November 2020
Leadership Transition Announcement
Dear Flaherty Colleagues and Friends:
Today we announce that Executive Director Jon-Sesrie Goff is stepping down as Executive Director to pursue a new opportunity. Jon’s last day with the Flaherty will be November 30.
On behalf of the Flaherty Board of Trustees, I want to express our profound gratitude to Jon for the strides he has made in reshaping and strengthening the organization.
Under his exceptional leadership, we've been able to accomplish a swift logo change and rebranding, the conception and execution of our first-ever virtual program, "The Unassembled," and a significant increase in support from foundations and grantors. Other significant achievements include the acquisition of archival materials from Claremont College, improved organizing systems, a reduction in monthly overhead by securing new office space, and the launch of new initiatives toward the inclusion of more diverse audiences.
We would like to acknowledge Jon’s enormous dedication to The Flaherty’s mission and his ongoing commitment to the documentary and arts community. We are very excited for him as he opens a new chapter in his professional and artistic career.
We remain committed to filmmakers, our community members, and participants, and the documentary and arts fields we hold so dearly. The Flaherty continues to adapt to the Covid crisis. We believe we are up to the challenge: we are designing our upcoming programs to enrich our experiences through challenging times and to enhance our engagement with the cinema arts in this changing world.
A transition team of Flaherty Trustees and advisors, aided by our staff, is currently engaged in a broad search for a new executive director who will join us in our commitment to bring high-quality film programs and discussion to a broad audience and to foster diversity and inclusion in our work and the communities we serve. During this transformative moment, we seek candidates with the experience and vision to nurture and lead the organization forward.
Interested applicants can find the job description here and email pertinent documents to EDjobsearch@flahertyseminar.org with inquiries and recommendations.
With gratitude,
Ruth Somalo
President, Flaherty Board of Trustees
A Letter from the Executive Director
Dear Friends:
I have made the decision to accept another position and this is my last month as Executive Director of The Flaherty. While I had not intended my tenure with the organization to be so brief, I consider it a privilege to serve this historic organization and build on the foundation built by previous directors and trustees. The responsiveness I witnessed to the logo change at the 2018 Seminar let me know that this was an organization prepared for change and invested in nurturing a welcoming global film community... I have always been interested in ways to present and create qualified representations of persons in image-based media while pushing the boundaries of form.
I hope the vision developed with our amazing Board of Trustees will be a roadmap for the future through the continued presentation of the annual Flaherty Film Seminar, deeper support for programmers, critics, and artists, effective stewardship and open access to our archives, resolving the ongoing issues with the Flaherty farm, an engaged web and social media presence, and field-defining boundary-expanding thought about the possibilities of the moving-image to reveal and represent the human condition.
Like every person who has ever encountered the Flaherty, I will always cherish my Flaherty story and the community that has formed through encounters at the Seminar or other Flaherty programming. Thank you to those who took the time to share your experiences and love for the Flaherty with you.
With excitement for the future,
Jon-Sesrie Goff
Flaherty Executive Director
Dispatch: “Every Voter Counts”
Every vote counts, but the most important thing to remember is that behind the numbers and statistics every voter counts. November 2020 has become a historical month in a year full of challenging events that have deeply impacted the lives of each inhabitant of this country. As I’m writing this, the votes are still being counted and surprisingly, Joe Biden has taken the lead in Philadelphia, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. Some of these states are “turning” blue because of the dedication and hard work that people like Stacy Abrams have put in these past years to make the voting process inclusive for everyone. But many expected a clearer election and a wider difference, in which Biden would have achieved 270 electoral votes in less time and would have won the presidency in a landslide. Some wonder why this was not the case? How is it possible that the country still shows, despite these last four years, an extremely conservative face that raises the figure of a President that on several occasions has expressed himself sharply against the LGTBQ+ community, the pro-choice movement, has shared xenophobic and misogynistic remarks and has never publicly punished extremely racist groups?
In the voice of those who have suffered constant racial or gender discrimination for years in this country, the answer is more evident than for those with more privilege. Why does it cost so much to unite a country like this? Perhaps the answer is not so difficult to find when we recognize that this has historically been a country that believes that differences are to be feared and should be repressed.
