Flaherty Seminar

This week we are highlighting the work and achievements of Catalina Jordan Alvarez (2018 Fellow), Caroline Gil Rodriguez (2011 Fellow) and Rob Rice (2019 Fellow) Catalina Alvarez (she/her) makes choreographed films and experimental musicals. In her anthology documentary, Sound Spring, Yellow Springs residents become actors lip-syncing to their own interviews, as they narrate their personal entanglements with the village’s larger history, creating a collage of past and present.... Sound Spring Seq. #6 has screened at the ICA Philadelphia (OVC w/ Lino Kino) and the Wexner Center for the Arts (Ohio Shorts). In early June, Alvarez will be exhibiting the first phase of her VR project with Liz Flyntz, The Space Expanding Room, via the Espírito Santo Art MuseumMAES (Brazil). Alvarez teaches at Antioch College. Caroline Gil Rodríguez (she/her) is a time-based media art conservator, archivist and writer from Puerto Rico. From 2018 to 2021, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Media Conservation, working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In that capacity, she collaboratively worked in the acquisition, exhibition, treatment, and research of both museum's audio, film, video, performance and software-based artworks. Her areas of interest include conservation of digital art and media-art technologies, the history and circulation of time-based media art in Latin America and the Caribbean, low-cost open-source solutions for digital preservation, and collectivism. Rob Rice (he/him) is filmmaker and scientist from Western Massachusetts. After completing an M.S. in neuroscience at Tulane, he worked as an engineer in CRISPR genetics at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He recently completed his first feature, a hybrid about legacy and loss called Way Out Ahead of Us, which will premiere in 2021. He is currently living in Los Angeles, where he completed the MFA Film Directing program at CalArts. Slide 1: #FlahertyFellowsHighlight Slide 2: Sumayah Chappelle and Rukiya Robertson in Sound Spring Slide 3: Carolina Gil R. installing a Bruce Nauman artwork at MoMA. Slide 4: Film still from by Rob Rice #FlahertySeminar

We want to continue celebrating the work of Flaherty filmmakers that have contributed greatly to the seminar and the film world. In this occasion we want to share a glimpse of the work by Su Friedrich (Flaherty Seminar 1987, 1998, 2004 & 2012) and also a huge supporter of the Flaherty seminar’s mission. With the exception of Hide and Seek, Friedrich is the writer, director, cinematographer, sound recordist and editor of all her films. Su Friedrich’s work was shown at the sem...inar for the first time in 1987, with Damned if You Don't (1987), a powerful film about sexual expression and repression, and The Ties That Bind (1984), an experimental documentary about the filmmaker's mother (also shown at the 1990 Flaherty seminar.) In 1998, the seminar exhibited her film Hide and Seek (1996), daring exploration into wild, uncharted territory--lesbian adolescence in the 1960’s (sufriedrich.com). Later in 2004 Sink or Swim (Excerpt), had an appearance at the 50 YEARS OF FLAHERTY, INSPIRED FILMMAKING Seminar programmed by Susan Oxtoby. In 2012, Su Friedrich was a guest artists for the OPEN WOUNDS seminar programmed by Josetxo Cerdán. Here we are sharing this unique finding from our archives: an image of Su Friedrich and Josetxo Cerdán on a tree during the 2012 seminar.

This week we are highlighting the work and achievements of Flaherty Seminar Fellows: Miguel Hilari (2018), Sofía Gallisá Muriente (2012) and Kevin B Lee (2013) Miguel Hilari (he/him) is based in La Paz, Bolivia. His films deal with memory, migration, and colonial history. They have been screened at Cinéma du Réel, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen, Images, Lincoln Center and Valdivia. Miguel’s second film Compañía (2019), a lyrical and mystical documentary about migration and indigenous m...emory, was awarded Best Medium-length Film at the Visions du Réel 2019, Best International Film at FIDOCS 2019 and Alanis Obomsawin Award at ImagineNATIVE 2020. He also leads a project of image and sound workshops in rural public schools. Sofía Gallisá Muriente (she/her) is a visual working mainly with video, film, photography and text, mining contemporary cultural institutions and historical sites for evidence of contested narratives. In 2011, she co-founded IndigNación, a multimedia collective born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and in 2012 she co-founded Restore the Rock, a non-profit hurricane relief organization. She has also shown in the Whitney Biennial (2019), The Getty's PST: LA/LA in Los Angeles (2017), San Juan Polygraphic Triennial, CCA Glasgow, the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, ifa Galerie in Berlin, among others. Recently she finished a 40-minute experimental film titled Celaje, that combines Super 8 and 16mm footage. Kevin B. Lee (he/him) is a filmmaker, media artist, critic and professor at Merz Akademie, Stuttgart. He has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning Transformers: The Premake (2014) introduced the desktop documentary format, was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound and screened in many festivals including Berlin Critics Week, Rotterdam International Film Festival and Viennale International Film Festival. He was Founding Editor at Fandor from 2011-2016, supervising producer at Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, and has written for The New York Times, Slate and Indiewire. Find out more about the 2021 seminar and how to register! (Link in bio) #flahertyseminar #fellowshighlights

