We’re pleased to announce the guest filmmakers for our Spring 2024 Doc Talk series below. All screenings will take place at Kellen Auditorium, with guest filmmakers joining us either in-person or virtually over Zoom for the Q&A. All events are free to attend and open to the public.
** As of May 5, 2024, the final Doc Talk, Is This Me? Films by Maryam Tafakory has been cancelled by the artist in solidarity with the students demanding divestment from Israel, who were arrested and suspended after the police were called to clear the solidarity encampments. **
Follow us on social media to get event updates and see recap videos of Doc Talk Q&As.
The Night Visitors by Michael Gitlin
Mon, Feb 5, 1-3:45pm ET
Kellen Auditorium, 66 5th Ave
Join us for a screening and Q&A with filmmaker Michael Gitlin to discuss his film The Night Visitors.
THE NIGHT VISITORS is a movie about moths. Through a critical lens that is by turns social and personal, the film closely considers these underknown creatures. The small hours of the night are threaded through with a sense of mortality and loss. Moths, with their trembling and exquisite impermanence, provide both a kind of solace and a focal point around which the desire to know can be organized. The film looks at moths as aesthetic beings and as carriers of meaning, aiming for a deep encounter with the beauty and incommensurability of the profoundly other.
Michael Gitlin makes work about some of the intricate conceptual and ideological systems out of which ways of knowing the world can be constructed. His films have screened at numerous venues, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Festival, the London Film Festival, and the Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Gitlin’s experimental documentary, THE NIGHT VISITORS, premiered at the 2023 New York Film Festival. Gitlin was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. His work has also been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His 16mm film, The Birdpeople, is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Chimeras of the Cine-machine: Films by Ana Vaz
Mon, Mar 4, 1-3:40pm ET
Kellen Auditorium, 66 5th Ave*
Join us for a screening and Q&A with filmmaker Ana Vaz to discuss her films including Apiyemiyekî?; Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas; Ha Terra! There is Land!; Look closely at the mountains; Atomic Garden. Following the in-person film screening, Vaz will join virtually via Zoom for the Q&A.
Vaz’s films activate and question cinema as an art of the (in)visible and instrument capable of dehumanising the human, expanding its connections with forms of life — other than human or spectral. Apiyemiyekî? addresses the genocide of the Waimiri-Atroari people in 1970s through illustrations created by the indigenous population which refer us to the present day. In present-day Dominican Republic, Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas revisits Lake Enriquillo where Christopher Columbus landed in 1492 and confronted the native Taíno people to establish the first European settlement in America. Há Terra! is set in the Brazilian bush where land and character, predator and prey encounter one another in a chase, a hunt, and a tale of looking and becoming. Look closely at the mountains compares the dire mineral extraction issue in Brazil with a different outcome in Nord-Pas-de-Calais in France, where such extraction has ceased. Atomic Garden explores an elderly Japanese woman’s contaminated garden after the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima.
Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker born in the Brazilian highlands. Recent film festivals include Locarno Film Festival, Cineasti del Presente (Switzerland, 2022); Berlinale, Forum Expanded (Germany, 2023, 2021, 2020); MoMA Doc Fortnight (New York, USA, 2023); CPH:Dox (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2023); IFFR (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2023, 2020); Viennale (Austria, 2022); Mostra Internacional de Cinema em São Paulo (Brazil, 2022); Jeonju International Film Festival (South-Korea, 2023); Indie Lisboa, International competition (Portugal, 2023). Her work has also been shown at Jeu de Paume (Paris, France), Instituto Moreira Salles (São Paulo, Brazil), Courtisane (Ghent, Belgium), Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), TIFF Cinemathèque (Toronto, Canada), and Flaherty Film Seminar (Hamilton, USA). She is a founding member of the collective COYOTE, an interdisciplinary group working in the fields of ecology and political science through an array of conceptual and experimental forms.
*Following the screening, the filmmaker will join us over Zoom for the Q&A.
Richland by Irene Lusztig
Mon, Mar 25, 1-3:40pm
Kellen Auditorium, 66 5th Ave
Join us for a screening and Q&A with filmmaker Irene Lusztig to discuss her film, Richland.
Built by the US government to house the Hanford nuclear site workers who manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Richland, Washington is proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town and proud of the atomic bomb it helped create. RICHLAND offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past. Moving between archival past and observational present, and across encounters with nuclear workers, community members, archeologists, local tribes, and a Japanese granddaughter of atomic bomb survivors, the film blooms into an expansive and lyrical meditation on home, safety, whiteness, land, and deep time.
Irene Lusztig is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and amateur seamstress. Her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present, inviting viewers to contemplate questions of politics, ideology, and the complex ways that personal, collective, and national memory are entangled. Her films have been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, BFI London Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, DocLisboa, and RIDM Montréal. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2021), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fulbright, two MacDowell fellowships, the Flaherty Film Seminar, and the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship. She is Professor of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz.
Is this me? Films by Maryam Tafakory
Mon, May 6, 1-3:40pm ET
** As of May 5, 2024, the artist has cancelled this event in solidarity with the students demanding divestment from Israel, who were arrested and suspended after the police were called to clear the solidarity encampments. **
Join us for a Q+A with filmmaker, Maryam Tafakory to discuss her films Mast-del, Irani Bag, Nazarbazi, and Chaste/UnChaste.
Through collages of original and found footage, Tafakory’s films reflect on identity and the censorship of intimacy and sexuality in post-Revolution Iran. Mast-del explores queer identity inside and outside of post-Revolution Iran through altered visuals, new and archival. Irani Bag is a video essay, focusing on the restriction of physical intimacy and demonstrating to its viewers “how to touch without touching.” Nazarbazi tells a story of desire, control, and love in Iran through a collage of found footage. Chaste/UnChaste examines the limitations of labeling women’s bodies as chaste/unchaste through depiction of Iranian women in film.
Maryam Tafakory [b. Shiraz/Iran] works with film and performance. Screenings of her work include MoMA, Tate Modern, Cannes’ Directors Fortnight, New York Film Festival, Locarno, Toronto International Film Festival, FICUNAM, Oberhausen, and Anthology Film Archives, amongst others. She was awarded the Gold Hugo at the 58th Chicago Int’l Film Festival, the Tiger Short Award at the 51st IFFR, the Barbara Hammer Feminist Film Award at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival, and the Best Experimental Short Film at the 70th and 71st Melbourne International Film Festival, amongst others.
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