The 70th Flaherty Film Seminar
Onward!
Artists
^Artist Present at Seminar in NYC
**Fellowship Program Artists
ACTIVIST ARCHIVISTS**
The Activist Archivists is a collective of media archivists and academics utilizing all available digital tools to support individuals and communities in voicing their concerns and opinions. They share knowledge and provide assistance with archiving and preservation. They want to improve the discoverability of media content and support the use of digital media as evidence and as a creative resource. They also aim to ensure that the rights and intentions of media creators are respected, preserving social movement legacies. They see the power of archives to inform and inspire action, to record the histories of social movements and change, to document abuses of power, and to protect activists on the ground. Activist Archivists is committed to participation, collaboration, and transparency in their desire to help archivists and institutions become active participants in, rather than passive aggregators of, the global narrative. The core team includes Howard Besser, Dan Erdman, Kelly Haydon, Marie Lascu, Lindy Leong, Yvonne Ng, and Rufus de Rham.
AKRAM ZAATARI**
Akram Zaatari is an artist who lives and works in Beirut. He has been exploring Lebanon’s postwar condition through collecting testimonies and various documents, notably on the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars through television, and the logic of Resistance in the context of the current geographical division of the Middle East. Co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation (Beirut), he based his recent work on collecting, studying, and archiving a particular collection on the Middle East, notably studying the work of Lebanese photographer Hashem el Madani (1928-) as a register of social relationships and of photographic practices. In addition to his work as an artist, Zaatari is also the curator of the Radical Closure box set, which includes his work In This House.
ALEJANDRO DE LOS RIOS | NOVAC**
Alejandro de los Rios is a Cuban-Venezuelan filmmaker based in New Orleans and has directed documentaries, short films, music videos and commercials. He’s served as the Virtuous Video Producer for NOVAC since 2022. Alejandro served as the Cinematography and Editing Mentor for NOVAC’s Community Documentary Co-Hort, which produced short films that won Audience Awards at the 2024, 2023 and 2022 New Orleans Film Festivals, as well as a Special Jury Mention in 2024. His short film, Game Day Ritual, was a 2024 Louisiana Film Prize finalist and won Best Editing at the 2024 UNO Film Festival. His credits also include “Distant Mardi Gras” & “Different Mardi Gras” documenting Covid’s impact on New Orleans, its artists and culture bearers; “9 for No. 9,” a documentary series on NFL quarterback Drew Brees; “m.a.m.i.” a sci-fi short directed under the mentorship of Werner Herzog. Raised outside Washington D.C., he studied writing at Ithaca College and then worked as a freelance journalist writing for ESPN the Magazine, VICE, the Associated Press, Deadspin and others.
ALEX RIVERA**
Alex Rivera is an award-winning filmmaker whose work explores themes of globalization, migration, and technology. His first feature, a cyberpunk thriller set in Mexico, ‘Sleep Dealer,’ won multiple awards at Sundance and Berlin. Rivera’s second feature, a documentary/ scripted hybrid set in an immigrant detention center, ‘The Infiltrators,’ won the NEXT: Audience Award and the Innovator Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, was released theatrically in the U.S., and is currently being developed as a scripted series by Blumhouse. Rivera is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, a Sundance Fellow, and was The Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University. He studied at Hampshire College and lives in Los Angeles.
ANAHITA RAZMI
Anahita Razmi is a visual artist working with installation, moving image, photography, objects, and performance. Often using her German Iranian background as a reference, her practice explores contextual, geographical, and ideological shifts – with a focus on shifts between an ‘East’ and a ‘West’. She is interested in a fluid, transcultural approach to contemporary art and its histories and references and in work that is producing testing grounds for possibilities of import/ export, hybrid identities, and the constructions & ambiguities of cultural representation.
ANGELA PARK, NORBERT SHIEH | VISUAL COMMUNICATIONS**
Visual Communications (VC) is the first non profit organization in the US dedicated to the honest and accurate portrayals of the Asian Pacific American peoples, communities, and heritage through the media arts. VC was created in 1970 with the understanding that media and the arts are important vehicles to organize and empower communities, build connections between peoples and generations through the development of AAPI film, video, and media. The organization has created award-winning productions, nurtured and given voice to our youth and seniors, promoted new artistic talent, presented new cinema, and preserved our visual history.
