Image of Seminar participants in Vermont with Frances Flaherty.
71st Flaherty Film Seminar
October 8–11, 2026
The Campus at Marlboro Music — Marlboro, Vermont
Fellowship Programming begins October 7
What to expect at the Flaherty Seminar
The Seminar is an enriching experience focused on bridging diverse and often divergent cultural spheres through communal engagement with non-fiction cinema. Through several immersive days of watching, discussing, and debating participants explore the impacts and possibilities of non-fiction cinema in our world.
The Seminar is an exploratory process, which emulates the concept of non-preconception. To this end, we do not announce the Seminar program beforehand. Beyond the programmers and production team, no one knows what they will be watching until the lights go down in the cinema. Film notes and trigger warnings will be made available upon request to participants before each screening begins. The Seminar is programmed as a continuum wherein individual screening programs relate to, riff off of, and expand upon one another.
The 2026 Flaherty Seminar programming begins on the evening of Thursday, October 8, and concludes on the night of Saturday, October 10th. The morning of Sunday, October 11th, will be dedicated to breakfast and departure.
Seminar Check In will open mid-day at the Campus at Marlboro Music on Thursday, October 8th, and continue through the evening. The opening program will begin at approximately 6pm ET on Thursday.
The seminar schedule is rigorous, with up to 2-3 screenings and discussions each day, punctuated by communal coffee breaks and meals. Seminar artists, fellows, and general participants take part in the program collectively at the Campus at Marlboro Music and engage in daily screenings, active discussions, shared meals, and social events.
*Please note that the Fellowship program begins a day earlier, on October 7th.
About the Seminar theme:
Programmed by The Flaherty team, the 71st Flaherty Seminar will delve into images that resist disintegration: works that excavate what empire and erasure have buried beneath systems, structures, and the surfaces of images themselves. Through fragmentation, recollection, and archival intervention, this year’s program will explore how memory is constructed, displaced, or reclaimed.
Stay tuned for more details and our official poster.