2020-2021 Flaherty NYC

To Feel, To Feel More,
To Feel More Than

Programmed by
Alia Ayman, Devon Narine-Singh, Suneil Sanzgiri

Friday, April 2, 8pm ET 
& Saturday, April 3, 4pm ET

Live conversation will follow the screenings
with our Programmers-in-residence and Guest Filmmakers
Program 1: Ho Rui An , Kalpana Subramanian, Miranda Javid, Natasha Raheja, Bassem Saad and M. Woods | Program 2: Erica Sheu, Vashti Harrison, Teona Galgoțiu and Leah Franklin Gilliam

This year our Flaherty NYC program went through a lot of changes due to the pandemic. Back in February 2020, we announced Alia Ayman, Suneil Sanzgiri, and Devon Narine-Singh as our inaugural programming team for the redesigned Flaherty NYC program. The trio and the Flaherty staff had envisioned a new plan to develop an ambitious screening series in New York City for the fall of 2020. But New York was one of the cities in the US that got hit the hardest by the virus forcing our organization to shut down operations in March and with this we had to postponed all of our 2020 programs including the 66th annual Flaherty Seminar. However, after a long period of darkness, the Flaherty was finally able to present new online programs, two of them curated by Flaherty NYC Programmers-in-Residence (The Unwriting of Disaster and Footprints) and a a third program (To Feel To Feel More To Feel More Than) curated by the trio that will bring back some of the original ideas that got them selected last year as our current Flaherty NYC programmers.

Programs

The future remains uncertain, but the past persists. The abundance, excess, and indulgence of images, and access to information that simultaneously leaves us sick, overwhelmed, and uneasy, also brings us further away from oblivion. Despite the fiction of borders, race, gender, and time that many would have us maintain through both overt violence and covert forms of soft power, our interconnection to each other—the continuum of care that brings us together across generations—is visible through the ways we commit to each other through our screens. 

This program, developed as a final output of the Flaherty NYC programming team comprised of Alia Ayman, Devon Narine Singh, and Suneil Sanzgiri, looks at how media ecosystems, digital detritus, and cultural memory are navigated across boundaries, identities, and history. Can remembrance fix a broken world? If not only by an act of saving the memories from being encompassed by that world, but acting as beginnings for other possibilities?From children’s drawings collected by Frantz Fanon during the Algerian war, sci-fi allegories on toxicity, swimming, and e-waste, to a 1908 film effectively envisioning our obsessions with Zoom calls and Snapchat filters, these films question the human, our relationship to the natural world, to time, to technology, and to each other. Our title comes from a passage from Fred Moten’s Black and Blur, which asks if anything still remains of the human, and how we might enact that remainder.

Program 01: Friday, April 2

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.)
The Wind (2019) 3’, by Miranda Javid
Kink Retrograde (2019) 18’, by Bassem Saad
A Gregarious Species (2021) 7’, by Natasha Raheja

80 min

Program 02: Saturday, April 3

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 Galgoțiu
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 

79 mins

2020 Flaherty NYC

The Unwriting of Disaster

August 12 to 18, 2020
in conjunction with Mimesis Documentary Festival
Curated by Devon Narine-Singh, Suneil Sanzgiri, and Alia Ayman

Live Q&As on August14 & 15 on Zoom

For the first time ever retrospective of films screened across the 66-year history of the Flaherty Seminar, this online program brings together films that work in opposition to the spectacularization of tragedy.

To write the disaster, to document the catastrophic, to bear witness to the unbearable event all seem to have become default impulses in times of crises. Luckily, this fervor to record has not remained unchallenged. Image-makers from all over the world continue to create works that overhaul the free-floating belief in the merits of visibility, archiving and inscription, thereby favoring the poetic to the sensational. This retrospective of previous films screened at the Flaherty Seminar looks to how these artists and filmmakers have responded to the explosive, destructive and inescapable forces of their times.