Flaherty Exposure: The Flaherty’s New Mentorship Initiative We want to congratulate Aryana Anderson, Ash Goh, Bren Haragan and Jordan Lord for becoming the selected Fellows for this year's new Flaherty Exposure program. @aryanaalexisanderson @winonashoplifts @jrd_lord #ashgohhua ... FLAHERTY EXPOSURE is an outgrowth of our annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and intended for emerging and mid-career professionals. The program is designed to further the fellow's knowledge of cinema through participation in an array of unique personalized mentorship activities as well as support innovation in the field without the demand of a final deliverable, rather the ability to deeply explore and share an idea or experiment with the moving image. Read more about it in our April Newsletter (Link in Bio) #flahertyseminar #flahertyseminar2021 #TheFlaherty #filmseminar #FlahertyExposure #FlahertyFellows #workinprogress #film #mentorship

Live Q&A with Filmmakers and Programmers for FNYC! Watch now!

Registration is NOW OPEN for our first ever Flaherty virtual Seminar to take place JULY 09-18. The 66th edition of the Flaherty Film Seminar will inspire us to look defiantly at the opaque places of cinema. As suggested by the writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the works presented will clamor for the rights to opacity for everyone in their irreducible singularities. Opacity is an unfolding force that creates openings and endless possibilities of cinematic existence, e...specially for subjects that have been excluded or are less valued on conventional screens. The Seminar will be an opportunity to experience the moving image in its power, beauty, and, most of all, ordinariness. As an invitation for displacement or provocation, it points to an open future, to cultural, formal, aesthetic freedoms, where questioning is prioritized over finding answers. OPACITY programmed by Janaína Oliveira, will give us the opportunity to dig deep into the philosophical, political and aesthetic aspects of uncertainty, fragmentation, and Opacity. We have extended the length of the seminar to spread out the daily sessions to two sessions a day of screenings, and discussions, which will be running in the afternoon and early evening EST time to allow for synchronous viewing worldwide. We are very excited to have the opportunity to open the seminar to people from all over the world that can now participate from their homes. To keep with The Flaherty tradition of no preconceptions, we do not announce the filmmakers or films that we will be screening, but trust us when we tell you that you are in for a very exciting edition of the seminar. Due to the economic uncertainty we are experiencing, we have cut our registration fees substantially, and there is a very special fee for a large number of countries, so the price of registration is more affordable than ever for everyone. Limited early bird spots expected to go quickly Register now! https://www.flahertyseminar.org/