ANNE DE MARE^
Anne de Mare is a multiple award-winning filmmaker and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Media & Journalism Grant. Her feature films as Director/Producer include the Emmy Award-winning The Homestretch (Independent Lens) about three teens experiencing homelessness in inner-city Chicago; Capturing the Flag about voting rights in the 2016 presidential election; and the festival favorite Asparagus! Stalking the American Life about farmers in rural western Michigan. Her short works include This Is Where I Learned Not To Sleep (SIMA Humanitas Award) about the intersection of law enforcement and domestic violence and the stop-motion animated short The Girl with the Rivet Gun (Black Maria Jury Award) about women workers during WWII. She worked as a Co-Producer on the Peabody Award-winning Deej (America Reframed) directed by Robert Rooy. She has been a Sundance Fellow and an Associate Artist with Kartemquin Films.
ASIM ABDULAZIZ AHMED**
Asim Abdulaziz Ahmed is a Yemeni filmmaker, visual artist, and producer. In 2021, Asim directed his first short film 1941, which was exhibited at the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2022 and at the VA Museum in London in 2023. Asim served as the art director of the first Yemeni feature film to be selected at the Berlinale Film Festival 2023, The Burdened (2023). His work has also been featured in The Washington Post, ArtNews, i-D, and Hypebeast. Asim has been awarded various grants, including an AFAC Artist Support Grant in 2020, which helped him develop his photography project Homesick, and the 2021 Masarat grant from the British Council for his first experimental short film, 1941, as well as a Comra Academy grant for development for his current short film, I Broke a Vase.
CAMILLE BILLOPS
Camille Billops (1933-2019) was a fearless filmmaker, artist, sculptor, historian, archivist, and staunch supporter of Black art and artists. Billops came into her own within the converging contexts of the 1960s civil and human rights struggles, New York’s emerging Black artists movement, and her personal struggles for affirmation. Her work is autobiographical, interpretive, and challenging. Without apology, she successfully drew from her life’s experiences, her education, and her observations of the world around her to carve out a space for her voice to be heard. She and her husband James made their loft in SoHo a hub for artistic collaborations, collecting thousands of books, documents, photographs, and ephemera related to Black culture. They held salons with Black artists, performers, and musicians, and recorded more than 1,200 oral histories, which were published in an annual journal called Artist and Influence. Camille Billops was a Guest Artist at the 1988, 1992, and 1995 Seminars.
CARLTON JONES, LOUIS MASSIAH | SCRIBE VIDEO CENTER**
Carlton Jones is a skilled and multi-talented videographer, digital photographer and lighting technician who has worked in the broadcast TV, film and as an educator with proven creative abilities from filming to producing meaningful videos. Also, he has
been Scribe-based for 25 years and steeped in the tea of documentary expression towards community-oriented videos and photographic documentation images that lend a hand in telling the experiences and stories for nonprofit corporations, educational communities, businesses serving people, community organizations, and individuals.
Louis Massiah worked on the team that produced The Taking of One Liberty Place (Scribe Video Center, 1987) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is a documentary filmmaker and the founder/director of Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia. His innovative approach to documentary filmmaking and community media have earned him numerous honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship (1996-2001), two Rockefeller/Tribeca fellowships, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. His award-winning documentaries, The Bombing of Osage Avenue (1986), W.E.B. Du Bois – A Biography in in Four Voices (1996), two films for the Eyes on the Prize II series (1987), and A is for Anarchist, B is for Brown (2002), have been broadcast on PBS and screened at festivals and museums throughout the US, Europe, and Africa.
CAULEEN SMITH^**
Cauleen Smith is a filmmaker and artist. With a BA in cinema from San Francisco State University (1991) and an MFA in filmmaking from the University of California
Los Angeles (1998), her interdisciplinary work expands from histories and practices of experimental film, including structuralism, Third World cinema, and science fiction. Through immersive installations, moving image works, sculpted objects, and textiles, she engages with non-Western cosmologies, Afro-diasporic histories, Black cultural icons, real and speculative utopias, and, in her words, “the everyday possibilities of the imagination.”
Cauleen Smith was a Guest Artist at the 2018 Seminar, The Necessary Image, programmed by Kevin Jerome Everson & Greg de Cuir Jr. Her work was first shown at the seminar in 1992.