Program 01

Boston Fire (1979) programmed in 1993, Peter Hutton, 5'

Solidarity (1973) programmed in 2013, Joyce Wieland, 11'

I Am 20 (1965) programmed in 1963 & 1968, S. N. S. Sastry, 19'

Voices (1985) programmed in 1986, Joanna Priestley, 4'

The Body Beautiful (1990) programmed in 1991, Ngozi Onwurah, 23'

Village, silenced (2012) programmed in 2013, Deborah Stratman, 7'

Program 2

Losing Ground (2000) programmed in 2006, Patty Chang, 6'

Partially Buried (1996) programmed in 1997, Renée Green, 20'

No Justice, No Peace! Young Black imMEDIAte (1992) programmed in 1992, Portia Cobb, 13'

Now Eat My Script (2014) programmed in 2015, Mounira Al Solh, 25'

Who Do You Think You Are (1987) programmed in 2003, Mary Filippo, 10'

Live Q&A Sessions

Friday, August 14

6 – 6:40 pm (MDT)
Renée Green & Patty Chang moderated by Suneil Sanzgiri

7 – 7:40 pm (MDT)
Joanna Preistley & Mary Filippo moderated by Devon Narine-Singh

Saturday, August 15

10 am – 10:40 am (MDT)
Portia Cobb & Ngozi Onwurah moderated by Devon Narine-Singh

11 – 11:40 am (MDT)
Deborah Stratman & Mounira Al Solh moderated by Suneil Sanzgiri

The programs will be streamed as part of the Mimesis Documentary Festival between August 12-August 18th.

The Flaherty’s y/e Fundraising Screening: Footprints

December 20, 2020
Guest-Curated by Devon Narine-Singh, Suneil Sanzgiri, Alia Ayman

Featuring the work of the three Flaherty filmmakers who’ve been recognized by Filmmaker Magazine as the Top 25 New Faces of Independent film, this program looks at how each filmmaker explores questions of ancestry, lineage, movement, and location. 'Footprints' implies a notion of impact and transience—how we impact others, and how those who came before us have impacted us. Join us for a live conversation between the filmmakers and the Flaherty NYC programming collective DNA on December 20th.

Films

Kindah, Ephraim Asili,12'

Outfox the Grave, Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich, 6 min

Anonymous, Joie Estrella Horwitz,

Calder For Peter, Ephraim Asili, 11 min

Green Turns Brown, Joie Estrella Horwitz, 6 min

Anonymous, Joie Estrella Horwitz, 3 min

Spit on the Broom, Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich, 12 min

Anonymous 5, Joie Estrella Horwitz

52 min

About the 2020-2021 Flaherty NYC Programmers-in-Residence

The programmers for this series hail from the beautiful diasporas of Egypt, India and the West Indies, and in turn their program reflects questions of emergence and opacity, highlighting works by underrepresented voices, canonic names, and promising new filmmakers that amplify characteristics of what writer Sylvia Wynter called “a new poetics of the propter nos”—a radical reversal in the belief that instead of the world being created for “us,” we were, in a sense, created for each other.

Alia Ayman

Alia Ayman makes and curates film and video. She is a cofounder of Zawya, a Cairo-based arthouse cinema and a doctoral student at NYU, where she is working toward a dissertation on decoloniality, difference and the global circulation of documentary images. She is currently a co-programmer for the 2021 edition of Images Festival in Toronto and a programming advisor for the Berlinale Forum. Alia lives and works between Cairo, Philadelphia and New York City.

Devon Narine-Singh

Devon Narine-Singh is a filmmaker and curator. His works have screened at Microscope Gallery, UltraCinema, The New School and The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. He has presented screenings and presentations at NYU Cinema Studies, UnionDocs, The Film-Makers Coop, and Maysles Cinema. He has a BFA in Filmmaking from SUNY Purchase. He is currently pursuing his MA in Screen Studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College.

Suneil Sanzgiri

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. His work spans experimental video, animations, essays, and installations, and contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relation to structural violence. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017. His film At Home But Not At Home made its World Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, in January 2020, with a nomination for the Found Footage Award. His follow-up film Letter From Your Far-Off Country made its world premiere at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 2020, and was entered into the Ammodo Tiger Shorts Competition at IFFR in 2021. Sanzgiri’s work has been screened at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally. Sanzgiri was a 2016 resident of the SOMA program in Mexico City and will be a resident of the Pioneer Works Studio Residency in Spring 2021.