TO FEEL, TO FEEL MORE, TO FEEL MORE THAN Programmed by Alia Ayman, Devon Narine-Singh, and Suneil Sanzgiri Here are three of the artists showing work for Program 2, Saturday, April 3, 4pm ET... Jessica Ashman is a London based artist working in animation moving image, music, performance and installation. Jessica creates experimental narratives that explore gender, identity and race, drawing on the wider stories of the Black British diaspora and working-class communities she was raised in. ‘I DON'T PROTEST, I JUST DANCE IN MY SHADOW' is a short visual essay film by artist animator, Jessica Ashman, about navigating the visual art and animation world as a black face in a white space. Leah Gilliam (they/them), who also uses the moniker LFranklin is fascinated with emergent systems and how things work. A multi-hyphenate artist and designer, LFranklin has channeled their curiosity into a wide-ranging career at the intersection of creativity, technology, and collaboration. NOW PRETEND is an experimental investigation into the use of race as an arbitrary signifier. Drawing upon language, personal memories and the 1959 text, "Black Like Me", it deals with Lacan's "mirror state" theories of beauty and the movement from object to subject. Teona Galgoiu (b. 1998) is a filmmaker and writer based in Bucharest, Romania, studying the Film Directing master at UNATC. BRIEF CONVERSATION ABOUT THE D WORD The director interviews a friend and follows his personal story about depression, deepening its impact at a young age, and the taboo surrounding it in the 21st century. PROGRAM 2 Memory Palace (2015) 2’, by Martine Syms A Short History (2017) 3.5’, by Erica Sheu Field Notes (2014) 18’, by Vashti Harrsion Glimpse of the Garden (1957) 5’, by Marie Menken An Excavation of Us (2017) 11’, by Shirley Bruno Brief Conversation about the D Word (2018) 15’, by Teona Galgoiu J'ai huit ans (1961) 9’, by Yann Le Masson, Rene Vautier, Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff Now Pretend (1991) 10’, by Leah Franklin Gilliam I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance in My Shadow (2017), 5’, by Jessica Ashman TRT: 78.5 mins EXPLORE THE FULL PROGRAM AND GET TICKETS TODAY (LINK IN BIO) #leahfranklin

Thank you Museum of the Moving Image Reverse Shot and writer Ela Bittencourt for this wonderful piece on Flaherty NYC's: To Feel, To Feel More, To Feel More Than programmed by Ayman, Suneil Sanzgiri, and Devon Narine-Singh. LIVE 2 NIGHT EVENT (Friday, 4/2 & Sat 4/3): discussion with programmers and filmmakers after each screening. TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE! Ticket link in article.

TO FEEL, TO FEEL MORE, TO FEEL MORE THAN Programmed by @alia_yman @devonnarines and @suneil_sanzgiri Here are two of the artists showing work for Program 2, Saturday, April 3, 4pm ET... Vashti Harrison is an artist and filmmaker whose work focuses on the natural and the supernatural. Working in multiple formats and media she uses the form and aesthetics of classic tales to retell stories from her own life and investigate her Caribbean Heritage. FIELD NOTES is an experimental portrait of the ghosts embedded in the culture of the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago. The film is structured as a visual and aural field guide to the ghosts spirits and jumbies throughout the island: from personal tales about shapeshifters and bloodsuckers, to the ghosts of Trinidad's past. Shirley Bruno is an American-Haitian filmmaker. Her approach is inward-looking, philosophical, transcendent and largely inspired by the heritage and folklore traditions of Haiti. Her films generally deal with the space between myth and history, corporality and spirit, and are influenced by Caribbean animist philosophy. AN EXCAVATION OF US The shadows of Napoleon's army fall upon a boat traveling through the mysterious cave named after her legend Marie Jeanne, a female soldier who fought in the Haitian Revolution. It is this battle inside her cave that will become the most successful slave revolution in history. PROGRAM 2 Memory Palace (2015) 2’, by Martine Syms A Short History (2017) 3.5’, by Erica Sheu Field Notes (2014) 18’, by Vashti Harrsion Glimpse of the Garden (1957) 5’, by Marie Menken An Excavation of Us (2017) 11’, by Shirley Bruno Brief Conversation about the D Word (2018) 15’, by Teona Galgoiu J'ai huit ans (1961) 9’, by Yann Le Masson, Rene Vautier, Olga Baïdar-Poliakoff Now Pretend (1991) 10’, by Leah Franklin Gilliam I Don’t Protest, I Just Dance in My Shadow (2017), 5’, by Jessica Ashman TRT: 78.5 mins EXPLORE THE FULL PROGRAM AND GET TICKETS TODAY (LINK IN BIO) #TheFlaherty #Filmmakers #FilmScreening #VirtualEvent #FNYC #CaribbeanHeritage

