Congratulations to Amrit Cheng (Doc Studies 2020), whose graduating film OK Boomer is premiering today at Teen Vogue, along with an op-ed from two young activists whom the film features.
This remarkable film chronicles the student-led campaign to integrate the New York City public school system, which is among the most segregated in the country.
LINK TO THE OP-ED AND THE FILM HERE
Dear all,
We are heart-broken to say that this year’s Truth be Told Festival had to be postponed due to the pandemic. This was a very hard decision to make, as we were very excited about sharing this year’s films with all of you. The choice, however, was obvious. Instead of going ahead with an online version of the festival, we have decided to wait until it’s safe to have an on-site screening. This was an unprecedented and difficult academic year and our students deserve praise for their perseverance, heartfelt commitment and care. We greatly look forward to welcoming you all back, sharing these films with you, and celebrating their achievements together. Further announcements will be posted here and on our blog / social media. In the meantime, we invite you to take a look at the 2020 Teaser – a sneak preview of student films completed in the program this year.
All the best,
Amir Husak (Director, Graduate Certificate in Documentary Studies)
& Doc Studies production team
“Outstanding… An information revolutionary, Stokes, despite her decades of isolation, touched the nerve center of the times.” – Best Films of 2019, New Yorker
“Weirdly exhilarating… Enlightening and the stuff of madness.” Critic’s Pick – New York Times
“The Information Age has found a startling, eccentric heroine in the subject of Matt Wolf’s eye-opening documentary.” – LA Times
Marion Stokes was secretly recording television twenty-four hours a day for thirty years. It started in 1979 with the Iranian Hostage Crisis at the dawn of the twenty-four hour news cycle. It ended on December 14, 2012 while the Sandy Hook massacre played on television as Marion passed away. In between, Marion recorded on 70,000 VHS tapes, capturing revolutions, lies, wars, triumphs, catastrophes, bloopers, talk shows, and commercials that tell us who we were, and show how television shaped the world of today.
Before “fake news” Marion was fighting to protect the truth by archiving everything that was said and shown on television. The public didn’t know it, but the networks were disposing their archives for decades into the trashcan of history. Remarkably Marion saved it, and now the Internet Archive will digitize her tapes and we’ll be able to search them online for free.
This is a mystery in the form of a time capsule. It’s about a radical activist, who became a fabulously wealthy recluse archivist. Her work was crazy but it was also genius, and she would pay a profound price for dedicating her life to this visionary and maddening project.
Matt Wolf is an award-winning filmmaker in New York whose feature documentaries include Wild Combination, about the cult cellist and disco producer Arthur Russell and Teenage, about early youth culture and the birth of teenagers. His new film Spaceship Earth about the controversial Biosphere 2 experiment is premiering at Sundance 2020. Matt’s short films include I Remember, about the artist and poet Joe Brainard, Time Magazine’s The Face of AIDS about a controversial Benetton advertisement, and Bayard & Me, about the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. He is also the director of HBO’s It’s Me, Hilary and is the co-curator of film for the 2019 Whitney Biennial. He is a Guggenheim Fellow.
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.
The Hottest August (95 min)
Monday, January 27, 2020 @ 1:00 PM EST
Kellen Auditorium
66 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10011
A complex portrait of a city and its inhabitants, The Hottest August gives us a window into the collective consciousness of the present. The film’s point of departure is one city over one month: New York City, including its outer boroughs, during August 2017. It’s a month heavy with the tension of a new President, growing anxiety over everything from rising rents to marching white nationalists, and unrelenting news of either wildfires or hurricanes on every coast. The film pivots on the question of futurity: what does the future look like from where we are standing?
And what if we are not all standing in the same place? The Hottest August offers a mirror onto a society on the verge of catastrophe, registering the anxieties, distractions, and survival strategies that preoccupy ordinary lives.
Brett Story is an award-winning filmmaker whose work has screened at festivals internationally, including the Viennale, True/False, and Oberhausen. Her 2016 feature documentary, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival and was a nominee for Best Feature Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards. Brett holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University. She is the author of the book, Prison Land, and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Infrastructures of Citizenship. Brett was a 2016 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fellow and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in film and video.
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.
The New School Doc Studies 