Gestures of Refusal
Poster Art by Adam Maida
At a time when images risk losing their capacity to affect and transform sensibilities, as Chilean philosopher and art theorist Andrea Soto Calderón proposes, this year’s Flaherty Film Seminar turns toward images that resist such disintegration: works that excavate what empire and erasure have buried beneath landscapes, archives, and the surfaces of images themselves.
If to imagine is to register a possibility for life, then this potential loss of images signals not only an aesthetic crisis, but an existential one. And yet, before accepting such disintegration, we might ask instead: how can images take on other forms, other temporalities, other densities? How might they interrupt the ways we have been taught to see, feel, and make sense of the world? The films in this program enact gestures of refusal, scrambling familiar modes of perception and opening cracks through which other forms of attention, memory, and possibility might emerge.
Across this year's program, acts of remembering, reworking, and refusing take shape through gestures of archival intervention, fragmented narration, and embodied recollection, exploring how memory is constructed, displaced, or reclaimed. Territory and home appear not as stable grounds but as haunted, contested spaces. The material properties of the image carry political weight. In these films, every grain, pixel, and trace of archival residue makes visible what has been concealed. This year’s invited artists and their works engage with grief and historical erasure not by resolving them, but by creating spaces for their partial reappearance and shared witnessing.
But how do we encounter such images together? With this program, we offer a model of thinking without the reliance on fixed frameworks or inherited categories, a program that asks us to remain open, provisional, and exposed to uncertainty. These films challenge habitual modes of spectatorship and require a different kind of attention: durational, relational, and willing to inhabit ambiguity. Confusion here becomes generative, not a failure of meaning but a condition through which new forms of understanding might emerge collectively.
All Seminar photography by Anna Victoria unless otherwise noted.
PROGRAMMERS
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Ruth Somalo is a Spanish-American visual artist, filmmaker, curator, educator, and film programmer based in New York. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between nonfiction filmmaking, curatorial work, and research, exploring emotion, myth, fragility, death, and ritual. Her recent work engages with taboos surrounding the female body, chronic illness and narrative medicine, grief, tears, ritual healing, and the legacies of the Witch Hunts.
Her films have been presented internationally at festivals, cinemas, and museums including Museo Reina Sofía, Cineteca Matadero de Madrid, San Sebastian International Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Documenta Madrid, L’Alternativa, and Anthology Film Archives, with screenings as part of Expo 1 at MoMA PS1 and Spanish Cinema Without Fear at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.
Ruth works as Premieres Programming Consultant at Film Forum and Senior Programmer at DOC NYC and the Architecture & Design Film Festival. Her independently curated programs include The Affection for Small Things, Filming One’s Own Ghosts, Ritual and Magic: Portals for Audiovisual Creation & Healing, Holy Fluids and Absent Wounds, Queer Utopias, and the Flaherty NYC series Broken Senses at Anthology Film Archives.
She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the Autonomous University of Madrid, where her dissertation, Mending Objects: Mourning, Healing and the Self in Contemporary Nonfiction Film, received Summa Cum Laude distinction. She is a member of Hist-Ex (Anthropology of Experience), an international research group at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where her research has included the study of gesture as a form of community building and political distinction.
Ruth mentors and teaches at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, advises MFA thesis students at the School of Visual Arts, and provides creative guidance to nonfiction filmmakers. A former President of the Flaherty Board of Trustees, she currently chairs its Programming Committee.
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Juan Pedro Agurcia works in film programming, production, promotion, and distribution, with a focus on access, experimentation, and building community through cinema. Working for The Flaherty since early 2022, he now serves as Director of Programs, having previously been Online Producer of the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar (Continents of Drifting Clouds), co-producer of the 68th (Queer World-Mending, 2023), and Producer of the 69th (To Commune, 2024) and 70th (ONWARD!, 2025) editions of the Seminar. He has collaborated with organizations including Cinema Tropical, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, and Camden Film Festival. He is Artistic Director, programmer, and co-founder of Tercer Cine Honduras, the only independent exhibition and distribution project in Honduras. He has served as a juror for the Ícaro Central American International Film Festival in Honduras, a selection committee member for the IDA Awards (2022, 2023, 2024), and an evaluator for Development funds for FDC – Proimágenes Colombia (2025). He has also participated in the Locarno Industry Academy Latin America in Morelia (2022) and Locarno LATAM U30 (2024), FICUNAM's Public Seminar of the Future (2022), and was a Getting Real fellow of the International Documentary Association in 2024.
PROGRAMS
Revisit the full program on the 2026 Seminar Programs page.
FELLOWS
This fall, we welcome 33 outstanding filmmakers, artists, curators, scholars, and cultural workers to the Seminar through our annual fellowship program. 14 Fellows will join us in person in Marlboro, Vermont, and 19 will take part in the Online Fellowship Experience.
Support for the 2026 Flaherty Fellowship program is generously provided by Wyncote Media Fund; LEF New England; Haverford College Department of Visual Culture, Arts, and Media; University of California San Diego Department of Visual Arts; University of Rochester Department of Art and Art History; Northwestern University: Art Theory & Practice; Purin Film Fund; SAIC Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation; the Kate Cashel Fund of The Community Foundation for the Greater Capital Region; Duke University MFA | EDA; Portland State School of Film; Nazaara Media Lab; and the Jilu Commune Artemisia Award.
PODS
The Seminar took place simultaneously from October 8-11th in Global Pods in
Salaya — Thailand
Warsaw — Poland
Buenos Aires — Argentina
Saratoga Springs — USA
New York — USA
TEAM
Flaherty is comprised of a small but mighty team! To the Flaherty and Seminar team and Board, thank you for the dedication and steady care that held every screening, conversation, and connection together!
Flaherty Team
Juan Pedro Agurcia – Program Director
Anisa Hosseinnezhad – Fellowship Programmer
Sun Park – Online Fellowship Facilitator
Eynar Pineda – Consulting Producer
Elizabeth Kroner – Production Coordinator
Harrison Kroessler – Production Assistant
The Flaherty Board of Directors
Dessane Lopez Cassell, President
Ted Kennedy, Treasurer
Sarah Ema Friedland
Steve Holmgren
Merrill Sterritt
And a special thank you to Pablo de Ocampo, Ruth Somalo, and Juana Suarez, who cycled off the Board following the 2026 Seminar. Their years of service and leadership have helped shape The Flaherty, and we are so grateful!
PARTNERS
Thank You to Our Partners
Behind every screening, conversation, and connection at the Flaherty Film Seminar is a community of funders and supporters whose belief in independent experimental nonfiction cinema makes every Seminar possible! Your support keeps the Seminar open, accessible, and alive, and it sustains our work and mission to gather around cinema for world-shifting conversations. Thank you for trusting us to imagine new ways of being and gathering around cinema, and for making the Flaherty possible year after year
Support for the Seminar and the Flaherty is generously provided in part by the Ford Foundation Just Films, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature through the Media Arts Assistance Fund, a regrant partnership of NYSCA and Wave Farm, and John M. Bissell Foundation
PHOTOS
All Seminar photography by Anna Victoria
A selection of this year’s Seminar images.