TO FEEL, TO FEEL MORE, TO FEEL MORE THAN Programmed by Alia Ayman, Devon Narine-Singh, and Suneil Sanzgiri @alia_yman @devonnarines @suneil_sanzgiri Here are the highlights of two of the artists showing work for Program 1, Friday, April 2, 8pm ET... Bassem Saad is an artist and writer born on September 11th and trained in architecture. His work explores objects and operations that distribute violence, pleasure, welfare, and waste. Through video, sculpture, and writing, he investigates and records strategies for maneuvering within and beyond governance systems. KINK RETROGRADE presents an allegory whose protagonists live in a city presided over by shocks that come to resemble the apparent retrograde motion of celestial bodies: cyclical and seemingly moving backwards. Natasha Raheja is a documentary filmmaker and social scientist working as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University. Her current writing and film projects explore questions of migration, belonging, and citizenship across the India-Pakistan border. A GREGARIOUS SPECIES (WIP) Bringing together mobile phone videos of transboundary gregarious locust swarms, political rallies, and scientific webinars, this found-footage, experimental video raises questions about the selective porosity of borders amidst environmental crisis, farmer insecurity, and nationalism in South Asia. PROGRAM 1 Shell Revolution (2018) 1’, by Ho Rui An Core Dump (2018) 15’, by Francois Knoetze WHALES SPF 50 (2017) 7’, by Wickerham & Lomax Tattva (2018) 4’ , by Kalpana Subramanian Long Distance Wireless Photography (1908) 6’, by Georges Méliés Bedford Cheese (2016) 19’, by M. Woods WARNING: This video may potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised. The Wind (2019) 3’, by Miranda Javid Kink Retrograde (2019) 18’, by Bassem Saad A Gregarious Species (2021) 7’, by Natasha Raheja TRT: 80 mins EXPLORE THE FULL PROGRAM AND GET TICKETS TODAY (LINK IN BIO) #TheFlaherty #Filmmakers #FilmScreening #VirtualEvent #FNYC #experimetalvideo #experimentalfilm #NYC

TO FEEL, TO FEEL MORE, TO FEEL MORE THAN Programmed by ALIA AYMAN, DEVON NARINE-SINGH, and SUNEIL SANZGIRI Here are two of the artists showing work for Program 1, Friday, April 2, 8pm ET... M. Woods is a media terrorist who uses mechanisms of immersive medias to reaffirm recognition of the physical reality that American nihilism attempts to abandon. M. was born without a proper identity, so he found one in a television while his grandmother cleaned houses for white people. BEDFORD CHEESE: An emanation of Jaldaboath sits in the 13th Aeon swallowing light. This is what it thinks: Outside on suburb streets there are gun shots so we stay inside and dream of a place called Bedford Cheese, where the hot hipsters traffic their cool. Trying to find enough print-out porn. It gets crinkled and oily and loses its sex. Miranda Javid is a writer, animator, and art-educator with a Masters in Fine Art from the University of California Irvine and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Currently, she lives in California, where she spends her time teaching animation at CalState Los Angeles and takes long walks when she's trying to think of narrative ideas. Also, she keeps bees. THE WIND: The rigidity of a historical fact rolls by like clouds, or maybe like cloud-computing. Digital landscapes like desktops, trash cans, and cursors flatten the sensation of what tangibly remains: the invisible pleasure of wind on skin. PROGRAM 1 Shell Revolution (2018) 1’, by Ho Rui An Core Dump (2018) 15’, by Francois Knoetze WHALES SPF 50 (2017) 7’, by Wickerham & Lomax Tattva (2018) 4’ , by Kalpana Subramanian Long Distance Wireless Photography (1908) 6’, by Georges Méliés Bedford Cheese (2016) 19’, by M. Woods WARNING: This video may potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy. Viewer discretion is advised. The Wind (2019) 3’, by Miranda Javid Kink Retrograde (2019) 18’, by Bassem Saad A Gregarious Species (2021) 7’, by Natasha Raheja TRT: 80 mins EXPLORE THE FULL PROGRAM AND GET TICKETS TODAY (LINK IN BIO) #TheFlaherty #Filmmakers #FilmScreening #experimentalfilm #animation #FNYC

