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Doc Talk: Bicentenario + La Laguna del Soldado with Pablo Alvarez-Mesa

Please join us for a special double-feature screening of Bicentenario and La Laguna del Soldado by filmmaker Pablo Alvarez-Mesa, followed by a conversation with the director. The two films are from an ongoing trilogy retracing Simón Bolívar’s 1819 liberation campaign across Colombia and its lingering presence two centuries later. 

In Bicentenario, shot on the exact dates and in the precise locations of Bolívar’s passage, spiritual mediums attempt to conjure the Liberator’s spirit, while Electronic Voice Phenomenon recordings channel a haunting dialogue between past and present – revealing how rituals of remembrance sustain political mysticism, violence, and unresolved historical trauma within the social imaginary. La Laguna del Soldado continues this journey across the high-altitude páramo, a fog-laden landscape that becomes a living archive of contested memory, where oral histories and territorial scars blur the line between ghost and geography. Together, these films offer a poetic and unsettling meditation on history as séance, landscape as witness, and liberation as an unfinished – and perhaps cursed – project.

Program Duration: 119 min

About the Filmmaker

Pablo Alvarez-Mesa is a filmmaker, cinematographer and editor working mainly in non fiction, whose films have played and earned awards at international film festivals including Berlinale, IFFR, Viennale, MoMA, Visions du Reel, and RIDM. His work in cinema lies in the relationship between fact and fiction; between what is recalled and what is inevitably constructed. Pablo is Sundance Doc Fund grantee, an affiliate member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, and a Berlinale Talents, Banff Centre for the Arts and Canadian Film Centre alumnus.

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.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS, Latest News, Spring 2026 Lineup

Doc Talk: Always with Hansen Lin

Please join us for a screening and Q&A with filmmaker and producer Hansen Lin to discuss his and Deming Chen’s award-winning film Always on February 23rd at Kellen Auditorium.

Set in the countryside of Hunan, ALWAYS traces the inner world of Gong Youbin, born into poverty and separated from his mother since infancy. Through a poetry class at school, Gong discovers writing as a means of imagination and emotional exploration. As childhood dreams coexist with the harsh realities of family life, the film becomes an allegory for innocence lost and the quiet inevitability of growing up.

Program Duration: 87 min

About the Filmmaker

Hansen Lin is a Chinese independent producer based in New York, where he founded TimeLight Films, a production company dedicated to breaking boundaries between reality and cinema and amplifying underrepresented voices and stories. He has produced author-driven films across both nonfiction and fiction. His latest producing credit, Always (dir. Deming Chen, 2025), won the DOX:AWARD at CPH:DOX and received numerous awards at international film festivals. He is an alum of EURODOC and the Film Independent Producing Fellowship.

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.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS, Spring 2026 Lineup

Doc Talk: Looking for Horses with Stefan Pavlovic

Please join us for a screening and Q&A with filmmaker Stefan Pavlovic to discuss his film Looking for Horses on January 26 at Kellen Auditorium.

Looking for Horses is a film about a friendship between a filmmaker and a fisherman who, after losing his hearing in a war, retreats to a remote lake to live in near solitude. The filmmaker, himself struggling with speech and a fractured sense of belonging, finds in the fisherman both a guide and a mirror. Despite their limitations, a bond forms as the fisherman opens his world to the young man — a world of giant catfish, wild horses, vast silences, and sudden storms. For one, the lake is a refuge from a broken land; for the other, it is a way back toward it. As they search for ways to communicate, the camera becomes their shared language. Taking the form of a gentle western, Looking for Horses is a poetic documentary about trauma, survival, and the fragile work of connection.

Program Duration: 88 min

About the Filmmaker

Stefan Pavlović is an award-winning filmmaker currently based in Amsterdam. His debut feature film Looking for Horses (2021) has been screened at over forty international film festivals, and won fifteen prizes, among others, the Burning Lights Competition at Visions du Reel, Jury Prize at Sarajevo Film Festival, Grand Prix at RIDM, Best Film at Kasseler Dokfest. Stefan was awarded the Prins Bernhard Documentary Stipend in 2021 and was selected for the Berlinale Talents program in 2022. Pavlović is a programmer at the Eastern Neighbours Film Festival in The Hague, the Netherlands. He received his BA in film directing at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and his MA at the Netherlands Film Academy in Artistic Research in and through Cinema.

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.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS, Latest News

Doc Talk: Silence of Reason with Kumjana Novakova

Please join us for a screening and Q&A with filmmaker Kumjana Novakova to discuss her film Silence of Reason on Dec 1st at Kellen Auditorium.

Silence of Reason is a forensic video essay constructed as a performative research into the first international criminal tribunal case to enter convictions for war-time rape as a form of torture and sexual enslavement as a crime against humanity. While working solely with archive and testimonies, the film acts as a memory itself: elusive and fluid, it rejects framing, moving in all directions, spatial and temporal. The singular experiences of violence and torture by women from the Foča rape camps during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina become our collective memories, surpassing time and space.

Program Duration: 63 min

Note: Following the screening, filmmaker will join remotely via Zoom for the Q&A.

About the Filmmaker

Kumjana Novakova was born in the former Yugoslavia and has worked in film and the arts since 2006. She co-founded the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival in Sarajevo, serving as its chief curator and director, and between 2018 and 2021 she led the Film Department of the Museum of Contemporary Art – Skopje in North Macedonia. Her practice spans cinema and contemporary video art, with a particular interest in how moving images explore identity, memory and the collective self.

Novakova’s work has screened at numerous festivals and venues, including Tate Modern, MoMA, Museum of the Moving Image, IDFA, Cinema du Reel, Punto de Vista, HotDocs, MG+MSUM, etc. Her feature film work includes Disturbed Earth (2021, co-directed with Guillermo Carreras Candi), which was shortlisted for the Academy Awards, and Silence of Reason (2023), which won multiple international awards — including the Grand Prize and Youth Jury Award at the Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival (2024), Human Rights Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2024, and the Golden Lily for Best Film at the goEast. 

Currently, she is an associate professor in the Master of Film programme at the Netherlands Film Academy and is pursuing a PhD in Contemporary Arts and Media in Belgrade. She splits her time living between Sarajevo and Skopje.

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.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS, Fall 2025 Lineup, Latest News

Doc Talk: A Body to Live In with Angelo Madsen

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.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS, Latest News

Doc Talk: The African Film Institute Presents with Christian Nyampeta

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.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS, Latest News

Doc Talk: The Dating Game with Violet Du Feng

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.