70th Flaherty Film Seminar
Thursday, June 26 – Sunday, June 29, 2025
New York City, with Global Pods
and an Online Experience
This year’s Seminar will gather participants for four days in New York City, alongside a series of Global Pods and an Online Experience. To commemorate The Flaherty's 70th anniversary, the program will be curated collaboratively by past seminar programmers Janaína Oliveira (OPACITY, 2021), Carlos Gutiérrez (SOUTH OF THE OTHER, 2007, with Mahen Bonetti), and Richard Herskowitz (1987 Seminar, 1999 Seminar with Orlando Bagwell, and chair of the Flaherty's 50th Anniversary Committee). Venue details will be announced in March, alongside registration opening.
Jemma Desai will contribute programming to the 2025 Flaherty Fellowship program, which will run parallel to the seminar, June 25th - June 29th, and convening in person at Firehouse: DCTV’s Cinema for Documentary Film and online. A few sponsored fellowship spots are still available: if you or your institution would like to sponsor a fellowship, please see below.
We are eager to share the 70th seminar experience with you, wherever you may be. Whether you join us in NYC or in Pods around the globe, we invite you to join us!
Stay Tuned! Registrations and Fellowship Applications open in March.
Until then, we invite you to read more:
"Commercial culture silences debate; The Flaherty liberates it and invigorates ideas. And that is a difficult, messy, uncomfortable, and disquieting experience that should never be sanitized. Each participant should find their way out of philosophical and artistic knots their own way – but always in consort with other like-minded seminarians. If the media art world thrives on romantic individualism, The Flaherty is just the opposite; it is a sort of collective intellectual and artistic sauna that cleanses the body and the soul.”
— The indomitable Patricia Zimmermann reflects on the Seminar’s 50th Edition. Read more.
Sponsored Fellowship Slots Still Available!
Each year, Flaherty is proud to collaborate with a wide range of institutional partners to support the Fellowship program. These partners can be academic institutions (recent partners include UC Boulder, CalArts, Duke, Harvard, Northwestern, University of Melbourne, University of Westminster) as well as arts organisations around the world (such as Anti-Archive, Black Public Media, CAAM, Corrientes, Palestine Ministry of Culture, Seminario El Público del Futuro.).
For our 2025 Fellowship Program, a few slots are still available for institutions looking to sponsor one or more Fellows, in person in New York City, and/or online around the world.
Fellowship Partners help provide a unique experience for Fellows, connecting them with peers, artists, and programmers while facilitating career development through mentorship and specialized programming.
The Flaherty offers four tiers of support for the 2025 Fellowship program, available for both in-person and online participation. Partners may either fund and select a Fellow from their organization to attend the Seminar or contribute directly to the Flaherty to support an Open Call Fellowship.
If you are part of an institution that has the funds to support a 2025 Flaherty Fellow, please complete this Fellowship Partner Interest Form by Friday February 28th. Thank you!
Yearning
In summer 2023 The Flaherty announced an unprecedented one-off programmer-in-residence model, working with Jemma Desai over two years towards a seminar proposal for 2025 tentatively titled Yearning:
What might happen if we used the phenomenology of yearning to appraise our cultural production infrastructure? Not yearning to belong to what we have, but yearning to be longing: to embody a desire for something else? (…)
We have learned a great deal from our ongoing work with Jemma. At this time we long for more space and gentleness to allow the process to continue unfurl. And so it is with love for what’s still to come that we announce the postponement of Jemma Desai’s seminar until 2026*, while acknowledging the many ways our process with her has contributed to the design of the 70th annual seminar we will present in 2025.
*in full knowledge that 2026 is very much unknown, for so many of us, at this time.
Thank you to all our partners: Ford Foundation, NYSCA, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, DCTV, William H. Donner Family Foundation, Wave Farm MAAF for Organizations, and more to be announced soon!