Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk (In-Person) – Bugs, Beasts, and other Bodies – Screening and Q&A with Alexis Kyle Mitchell

Join us for a screening and presentation with Alexis Kyle Mitchell to discuss her films, Bugs & Beasts before the Law, Special Works School, and The Treasury of Human Inheritance (in progress)

Bugs & Beasts before the Law explores the medieval practice of putting animals on trial, an aspect of colonial law-making that forged political and sometimes profane relationships between humans and animals. Special Works School investigates the connections between artistic practice and surveillant technologies, honing in on the psychic, embodied and material dimensions of surveillance – both from the position of the surveiller and the surveilled. Mitchell will also present her current film-in-progress, The Treasury of Human Inheritance, about a rare neuromuscular genetic disease that runs in her family.

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), Tiffany Jiang (Doc Studies ’22 & Media Studies ’23), and Farrah Elatty (Media Studies ’24).

recap soon

Alexis Kyle Mitchell is an artist and scholar based between New York and the Glasgow. Mitchell recently completed a PhD in Human Geography at the University of Toronto and was artist-in-residence at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015-17), MacDowell (2018), and Sommerakademie Paul Klee (2017-19). She often works collaboratively alongside artist Sharlene Bamboat – the duo has recently launched a web project http://www.before-law.com. Recent screenings and exhibitions include Mercer Union, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Lille Fine Art Museum, and a solo exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, presenting Bamboat | Mitchell’s experimental film and installation Bugs & Beasts Before the Law. Her writing can be read in Digital Lives in the Global City and Queer at Camp. Mitchell currently holds a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Disability Studies at New York University.

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

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk (Online) – Q&A with Miko Revereza & Carolina Fusilier

Join us for a Q&A with artist filmmakers Miko Revereza and Carolina Fusilier to discuss No Data Plan (directed by Revereza) and El Lado Quieto (directed by Fusilier/Revereza). Register to receive the meeting invite link and access to films one week prior to the event.

No Data Plan
A voiceless narrator rehashes details about his mother’s affair as he crosses America by train. “Mama has two phone numbers. We do not talk about immigration on her Obama phone. For that we use the other number with no data plan.” The precarious movement from Los Angeles to New York illustrates the migration and fugitivism of an undocumented subjectivity.

El Lado Quieto
El Lado Quieto is a sensorial journey through colliding mythologies, surveying the afterlife of a long-abandoned holiday resort off the Pacific coast of Mexico. This study of life and decay unfolds through the fable of the Siyokoy sea creature, who, carried by strong currents from the Philippines, comes to navigate the spectral remnants of this post-human landscape.

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), Tiffany Jiang (Doc Studies ’22 & Media Studies ’23), and Farrah Elatty (Media Studies ’24).

recap soon

Carolina Fusilier is a multi disciplinary artist exploring post-human imaginaries. Her work contemplates the intersections between organic and machine bodies, industrial and domestic scenes. Her work has been supported by a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship (2019-2020, US), Fundación Jumex (Mexico), Raul Urtasun-Frances Harley Fellowship (2015, The Banff Centre, CA), and Locust Projects (US). She also received the ACC Cinema fund (Asia Culture Center, KOR) for ´El Lado Quieto´(as a co-director) which was recently screened in Doc-Fortnight MoMa (New York); Open City Film Festival (London), IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), True/ False Film Festival (Columbia, US), YIDFF 2021 (Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, JP), Dok-Leipzig (DE), and Images Festival (Toronto).

Miko Revereza is a documentary and experimental filmmaker living in Oaxaca City, Mexico. Migration and exile are recurring themes across his work. Revereza’s titles include DROGA!, Disintegration 93-96, No Data Plan, Distancing and El Lado Quieto. No Data Plan received the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award, San Diego Asian Film Festival Emerging Filmmaker Award, and was listed in BFI Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary & Experimental Films of 2019 and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2019. Revereza was Filmmaker Magazine’s 2018 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema, a 2019 Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, and recipient of the 2021 Vilcek Prize in Filmmaking.

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

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk (In-Person) – Wisdom Gone Wild – Screening and Q&A with Rea Tajiri

In this moving and original reflection on aging, mortality, and transformation, Rea Tajiri partners with her mother, Rose Tajiri Noda, to create a film about the final sixteen years of Rose’s life as a person living with dementia. Together, they nurture their connection through listening, art, and music. Rose performs songs from her youth, providing the soundtrack for time travel, as we witness her evolution across nine decades of living. Delicately weaving between past and present, parenting and being parented, the film reflects on the unreliability of memory and the desire to reinvent one’s own life when memories fail us.

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).

recap soon

Rea Tajiri is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and educator who creates installation, documentary and experimental films. Her work situates itself in poetic, non-traditional storytelling forms to encourage dialog and reflection around buried histories. Her groundbreaking, award-winning work, including History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991), is part of the canon of Asian American filmmaking and has influenced a generation of filmmakers. As an advocate of emerging artists and directors, Tajiri co-founded The Workshop, an incubator for Asian American film directors in New York City. Funded through ITVS, Independence Media Philadelphia, CAAM Documentary Fund, JustFilms/Ford Foundation and a Pew Fellowship, Wisdom Gone Wild premiered at the 2022 Blackstar Film Festival where it won the Jury Award Honorable Mention and Audience Award for Feature Documentary.

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

Doc Studies DOC TALKS, Uncategorized

Doc Talk (Online) – Short Films: Analogue Activations – Q&A with Lindsay McIntyre

Join us for a Q+A with director Lindsay McIntyre to discuss a collection of her short films.