CHARLES RABOTEAU, GAIL LONEY, JACQUELINE WIGGINS, MARCUS RIVERA, TINAMARIE RUSSELL, WILLIAM MICHAEL | SCRIBE VIDEO CENTER**
Scribe Video Center was founded in 1982 as a place where emerging and experienced media artists could gain access to the tools and knowledge of video making and work together in a supportive environment. Scribe provides training in all aspects of film, video and audio production. We also offer classes in computer based interactive media to individuals and community organizations as well. We give emerging and mid-level video makers the skills and opportunity to use video and film as tools for self-expression and for representing and supporting their communities. In the three decades since its inception, Scribe has established eight ongoing programs designed to meet the needs of the general public and media artists.
DAVID MARK GREAVES^
David Mark Greaves has an award-winning career that spans filmmaking, publishing, and corporate management. As a filmmaker with his father William Greaves, he worked as cinematographer and/or editor on the documentaries From These Roots (about the Harlem Renaissance), Nationtime Gary: the First Black Political Convention, Voice of La Raza with Anthony Quinn, The Fight of the Century: Ali/Frazier, and the famed feature film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 1. Significantly, he was one of the original cameramen during the 1972 shoot for Once Upon a Time in Harlem. In 1996 he founded DBG Media and the award winning independent newspaper Our Time Press. As a journalist and writer, he has won numerous awards from the Independent Press Association and the New York Association of Black Journalists, including First Place awards for investigative reporting, in-depth reporting, and personal commentary, among them.
HASKELL WEXLER
Haskell Wexler is the two-time Academy Award–winning cinematographer behind Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Bound for Glory. The 1969 film Medium Cool, which he wrote, directed, and shot, was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress in 2003.
IGNACIO AGÜERO
Born in 1952, in Santiago, Chile. Agüero studied architecture and then went into film studies the year after the military coup, when all the filmmakers went into exile. He made his first films under the Pinochet dictatorship, up to One Hundred Children Waiting for a Train. During all those years he worked in advertising, until he co-directed the Franja del No, a television program of the opposition parties to Pinochet that defeated him in the 1988 plebiscite. His line of work as an artist has been mainly as the author of documentary films, but he has also made telefilms and has been an actor in numerous films, including several by Raúl Ruiz. Retrospectives of his films have been held in various countries, such as Mexico, Spain, Peru, Argentina (at BAFICI), Bolivia, New Zealand, and France. He has received numerous awards including the Grand Prix at FIDMarseille in 2016 and 2019 and also best Latin American film at the Mar del Plata Festival in 2019. He is a film professor at the University of Chile and participates in the Zéro en Conduite organization doing film workshops for children.
JAMES BLUE
James Blue (1930-1980) was a groundbreaking filmmaker, as well as educator, actor, avid film historian, and advocate of nonfiction experimentation and the democratization of media. James worked as a maker of the public television series The Invisible City: Houston’s Housing Crisis, Part 2: Messages (Southwest Alternative Media Project, 1979). He collaborated with nonprofessional actors to produce The Olive Trees of Justice (1962). He created the pretense it was about the wine business, when it was an anti-colonialist narrative about liberation struggles. Smuggled to France, it won the Critics Prize at Cannes. He later won the first Ford Foundation grant awarded to a filmmaker. His other films include The March (1963-64) and A Few Notes on Our Food Problem (1968). He worked with anthropologist David MacDougall at Rice University and founded the Southwest Alternative Media Project (SWAMP) in Houston. He later joined the faculty of the Center for Media Study at SUNY Buffalo.
JAMES BLUE WITH ADELE NAUDE SANTOS SOUTH WEST ALTERNATIVE MEDIA PROJECT**
Internationally acclaimed filmmaker and educator James Blue and founding director Ed Hugetz founded SWAMP in 1977. With initial financial support of Houston philanthropists John and Dominique de Menil, SWAMP became the first Texas independent nonprofit organization focused on the citizen filmmaker. SWAMP is committed to Texas film and video art and independent media artists. SWAMP works to develop and expand audiences for artistic voices that reflect, celebrate, and examine the cultural, social, and political diversity in Texas. It has supported the work of noted filmmakers Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez, and Jane Campion, and helped Texas filmmakers receive over $2 million to support non-commercial filmmaking. It offers professional development workshops, after-school programs, summer film classes, special screenings, fiscal sponsorship, grant opportunities, collaborative events, and other initiatives to promote the creation and appreciation of film and new media as art forms chronicling Houston’s diverse multicultural community.
