wildfires or hurricanes on every coast. The film pivots on the question of futurity: what does the future look like from where we are standing?

And what if we are not all standing in the same place? The Hottest August offers a mirror onto a society on the verge of catastrophe, registering the anxieties, distractions, and survival strategies that preoccupy ordinary lives.

Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has screened at festivals internationally, including the Viennale, True/False, and Oberhausen. Her 2016 feature documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. She is the author of the book, Prison Land, and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Infrastructures of Citizenship. Brett was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.

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.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk: Nico Pereda (Dec.5, 2019)

Andrea Bussmann and Nico Pereda’s Tales of Two Who Dreamt is set in a housing block in Toronto. A Roma refugee family is hired as actors to work on a fiction film.  We see them rehearsing stories of their past while reflecting on the upcoming hearing about their residency status. The stories are spun into legends, whereby the boundaries between reality and fiction, and the documented and the performed no longer apply.  There’s the tale of the dog left to starve in an empty flat, the tale of the lawyer’s child, and the tale of the boy who woke up to find himself transformed into a bird. You’d think all these stories could make for a mesmerising film and you’d be right, but what sort of film would it be? An observational documentary, a family portrait they themselves help mould, a Kafkaesque fairy story, the making-of the same? But there are no clear explanations here, for it is also a place of infinite shifting boundaries. If you want answers, you might as well ask the devil.

Nicolás Pereda is a filmmaker whose work explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives using fiction and documentary tools. His work has been the subject of more than 20 retrospectives worldwide in venues such as Anthology Film Archive, Pacific Film Archive, Jeonju International Film Festival and TIFF Cinematheque. He has also presented his films in most major international film festivals including Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, and Toronto, as well as in galleries and museums like the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the Guggenheim and MOMA in New York, and in television stations such as HBO, Turner, MVS, Netflix, and ISat. In 2010 he was awarded the Premio Orizzonti at the Venice Film Festival.

Doc Studies Events, NEWS/BLOG, Uncategorized

Doc Studies Info Session!

Members of the faculty and admission counselors will be present to discuss the program, describe professional opportunities in their field, and answer questions about the application process. Recent alumni and current students may also be present based on their availability. Clips of recent student work will be shared.

Contact Phone:212.229.5150
Contact E-mail:nsadmissions@newschool.edu
Starts On:04 Dec 2019 06:00 PM ET
Ends On:04 Dec 2019 07:30 PM ET
Location:The New School – Main Campus
Address:The New School
79 Fifth Avenue, 16th floor
Room 1618

REGISTER HERE!

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk: Ian Soroka (Nov. 4, 2019)

GRAND PRIX – DOCLISBOA – City of Lisbon Award for Best International Competition Film

GRAND PRIX – DOXA Doc. Film Festival Vancouver – Best Feature Documentary Award

The film’s attractively verdant visuals are layered with a variety of voices exploring the forest’s past and present, with particular focus on its role as a commune for partisans during WWII. – Matt Turner, The Brooklyn Rail

Tactfully, Soroka keeps subjects at a distance in the frame, mostly using off-screen interviews as voiceover, side-stepping both conventional technique and creating a sort of unified disembodied voice of the setting. – Adam Cook, MUBI

Drifting through the densely forested landscape of southern Slovenia—GREETINGS FROM FREE FORESTS, like a lifting fog, reveals a refuge of embedded historical memory. The film travels alongside the testimonies of local hunters, foresters, cavers, and foragers among others—orbiting around an absence left by radical struggle after it has come to fruition and since faded. During WWII, this forest served as a sanctuary for the Partisan Liberation Front, who were resisting the Fascist occupation of Yugoslavia. Remnants of this event can still be found throughout the forest in various states of decay, but also within images that sought to preserve the revolution’s emancipatory energy for future generations; images now stored in an underground film archive buried within the forest itself, depicting both the violence and the hope that came with radical change.

Ian Soroka (b. 1987) works in non-fiction forms of film and of Colorado in Boulder, in Prague at FAMU, and completed an M.S. in Art, Culture and Technology at MIT. Ian is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Princess Grace Foundation-USA Award recipient, and a Fulbright Fellow in Slovenia, where he was a guest researcher at the Slovenian National Film Archive and Cinematheque. His work has screened internationally in festival, gallery and museum contexts including: DocLisboa, Art of The Real, The Doc’s Kingdom Film Seminar, Rencontres Internationales, Dokufest, DokFest München, and Kinoteka, Ljubljana. Ian is from western Colorado and is based in the San Francisco Bay area.