Flaherty Fellows Highlight! In 2021 we want to start the year doing what we like the most: supporting our community of filmmakers, archivists, programmers, researchers, academics and film enthusiasts. Cover picture, from left to right: Jules Rosskam (Flaherty Fellow 2012), M. Asli Dukan (Flaherty Fellow 2018) and Emily Drummer (Flaherty Fellow 2015)... Jules Rosskam @julesrosskamfilms is a 2021 Creative Capital Awardee! The award is in support of Desire Lines (second image), a feature-length essay film. Situated at the intersection of sex, gender, and desire, Desire Lines is an immersive feature-length essay film comprised of one-on-one interviews, erotic encounters, observational footage, performed scenarios, and a fictional narrative presenting an abbreviated history of the bathhouse. M. Asli Dukan @maslidukan is currently working on The Maria Trilogy, a three-part interactive, multimedia project exploring the lives of five generations of women in her family from the U.S. to the Caribbean. Dukan received a 2020 Independence Public Media Foundation grant and a 2020 Sundance Institute Knight Alumni grant. She holds an MFA from CUNY and resides and teaches in Philadelphia. (Third image is Asli's experimental short, Memories from the Future) Emily Drummer's @eedrumm new film "Field Resistance" (forth image) has screened at major experimental+documentary film festivals, the list is so long that we'll only include some: +Art of The Real, Film at Lincoln Center, 2020 +Edinburgh International Film Festival, 2020 +Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, 2020 +Analogica, 2020 +Chicago underground, 2020 +Transient Visions, 2020 +Fracto Experimental Film Encounter, ACUD Kunsthaus Berlin, Germany +ICDOCS, 2020 #theflaherty #flahertyseminar #flahertyfellows #flahertyfellowshighlight

We are so excited to co-present with @movingimagenyc a live online conversation around the new piece by Lynne Sachs "Film About a Father Who" with the Sachs Family featuring @lynnesachs1 @irasachsfilm and Kirsten Johnson. Introduced by Eric Hynes, MoMI Curator of Film. Make sure to mark it on your calendars next Tuesday 19, 7pm Also, make sure to check Lynne Sachs retrospective @movingimagenyc with preservations efforts by @metpostny and @themuseumofmodernart and films distr...ibuted by @canyoncinema and @cinemaguild Film curation by Edo Choi @bitterstranger

We are excited to announce a co-presentation with Museum of the Moving Image of a live online event with Lynne Sachs, Ira Sachs, Kirsten Johnson and introduced by Eric Hynes, MoMI Curator of Film

Dear Flaherty Friends, As 2020 comes to a close The Flaherty wishes all of the worldly creatures a Happy New Year! We look forward to sharing space with you in 2021.... Today is the last day to donate in 2020. Continue to support Filmmakers, Artists, Curators, Critics, Archivists, Ethnographers and Film lovers with your tax-deductible-donation (link in bio) Warm regards, The Flaherty Photos by Robert Flaherty from the set of Nanook of the North

As 2020 comes to a close The Flaherty wishes you all a Happy New Year! 2020 was an extremely difficult year for the world. We can all agree about that and we can't predict exactly how 2021 will be, but please remember that we have each other as a community of filmmakers, curators, archivists, ethnographers, researchers, professors, teachers, instructors, students and all film enthusiasts! For those staying at your places and not traveling to see family we recommend you to kee...p supporting online content made by independent artists, previous flaherty filmmakers, programmers and fellows. With your support we will continue to do so as well! With more programming on our horizon, we are working hard to bring you a new year with exciting film adventures, including a hybrid 2021 Seminar OPACITY programmed by @jana_oliveira a final program in the spring by our 2020 Programmers-in-residence @devonnarines, @suneil_sanzgiri, @alia_yman, and the exhibition of our newly preserved film Notes of an Early Fall (1976) by @saul_lavine, awarded an NFPF Avant Garde Masters Grant. We look forward to sharing space both in the virtual world and -hopefully- in person in 2021. Please make a taxdeductible donation today (link in bio) and help us continue to conjure that space of community, passion and excellence in film practice. Warm regards and best wishes, The Flaherty Pictures from The Flaherty Archive #winter #holidayseason #newyear #flahertyarchives #flahertyseminar #francesflaherty #robertflaherty

The Flaherty wishes you all a peaceful Holiday Season! We know some of us will be only connecting with family via zoom and/or other video call apps. It might seem a lot like a work meeting, a messy class session or an improvised after screening q&a but the spirit is present and we are also aware of the difficult times we are living these days. So don't give up hope! Cheers to all from The Flaherty office! Here is a picture we found in our archives of the Flaherty family's winter holiday tree.