JAZMIN GARCÍA**
Jazmin Garcia is a Director and cinephile based in Los Angeles. She has been developing her body of work through music videos and short documentaries.Her work explores themes of immigration and cultural assimilation, using family histories and her own experience as a first generation Mexican-Guatemalan American to weave intimate stories of trauma, magic, amor, and the perseverance of hope. Her short films evoke moments of timeless beauty, reveal the sweetness in individual struggle, lend visibility to, and inspire those whose stories are so often left out of the picture.
JEANNE KELLER | NEW ORLEANS VIDEO ACCESS CENTER (NOVAC)**
Jeanne Keller was a part of the team of VISTA volunteers that made Must I Pay the Rent? (New Orleans Video Access Center, 1975). NOVAC was a VISTA project affiliated with the New Orleans Legal Aid Center, which produced educational videos for distribution via the new cable access channel in New Orleans. NOVAC was dedicated to using video as a social action and educational tool for the low-income community in the city. A video Keller co-produced at NOVAC with Kath Quinn and Casey Caldwell, Rape in New Orleans, part of the NOVAC “Survival Information Television” project, won an award for Best Documentary from the New Orleans Press Club, a surprising honor in those early days for a community-based cable access team.
JOCELYNE SAAB**
Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon/France) was an trailblazing artist, photographer, filmmaker, producer, and journalist born in Beirut in 1948. She is considered a pioneer of Lebanese cinema. Her filmmaking practice focussed on the disadvantaged—from displaced people to exiled fighters, cities at war, and a Fourth World without a voice. Her work is grounded in representations of historic violence and an awareness of the actions and images required to document and counteract it. Saab studied at Saint-Joseph University (Beirut) and received a BScEcon from Sorbonne University (Paris), before being invited by poet and artist Etel Adnan to contribute as a journalist to As-Safa newspaper. In 1973 Saab became a reporter for French television, covering the Lebanese War from her home country for fifteen years. Her 50+ feature-length and short documentary, fiction, and essay films, as well as multimedia installations, have been exhibited extensively around the world. Saab died in Paris in 2019.
JON-SESRIE GOFF^
Jon-Sesrie Goff is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, curator, and cultural strategist whose work bridges narrative, infrastructure, and justice. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and 2015 Princess Grace Award winner, he is the director of the award-winning documentary film After Sherman (POV, ITVS). His filmmaking practice is grounded in archival research, oral history, and community engagement, centering Black life and cultural memory as acts of resistance and reimagination. In his role as a Program Officer at the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms initiative, Jon makes grants globally in documentary film, emerging media, and visual storytelling– his portfolio supports artist centered infrastructure, equitable distribution networks, and transnational partnerships that build cultural power and deepen narrative sovereignty. At Ford, he also served as co-chair of the African-American subgroup for the Foundation’s Racial Justice Working Group. A practicing artist and field-builder, Jon contributes to cross-sector initiatives focused on narrative equity, AI ethics, global media infrastructure, and the future of public interest media. His leadership roles include Executive Director of the Flaherty Film Seminar and serving as the inaugural Museum Specialist for Film at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Jon attended Morehouse College and The New School and holds an MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts from Duke University. He mentors emerging socially conscious artists and storytellers and has taught film production, photography, and media studies at Duke, Villanova, and West Chester University.
KARRABING COLLECTIVE
The Karrabing Film Collective is a grassroots Indigenous-based media group. Filmmaking provides a means of self-organization and social analysis for the Karrabing. Screenings and publications allow the Karrabing to develop local artistic languages and forms and allow audiences to understand new forms of collective Indigenous agency. Their medium is a form of survivance – a refusal to relinquish their country and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality. The films represent their lives, create bonds with their land, and intervene in global images of Indigeneity.
LARISSA SANSOUR**
Born in East Jerusalem, Sansour (PS/DK) studied Fine Art in Copenhagen, London and New York. In 2019, she represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale. Recent solo exhibitions include Amos Rex in Helsinki and Göteborgs Konsthall in Gothenburg. In the autumn of 2025, Charlottenborg Kunsthal in Copenhagen will be hosting a retrospective featuring a new installation. Sansour is currently working on two new film projects, a short film commission for the Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam and her first feature film, In Memory of Times to Come. She lives and works in London.
