We’re pleased to share the guests for our Spring Doc Talk series below. Events will follow a hybrid schedule where some will take place in-person at Kellen Auditorium and others will be hosted virtually over Zoom. All events are free to attend and open to the public. This page will be updated as more details are made available.
Follow us on social media to get event updates and see Q&A recaps of Doc Talks. Keep an eye out for news about our upcoming student film festival, Truth Be Told, scheduled for May 2023.
“All About My Sisters” by Wang Qiong – January 30th, 8:00pm EST (Online)
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.
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
“Wisdom Gone Wild” by Rea Tajiri – February 13th, 7:00pm EST (Kellen Auditorium)
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.
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, Rea 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.
Analogue Activations: short films by Lindsay McIntyre – March 7th, 6:00pm EST (Online)
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.
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).
Films by Miko Revereza & Carolina Fusilier – March 28th, 6:00pm EST (Online)
In 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 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.
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.
Bugs and Beasts and other Bodies with Alexis K. Mitchell – April 25th, 5:00pm EST (Kellen Auditorium)
Alexis Kyle Mitchell will discuss her collaborative film and installation BUGS & BEASTS BEFORE THE LAW along with other projects. BUGS & BEASTS BEFORE THE LAW is an experimental film that explores the medieval practice of putting animals on trial. This history of colonial law-making forged political and sometimes profane relationships between humans and animals. Mitchell & Bamboat’s essayistic work reimagines common perceptions of legal history and, in doing so, produces a world where past and present, fiction and non-fiction, human and animal fuse. Mitchell will also present other projects, including her current film-in-progress about a rare neuromuscular genetic disease that runs in her family.
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 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.
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