Working in 16mm film using experimental and handmade techniques, Lindsay McIntyre’s short films circle themes of portraiture, place, form and personal histories. Interested simultaneously in the apparatus of cinema and representation, she bridges gaps in collective experience and remains dedicated to integrating theory and practice, form and content. She hopes to share authentic stories including from the generations of urban Inuit who have been displaced from Inuit Nunangat. Her current research involves the auto-ethnographical exploration of intergenerational trauma as well as a project linking land use, art practices, cultural knowledge and resource extraction in the circumpolar north.

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).

*Register in advance to watch the films remotely and receive the meeting link!

register

Lindsay McIntyre (she/her) is a filmmaker and multi-disciplinary artist of Inuit and settler descent working primarily with analogue film. Her short documentaries, experimental films, and expanded cinema performances have been seen around the world including at Ann Arbor, Anthology Film Archives, Pleasure Dome, Mono No Aware, Rotterdam, Oberhausen, Images, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Raindance, One Flaming Arrow, and Black Maria, and can be found in several permanent collections. AJJIGIINGILUKTAAQTUGUT: WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT (2021) earned a special mention as one of 2021 VIFF’s Best Shorts and was nominated for Best Animation at the American Indian Film Festival. HER SILENT LIFE won Best Experimental Film at imagineNATIVE (2012). Honours include the 2021 Women in the Director’s Chair Feature Film Award, Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton recipient for Excellence in Media Arts by the Canada Council (2013), and REVEAL Indigenous Art Award (2017).

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

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk (Online) – All About My Sisters – Q&A with Wang Qiong

In her astonishing feature debut, Wang Qiong documents with unflinching and harrowing honesty her own fractured family, gradually revealing the personal and psychological effects of China’s one-child policy on the individual, the family unit, and women in society at large. At the center of the film is her sister, Jin, who remains profoundly affected by her biological parents’ abandonment of her as a baby after attempting to abort her. Adopted by her aunt and uncle, Jin resumed living with her birth parents as a teenager, yet the family remains embroiled in a legacy of trauma. Filming over the course of seven years, Wang moves far beyond the diaristic, capturing moments of vulnerability, joy, pain, and anguish with insight and delicate artistry.

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).

Wang Qiong is a Chinese emerging independent documentary filmmaker and cinematographer now based in Philadelphia. Her debut documentary film, ALL ABOUT MY SISTERS, was officially selected into prestigious film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival and BFI London Film Festival in 2021, and won the Pinkenson Local Feature Award at the Philadelphia Film Festival and the Jury Award for the best film at the Documenta Madrid International Film Festival. Qiong was selected into Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2021. She recently completed her MFA in Filmmaking from Temple University, and is a recipient of a Princess Grace Foundation Honorarium, 2021. Qiong is currently working on her second feature length documentary, 岛DAO

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

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 DOC TALKS, Events

DOC TALK (ONLINE): What Farocki Taught / On the Domestication of Sheep – Screening and Q&A with Jill Godmilow (filmmaker and author)

“Godmilow’s film re-makes Farocki’s film… in order to study it, to take apart its various phases, to understand it, to think about it…. It is an act of remembering…. Film which can break reality into pieces… can also demonstrate for us the processes of memory, of re-thinking the past and turning it—not into nostalgia—but into a lesson for the future.“
—Tom Gunning

“A bracing exercise in political filmmaking and pedagogy… resurrecting the Brechtian frontal attack, both on an economic system intent on the manufacture of death and on the complacency of documentary realism.” 
—Michael Renov

Ever since Jill Godmilow began making documentaries in 1966, her work has broken barriers. Her early feminist films helped pave the way for more films made by, for, and about women. In her groundbreaking Far From Poland she explored the rise of the Solidarity movement at a distance, incorporating an unprecedented array of experimental approaches—staging, reenactment, interviewing, archival films—and thereby fostering a post-realist movement within documentary filmmaking. Her criticism of documentary’s “pornography of the real” has won her friends and enemies, challenging left liberal documentary to re-think its strategies. What Farocki Taught (1998) is one of her most controversial films, a re-make and interrogation of Harun Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire about Dow Chemical’s creation of napalm B during the Vietnam War. Since her retirement from teaching at Notre Dame University, she has been busier than ever, producing and directing new films and writing a book for students about the documentary. Her recent short film, On the Domestication of Sheep (2019), is a quirky surprise—an animated film that delivers a blow to gendered capitalism with ironic wit and powerful punch. Godmilow remains tireless in her efforts to keep the debate over documentary ethics as stimulating as ever. She will discuss these two short films, radically different in style and tone from each other, and then speak about her new book and film-in-progress.

Jill Godmilow

Jill Godmilow is an internationally known, award-winning independent filmmaker who has been producing and directing nonfiction and narrative work on feminist, gay, labor, and art issues for decades. In 2003, her Academy Award-nominated feature Antonia: A Portrait of the Woman was added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. She is Emerita Professor at the University of Notre Dame where she taught film production and critical studies courses in the Department of Film, Television & Theatre for twenty years. She is probably best known for her radically deconstructive approach to the documentary and juxtaposition of fact and fiction. In 2020 she began work on a new film, For High School Students—Notes from the Vietnam War. She has just finished writing Kill the Documentary—A Letter to Filmmakers, Students and Scholars, forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Please join us for this online screening and Q&A, hosted and moderated by Deirdre Boyle, Associate Professor in the School of Media Studies at The New School. 

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies
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