ACTION
THE 65th ROBERT FLAHERTY FILM SEMINAR
JUNE 15 – 21, 2019, COLGATE UNIVERSITY, HAMILTON, NY
Programmer: Shai Heredia
Screening Schedule | Featured Artists | Fellows | Photos
We are artists in action. We combat demagogues who oppose our notions of freedom and justice. In this era of uncertainty, we rebel against the lies and navigate what to accept or reject, what to learn or unlearn. We find solidarity in small local communities, and together we act creatively, speak out, and make works that challenge the status quo.
At the 65th Robert Flaherty Seminar we unite as an international community of artists—thinkers, makers, and activists—all in action. We discover and experience moments of beauty, truth, anarchy and conflict through film, as well as painting, performance, photography, text, and sound. We encounter the craftsmanship of those who are not afraid to battle deep, ethical questions, and whose actions split form and convention wide open. With careful attention to the process of making—the construction of sensuous textures and mythical imagery, the patterning of resistance and repetition, and the uses of performative interventions and idiosyncratic storytelling—we learn how to create powerful moments of aesthetic and political liberation.
While inhabiting the everyday practice of making, doing, living, suffering and protesting as artists today, we take inspiration from the poetics of the human condition, and step into a new terrain. In discourse, thought, and experience, we come together as a community in action to bear witness and shape our future.
2019 Seminar Programmer – Shai Heredia
Shai Heredia is a filmmaker and curator of film art. She studied at St. Xaviers College Mumbai and Goldsmiths College, London. In 2003, she founded Experimenta, the international festival for experimental cinema in India. She has curated experimental film programs at film festivals and art venues worldwide, including the Berlinale, Germany and the Tate Modern, London. Her film ‘I Am Micro’ (2012) received critical acclaim and won prestigious awards, including a National Award from the Government of India. Her latest film ‘An Old Dog’s Diary’ (2015), won the first BFI London International Film Festival Short Film award. She has been an arts grant maker with the India Foundation for the Arts, and also teaches at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Heredia lives and works in Bangalore where she runs Experimenta India.
Thank you to our major Seminar funders: The Ford Foundation – JustFilms, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Johnson Family Foundation, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The William H. Donner Foundation, The New York State Council on the Arts
Thank you to our Seminar grantee partners: COUSIN, Princess Grace Foundation-USA, and the Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Initiative