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Join us for our 1st Doc Talk of Fall 2025!

We’re excited to open the Fall 2025 Doc Talks screening season with The Shards by Masha Chernaya, followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker.

In Spring 2022 Masha prepares to leave Russia – her homeland that has changed. It turns into a chain of unexpected farewells: her mom dies of cancer, her lover flees army conscription, everything including her own old self is falling apart. Her way to cope with the grief is to fixate everything with her camera. Her anger guides her to inner emigration to the local underground scene, which became an escape for young Russians. This kaleidoscope of shards chronicles not only the spirit of the time, but the director’s personality crumbling against the backdrop of global turmoil.

With a multifaceted background, Masha Chernaya works as a director and cinematographer, editor, text author, photographer, and illustrator, blending her diverse talents to create compelling visual narratives. Her most recent feature documentary The Shards (2024) has won the Doc Alliance award for Best Feature Film.

Please join us for this screening and Q&A, hosted and moderated by Amir Husak, Director of Documentary Studies and Assistant Professor in the School of Media Studies.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

[Cancelled] Doc Talk – Is this me? Films by Maryam Tafakory

** 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 virtual screening and 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.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies at the School of Media Studies at the Schools of Public Engagement.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk (In-Person) – Richland by Irene Lusztig

This Doc Talk featured 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.

Moderated by Lana Lin, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates Adriana de Lucio (Media Studies ’24) and Johann Yamin (Media Studies ’24).

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.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies at the School of Media Studies at the Schools of Public Engagement.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk (In-Person w/ Zoom Q&A) – Chimeras of the Cine-machine: Films by Ana Vaz

This Doc Talk featured a screening and Q&A with filmmaker Ana Vaz to discuss her short films Apiyemiyekî?, Amérika: Bahía de las Flechas, Ha Terra! There is Land!, Look closely at the mountains, and Atomic Garden. Following the in-person film screening, Vaz joined 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.

Moderated by Lana Lin, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates Adriana de Lucio (Media Studies ’24) and Johann Yamin (Media Studies ’24).

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.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies at the School of Media Studies at the Schools of Public Engagement.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk (In-Person) – The Night Visitors with Michael Gitlin

The first Doc Talk of Spring 2024 featured 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.

Moderated by Lana Lin, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates Adriana de Lucio (Media Studies ’24) and Johann Yamin (Media Studies ’24).

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.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies at the School of Media Studies at the Schools of Public Engagement.

Doc Studies DOC TALKS

Doc Talk (In-Person w/ Zoom Q&A) – Onlookers with Kimi Takesue

This Doc Talk featured a screening of Kimi Takesue’s film, Onlookers. Following the screening, Takesue joined virtually for the Q&A.

ONLOOKERS offers a visually striking, immersive meditation on travel and tourism in Laos, reflecting on how we all live as observers. Traversing the country’s dusty roads and tranquil rivers, we watch as painterly tableaus unfold, revealing the whimsical and at times disruptive interweaving of locals and foreigners in rest and play. Tourists swarm sites of spectacle, then recede like a passing tide, leaving Laotians to continue with their daily lives. ONLOOKERS transports viewers on a sensorial journey of deep looking and listening, inviting audiences to contemplate their own modes of tourism, while asking enduring questions about what we seek when we travel.

Moderated by Lana Lin, Director of the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates Adriana de Lucio (Media Studies ’24) and Johann Yamin (Media Studies ’24).

Kimi Takesue is an award-winning filmmaker working in documentary, experimental and narrative genres. Takesue’s films have screened at more than 250 film festivals and museums internationally including Sundance, Locarno, Toronto, New Directors /New Films, Cinéma du Reel, Centre Pompidou and MoMA and have aired on PBS, IFC, and the Sundance Channel. Takesue is the recipient of Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, as well as the “Breakthrough Award” from Chicken and Egg Pictures recognizing women who have made significant contributions to the documentary field.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies at the School of Media Studies at the Schools of Public Engagement.

Doc Studies Uncategorized

DOC TALK (ONLINE) – YEH FREEDOM LIFE – Q&A with PRIYA SEN

Filmed in the dense streets and neighborhoods of Ambedkar Nagar in New Delhi, Yeh Freedom Life (This Freedom Life) (2019, 70 min) tries to keep up with its protagonists, as they maneuver erratic and unpredictable love. One of them works at a local beauty parlour, the other runs the family kiosk at a crowded intersection. They are surrounded by a cacophonous city; they are both in love with other women. The film stays with them and their desire for ‘freedom lives’, outside society and family’s constant scrutiny and sanction. But this ‘freedom life’ also leaves them vulnerable to the precariousness of love, when it refuses such constraints.

Priya Sen & Nicolás Grandi‘s Faasla (2020, 50 min) is a conversation in epistolary form using video, an exchange over a distance of countries and time zones, and at the time of a global pandemic which has meant a sudden re-ordering of our lives as we knew it. “We speak of distances, of intimacies we can no longer access, of the state of suspended freedoms, of memory, images and sensations. Our bodies themselves have become receptacles of these uncertainties, the archives we have haphazardly been building over the years, are having to speak for us. Maybe this dialogue is between the archives themselves, what we have seen, what we see now.”

Priya Sen is a New Delhi based filmmaker and artist who works with nonfiction forms across film /video, sound and installation. Her films explore forms for tenuousness, ambiguity and un-settling, as modes of navigating urban lives and experience. Sen’s work has been presented at the Flaherty Seminar 2019, among other festivals and venues that include the BFI London Film Festival, Forum Expanded Berlinale, Bangalore Queer Fest, Experimenta, Images Festival Toronto and the Dharamshala International Film Festival.

Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies

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