LIANI GREAVES^
Liani Greaves is an independent producer, strategy consultant and professional coach. She is currently the Vice-President of William Greaves Productions. Her work in film began in the mid-90s on Columbia Pictures’, I Like it Like That and as the Assistant to Director Jeff Pollack on New Line Cinema’s Above The Rim. She went on to manage production on several music videos, eventually joining Big Dog Films as Director’s Representative to Hype Williams and brokering music videos for artists including Notorious B.I.G and Brandy. Liani entered the non-profit world in the late 90’s as the Manager of Entertainment for the AIDS Walks and AIDS Dance-a-thons around the country. She built a respected producing practice and conceived and produced several successful fundraising campaigns and events, including Art, Rhymes & Life: Draw the Line on HIV; A Woman’s Work, a fundraising benefit for Women’s Prison Association; and You Rock My Soul, a fundraising concert at Carnegie Hall for GMHC. In 2005, she had the honor of working alongside her grandfather William Greaves and actor Steve Buscemi on the feature film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½, the follow-up to Greaves’s critically acclaimed Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 1.
LOUIS MASSIAH^
Louis Massiah is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a media arts center that provides production workshops to community groups and emerging media makers. Massiah has presented at the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and has been a co-programmer and board member.
LOUISE ARCHAMBAULT GREAVES
Louise Archambault Greaves was President of William Greaves Productions Inc., the NYC-based film production and distribution company she founded with her husband in 1963 and ran for sixty years, until her passing in 2023. Louise managed the logistics and finances of their productions, and handled the distribution of their films, filling orders for 16mm prints, then VHS cassettes, then DVDs, up until a few weeks before her death. She appeared on-screen in three of their films, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (alongside Shannon Baker, who had first introduced her to Bill), Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 ½ (again with Shannon Baker), and Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class. In 2018, Louise oversaw IndieCollect’s 4K restoration of the never-before-released 80-minute version of Nationtime. The only film made about the National Black Political Convention of 1972, it serves as a vital link in the history of Black Power in America. Restorations of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One and its 2005 sequel, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½ (the latter financed with the support of Steve Buscemi and Steven Soderbergh), were released by The Criterion Collection / Janus Films in 2006. In 2021, Louise made a new deal with Janus Films to acquire another thirteen films by William Greaves to be released in a Criterion Collection boxed set. At the time of her death, she was working with Criterion on restoration of the 126-minute Director’s Cut of The Fight. With support from The Film Foundation, this project is being completed in collaboration with the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which holds part of the William & Louise Greaves archive and unique motion picture and sound elements.
MADISON BUCHANAN | APPALSHOP**
“My name is Madison Buchanan. I grew up in Central Appalachia, in a family that knew poverty extremely well. To date, I have lived in 33 different places throughout my life in places ranging from apartments and trailers to motels and campgrounds. My experiences with homelessness and watching my parents desperately struggle to keep me warm and fed have led me to dedicate much of my work to helping people in similar situations to mine. I am a documentary filmmaker who is very passionate about uplifting and amplifying the voices of my community. Specifically, I work to highlight the experiences of people who struggle with poverty, homelessness, addiction, incarceration, and other compounding traumas. These are systems and obstacles that I have known deeply throughout my life and an experience I strive to humanize. It is only through lifting up those who are suffering that we can create meaningful change.”
MARIA ESTELA PAISO^**
Born in Quezon City, the Philippines in 1997, the filmmaker graduated with a degree in communication arts in 2016 and has since worked in post-production. After several music videos and visual experiments, she made It’s Raining Frogs Outside (2021), her debut film as a director selected at Berlinale. In her free time, she works to perfect her karaoke skills. Her short Nightbirds, co-directed with Ashok Vish, is part of the Philippines Factory (2024) project by Directors’ Fortnight.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a Baptist minister and civil rights activist who had a seismic impact on race relations in the United States, beginning in the mid-1950s. Among his many efforts, King headed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Through his nonviolent activism and inspirational speeches, he played a pivotal role in ending legal segregation of Black Americans as well as the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, among several other honors. Assassinated by James Earl Ray, King died on April 4, 1968, at age 39. He continues to be remembered as one of the most influential and inspirational Black leaders in history.
