We’re thrilled to announce that several Doc Studies program alumni are screening their films this November at DOC NYC, America’s largest documentary festival! Rite of Passage by Talha Jalal (Class of 2023) is an official selection of the shorts programs, and Through a Glass Eye by Lola Granger-Jourdan (Class of 2023) was competitively selected for DOC NYC U. Both short films were previously presented during our Doc Studies annual showcase, Truth Be Told 2023. Mahdokht Mahmoudabadi (Class of 2018) is the lead editor of the feature film Three Promises, included in the official selection of DOC NYC. Congratulations to our alums!
Learn more about their backgrounds, the films’ synopses, and screening details below.
This Doc Talk featured a screening of Miryam Charles’ film, Cette Maison. Following the film screening of Cette Maison, Miryam Charles joined virtually for the Q&A.
Bridgeport, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director and cousin of the teenager examines the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, CETTE MAISON explores the relationship between the security of the living space and the violence that can jeopardize it.
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).
From Haitian descent, Miryam Charles is a director, producer and cinematographer living in Montreal. Her films have been presented in various festivals internationally. CETTE MAISON, her debut feature film, had its world premiere at Berlinale Forum 2022 and has been screened at festivals worldwide, winning awards at Indie Lisboa, Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, Montréal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, and Indie Memphis. Her ongoing work explores themes related to exile and the legacies of colonization. Her second feature-length fiction film LA MARABOUT is currently in production.
Campbell’s works perform critical excavations of history, drawing on archival research. They use collage, oral histories, and sonic recording to expose public secrets, historical gaps, structural violence, acts of omission, failures of collective memory, and sociopolitical narratives. Campbell’s most recent film, REVOLVER, is an archive of pareidolia (a situation in which someone sees a pattern or image of something that does not exist) narrated by a descendent of Exodusters.
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).
Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descent. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets — fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s creative practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, film, writing, and installations that are often site-responsive. Campbell was the recipient of a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts and a 2022 Creative Capital award. Other honors include a Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, and MacDowell. Exhibitions and screenings include MOMA, Artists Space, SFMOMA, ICA-Philadelphia, REDCAT, MIT List Center, Block Museum, Walker Art Center, BAM, and DocLisboa. Campbell was a featured filmmaker at the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar. Their latest film, REVOLVER, received the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and was featured in the 2023 Berlinale Expanded Film Forum.
We are excited to announce our Doc Talk Line-up for Fall 2023! Throughout the semester, we will be hosting in person and virtual Q&A conversations with directors from around the world. Please join us for what we know will be a great semester!
Thanks to all who attended the Doc Studies virtual info session held over Zoom on April 20th. A panel of alumni from recent years (Inés Vogelfang, Mahdokht Mahmoudabadi, Luz Zamora, Cacau Araujo, Tiffany Jiang) answered questions about their experiences in the program, shared excerpts of their work, and gave updates on what they’re doing now in the field. Lana Lin, the Director of the Doc Studies graduate program, provided insight into the curriculum, faculty, and structure of the program. Prospective students received application fee waivers for attending the session.
We encourage all prospective students to visit campus on May 23, 2023 at 7pm to attend Truth Be Told, our annual documentary film festival of original short films made by students in the current graduating class. Past editions of the festival can be found here. Each work is the result of a year of intensive study in documentary cinema – production, history, theory, and aesthetics. The screenings will be followed by a faculty-led Q&A with the filmmakers and a light reception. Admission is free and registration is required. Learn more about the films and students.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
The New School Doc Studies 