Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk: Stephen Maing (2018)

“As [documentary filmmakers] we have a chance to make something that transcends straight [journalistic] storytelling. We have the opportunity to bear witness to incredibly messy situations and to interrogate our own placement within that.”

Stephen Maing was a Doc Talk guest on September 17th, 2018. He is an Emmy-nominated Brooklyn-based filmmaker. His film Crime + Punishment chronicles the real lives and struggles of The NYPD 12; a group of black and Latino whistleblower cops and the young minorities they are pressured to arrest and summons in New York City.

Crime + Punishment received a Special Jury Award at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk: Angela Anderson (Sep. 23, 2019)

The first Doc Talk of this fall 2019 semester was with Berlin based artist and filmmaker Angela Anderson. The works in this screening address the extraction of two highly contested substances – gold and oil – mapping out affective cartographies which are rendered invisible within capitalist calculations of value:

Anderson’s most recent film, “Three (or more) Ecologies: A Feminist Articulation of Eco-intersectionality – Part I: For the World to Live, Patriarchy Must Die” contrasts the highly industrial/technical nature of the destructive fracking industry in North Dakota’s Bakken oil boom on the Ft. Berthhold – Three Affiliated Tribes Reservation with voices from Jinwar, a women’s village project in the autonomous region of Rojava (Northern Syria). The first chapter of this ongoing research project emphasizes the urgent necessity of redefining value and for a societal shift towards relations of empathy and care. The film features interviews with feminist activist and writer, Silvia Federici. 

In 2013, Angela Anderson and Angela Melitopoulos began documenting the environmental, social and psychological damage inflicted on the region of Halkidiki in north­ eastern Greece by the construction of a massive open pit gold mine by the Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold in the pristine forests of the Skouries­-Kakkavos mountains. Unearthing Disaster I (2013) captures the literal pulverization of the natural and cultural environment and its social form of expression. The video accompanies local activists on a journey through their once ­familiar landscape, transformed into something they no longer recognize.

Angela Anderson is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of the fields of philosophy, ecology, economics, migration, and feminist & queer theory. Recent video works include the audio-visual research projects Unearthing Disaster (2013-2015) and The Refrain (2015) with the video artist Angela Melitopoulos, The Sea Between You and Me (2016) and as a co-author in the project Crossings (2017) by Angela Melitopoulos shown in documenta 14. During 2018-2019 she was an Art and Theory Fellow at Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen (Innsbruck, AT). Recent exhibitions include Tiroler Kunstpavillion (Innsbruck, 2019), Tallinn Photomonth Biennial (Tallinn, EE, 2019), CAAC (Sevilla, 2018), Minnesota Street Project (San Francisco, 2017), Holbaek Images (Holbaek, DK, 2016) Framer Framed (Amsterdam) and the Thessaloniki Biennale (2015). She is also the exhibition designer for Forum Expanded at the Berlin International Film Festival. She holds an MA in Film and Media Studies from the New School (NYC) and is pursuing her PhD at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Originally from Wisconsin, USA, she lives and works in Berlin.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk: Lynne Sachs (Feb. 25, 2019)

A beautiful, poetic collage of memory, history, poetry, and lived experience, in all its joys, sorrows, fears, hopes, triumphs, and tragedies … rendered in exquisite visual terms, creating an artful collective chronicle of history.
– Christopher Bourne, Screen Anarchy

An examination of one generation’s complex and diverse navigation between public and private experience.
– David Finkelstein, Film International Continue reading “Doc Talk: Lynne Sachs (Feb. 25, 2019)” →

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk With Maya Mumma (Nov. 5, 2018)

 

“Eye-opening, meticulous, and haunting movie.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“The film begins to raise its subject back up to a towering state of wisdom and foresight.” – Hank Stuever, Washington Post

King in the Wilderness chronicles the final chapters of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s life, revealing a conflicted leader who faced an onslaught of criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. While the Black Power movement saw his nonviolence as weakness, and President Lyndon B. Johnson saw his anti-Vietnam War speeches as irresponsible, Dr. King’s unyielding belief in peaceful protest became a testing point for a nation on the brink of chaos.

Maya Mumma, ACE, was an editor on the Academy Award winning documentary O.J.: Made in America for which she was honored with the 2016 Best Editing award from the LA Film Critics Association, an ACE Eddie Award, and a Primetime Emmy.

Maya began her career in the edit room of the Academy Award nominated documentary Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. She has gone on to edit the Emmy nominated films Which Way Is the Front Line From Here: The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington (HBO) and Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley (HBO), the Peabody Award winning Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown (HBO), A Journey of a Thousand Miles: Peacekeepers (TIFF 2015, PBS 2018), the Netflix original series Daughters of Destiny (Television Academy Honor), King in the Wilderness (HBO), which premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and most recently John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls (HBO).

Originally from Oklahoma, Maya has a BA in Social Anthropology from Boston University, an MA in Media Studies from the New School, and is a graduate of the New School’s intensive Documentary Media Studies program. In addition to editing, she has taught filmmaking to New York City public school students and teachers, and served as a mentor for the Firelight Media Documentary Lab and the Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship.

Doc Talk recorded November 5th at The New School

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk With Jessica Edwards

How do you fund a documentary film? Where do you go, and what do you need to know? And – provided you secure the funding – how do you get your film out into the world and make sure people hear about it? 

Our guest, Jessica Edwards, has a broad background in the film industry as a director, producer and publicist. Her first feature-length documentary, Mavis!, about soul music legend Mavis Staples and her family group The Staple Singers, premiered on HBO in 2016 and was awarded a Peabody for distinguished achievement in documentary filmmaking.

Her award-winning debut short Seltzer Works premiered at SxSW and was broadcast on the PBS series POV in 2010. Her other documentaries including Tugs (2011), The Landfill (2012) and Slowerblack (2017) have screened at film festivals around the world including Sundance, SxSW, Hot Docs, Full Frame, IDFA and dozens of others.
 
Edwards is a Vice-President at the VR content studio Scenic, where she has collaborated with outlets like the Wall Street Journal on 360 video documentaries for Samsung Gear, Google Daydream and other VR platforms.

As an independent film publicist for over 10 years, Edwards worked with such filmmakers as Sofia Coppola, David Lynch, the Coen Brothers, Gus Van Sant and many others. 

In 2015 she was named 10 Documakers to watch by Variety. Edwards holds a MA in Media Studies from The New School in New York City and a BA in Cinema Studies from Concordia University in her native Canada. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Doc Talk recorded October 15th at The New School