MAXIME JEAN-BAPTISTE
Maxime Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker based between Brussels and Paris. His audiovisual and performance work is focused on archives and forms of reenactment as a perspective to conceive a vivid and embodied memory.
MERIEM BENNANI**
Meriem Bennani is a New York-based artist from Rabat, Morocco, whose work spans video, sculpture, installation, digital media and drawing. Mixing multiple media, genres and aesthetic references, she develops highly original approaches to storytelling through magical realism and humour. Her works explore the intersection of globalised popular culture with the vernacular and traditional representation of Moroccan culture and history. They comment on contemporary society, identities in transition, geopolitics and the ubiquity of digital technologies.
MIRYAM CHARLES
From Haitian descent, Miryam Charles is a director, producer and cinematographer living in Montreal. She has produced several short and feature films and directed several short films. Her films have been presented in various festivals in Quebec and internationally. She has just completed the direction of her first feature film This House. Her work explores themes related to exile and the legacies of colonization.
OMAR AMIRALAY
Omar Amiralay, (born 1944 in Damascus, Syria; died 5 February 2011) is considered one of the leading documentarists in the Arab world. After studying at the Paris film school La fémis, he returned to Syria in 1970, where he made, among others, documentaries about the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates, the screenings of which were banned because of criticism of the corrupt state apparatus in Syria. In 1976, he won the Interfilm Award – Otto Dibelius Film Award at the International Forum of Young Cinema for Al hayatt al yawmiyah fi quariah suriyah (Everyday Life in a Syrian Village). Omar Amiralay was a Guest Artist at the 2009 Seminar, alongside Kamal Aljafari, Kasim Abid, Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing Taylor, Juan Manuel Echavarria, Jeanne C. Finley, Amar Kanwar, Beryl Korot, John Muse, Abderrahmane Sissako, Chick Strand, and Pawel Wojtasik (among others).
OTOLITH GROUP
The Otolith Group was founded in London by Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun in 2002. They are interdisciplinary artists working internationally for over two decades with a pluralistic body of forms including installation, publication, performance, photography, and video. Their practice observes methods of research that manifest as distinct cosmogonies that see and listen across media. Sounds, texts, and images emerge in dialogue with the cultural worlds and communities of the global majority who form the continents and countries of the global south and its diasporas. Their research emerges through collaborations, friendships, and affinities with the living and the dead; artists, theorists, philosophers, poets and composers, performers, cooks and organisers. The Otolith Group’s work has been exhibited internationally and this site is an archive of their past, current and future work. The Otolith Group were Guest Artists at the 2013 Seminar, History is What is Happening, programmed by Pablo de Ocampo. Their work was also shown in the 2022 FNYC Opacity Spirals program curated by Janaína Oliveira and Inney Prakash.
SARA GOMEZ
A true cinematic revolutionary who used the camera as her tool in the fight against oppression in all forms, the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez brought the stories of ordinary Cubans to the screen with a bracing immediacy and insight. Drawing on her background in ethnography, Gómez became her country’s first woman director, exploring issues of class, race, labor, women’s health, and Afro-Cuban culture in a string of intimate, illuminating shorts that revealed the complex realities of life in a postrevolutionary society rocked by seismic change. Though she directed only one feature—the formally innovative landmark of radical feminist cinema One Way of Another—before her death from an asthma attack at age thirty-one, Gómez left behind a vital legacy as a pioneer whose work continues to offer lessons in what a truly engaged, decolonial counter-cinema can be. —CRITERION
SOFÍA GALLISÁ MURIENTE**
Sofía Gallisá Muriente is an artist whose research-based practice resists colonial erasures and claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Her work deepens the subjectivity of historical narratives and contests dominant visual culture through multiple approaches to documentation. She employs text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetic and political implications. Sofía has been a fellow of the Smithsonian Institute, Cisneros Institute at MoMA, Puerto Rican Arts Initiative, Annenberg Media Lab at USC and the Flaherty Seminar, and participated in residencies with the Vieques Historical Archive, Alice Yard (Trinidad & Tobago), FAARA (Uruguay) and Fonderie Darling (Montreal), among others. She has exhibited in Documenta, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Queens Museum, Savvy Contemporary, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and galleries like Km 0.2 and Embajada. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local. In 2023 she was awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship. Sofía was a Guest Artists at the 2022 Flaherty Film Seminar, Continents of Drifting Clouds, programmed by Sky Hopinka and Almudena Escobar Lopez.
SUDANESE FILM GROUP
In the late 70s and early 80s, a group of filmmakers who were then working in the Ministry of Culture’s film department published the magazine Cinema. In April 1989, Suliman Elnour, Eltayeb Mahdi, and Ibrahim Shaddad founded the Sudanese Film Group (SFG) in order to operate more independently from the state. Their goal was to be involved in all aspects of film production, exhibition, and teaching, and to maintain Sudanese people’s passion for cinema. The Sudanese military coup of June 30, 1989 ended all cultural endeavors, and civil society organizations were banned. But in 2005, the state’s tight grip was loosened and the SFG was able to re-register. The Berlin-based Arsenal—Institute for Film and Video Art digitally restored works by these Sudanese filmmakers in 2018. The Sudanese Film Group were Guest Artists at the 2021 Flaherty Film Seminar, Opacity, programmed by Janaína Oliveira.
TIM, RIO | B MEDIA COLLECTIVE**
Tim and Rio are part of the B Media Collective, and produced Occupy Portland Eviction Defense (B Media Collective, 2011).
TONY BUBA^**
Tony Buba made Voices from a Steeltown (1983) in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Tony and his production company, Braddock Films, represent a singular commitment to the communities of Braddock and Pittsburgh. An active independent filmmaker and lifelong resident of Braddock, Buba produced films since 1974 and is responsible for telling the world about the deindustrialization of the Monongahela River Valley. Voices from a Steeltown followed his short film series The Braddock Chronicles. The Independent Spirit Awards nominated his film Lightning Over Braddock: A Rustbowl Fantasy (1988) for Best First Feature. His other titles include Struggles in Steel: A Story of African American Steelworkers (1996) and We are Alive: The Fight to Save Braddock Hospital (2013). In addition to the many films produced by Braddock Films, Buba has worked on industrials, commercials, documentaries, and features. Early in his career he played a motorcycle raider in the cult classic Dawn of the Dead (1978).
VICTOR JARA COLLECTIVE**
Guyana’s Victor Jara Collective may have produced just two films, yet as an example of a politically committed and formally radical approach to documentary filmmaking, their intervention remains unique in the relatively short history of indigenous Caribbean cinema production. Named in honour of the Chilean musician and dissident Victor Jara, the collective was influenced by the New Latin American and Third Cinema movements as well as the theories of Soviet montage and the European avant-garde. The collective— born out of a Marxist study group at Cornell University—aimed to create work that explored Guyana’s own political, social and economic struggles as a newly postcolonial nation.
WILLIAM GREAVES
Director, producer, actor and writer William Greaves began his career as a featured actor on Broadway and in motion pictures. His work behind the camera has earned him over 70 international film festival awards including an Emmy and four Emmy nominations. In 1980 he was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, and in the same year he was the recipient of a special homage at the first Black American Independent Film Festival in Paris. In 1986, he received an Indy — the special Life Achievement Award — from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers. He was honored by the National Black Theater and Film Festival with its first award for Lifelong Achievement in Film and for Contributions to Black Theater. For two years, he served as executive producer and co-host of the pioneering network television series Black Journal, for which he was awarded an Emmy. Among his outstanding documentary films are From These Roots (1974), an in-depth study of the Harlem Renaissance which has won over 20 film festival awards and has become a classic in African American history studies, and Ida B. Wells: A Passion For Justice (1989), which has won 19 film festival awards and was nominated for a 1990 NAACP Image Award. Greaves also served as Executive Producer of Universal Pictures Bustin’ Loose (1981), starring Richard Pryor and Cicely Tyson, and produced, wrote and directed the feature films Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968); The Marijuana Affair (1975); and The Fighters (1974), starring Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Retrospectives of William Greaves work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. A long-time member of The Actors Studio in New York, William Greaves was honored by the Studio in 1980 as a recipient of its first Dusa award. From 1969 to 1982, he taught acting for film and television for the late Lee Strasberg at the Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York, and on occasion, substituted for Mr. Strasberg as moderator of the Actors Studio sessions. He later was a member of the Studio’s board of directors. Greaves was a life long student of Yoga and Eastern Philosophy, and this practice was foundational to all of his work and his philosophy of filmmaking as a mission. Greaves passed at the age of 87 at his home in Manhattan on August 25, 2014.