During the last weeks of October, I witnessed long lines of voters outside and around the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Many of these times I wanted to thank these folks who believed in the early voting process and who made their way to these voting centers even though the Covid pandemic numbers keep climbing in NYC and across the country. Part of my desire to thank these long lines is because many of us who live in NYC and in so many cities in the United States cannot vote because we are immigrants, residents, non-citizens or perhaps because these powers have been taken away legally. However, many of us who dedicate our lives to the productivity of this country in various areas, follow the electoral process second by second and dream of one day having the right of voice and vote that a U.S. citizen has.
early voters at Barclays Center, Brooklyn, NY
This morning I passed by the Barclays Center one more time but it wasn’t until I hit Bedford and Eastern Parkway when I realized people were beginning to cheer. I couldn’t end this dispatch with out this update: Biden-Harris to the Whitehouse!
On Franklin and Prospect Pl, in Crown Heights, I ran into a young Jamaican-American, maybe in their 20’s, they kept telling me how important it was to have Kamala as our next vice-president. This person was certainly happy about Biden, but they reminded me what so many were actually cheering for, the first POC female vice-president of the United States. On the other side of the street I could hear an older man cheering and saying: “Welcome to the next generation.” It certainly feels like we are beginning an entire new era. So much has happened since November, 2016. I remember that year as such an important part of my life, fearing about my immigration status. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. But now we are here. I heard people say “we did it!” and even if I wasn’t able to vote this year, I did feel quietly part of it.
Our office is getting back to organizing new Flaherty events, this soft start is a Flaherty Family effort to bring our organization back and offer different online events to our community during these uncertain times. We don’t know how long we will exist in this “partial” mode of operations but we are hoping to come back in full force as soon as possible. If you want to contact us you can send us an email to our new address info@theflaherty.org
If you want to share your events and screenings on our Newsletter, you can always submit your info here.
FLAHERTY FILMMAKERS
Abby Child (1972, 1973 Flaherty Filmmaker) is premiering her new feature experimental documentary ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES at DocNYC festival on November 11-19. The film is available to stream by noon November 11 and accessible through midnight November 19. So you can watch anytime, at 1am or 2pm. Please note the festival is GEO-locked to the USA. Hopefully it will play in Canada, Europe and Asia upcoming.
Early responses:
"Fresh, entertaining and complex ethical engagement around AI + robotics...goes to places that most tech docs dare not go in exploring the terrains of gender and sexuality."
"Child's films display a unique mastery of both form and content, graced with delicate editing, and colored by whispering sound designs which are all her own...The style undermines expectations." --Kristin Cato, The Blinking Eye Blog
"The use of observation in watching the robots and the juxtaposition of human interaction with technology and the environment they live in, brings into account our own reliance on technology as our own roboticism. Raises ethical, socioeconomic, gender and sexual issues, through an intricate, moving and often playful tableaux."
This is the url to buy tickets: https://www.docnyc.net/film/origin-of-the-species/
The World After: Conversation Pieces
Madelon Hooykaas (Flaherty NYC Filmmaker 2018) is presenting her new work for The World After, an initiative that invites artist to respond to questions about the Anthropocene after the Coronavirus pandemic, between September 19 and January 3. This project is inspired by the exhibition Poems for Earthlings by Adrián Villar Rojas. The World After is initiated by the Oude Kerk in collaboration with mister Motley. For The World After Madelon Hooykaas made a short film that focuses on bees, in response to a news item about unexplained mass mortality of bees in northern Italy – the same region severely affected by the corona crisis. Hooykaas has been doing artistic research on bees for some time now. She refers to a prediction attributed to Einstein: if the bees die out, then humanity must start to worry. We know that bees are essential for cycles in nature. Why, then, do we do so little to protect them?
The World After: Conversation Pieces September 19 - January 3 will take place at Old Church (Oude Kerk) in Amsterdam,The Netherlands. Follow this LINK for more info on the project and other artists.
Around NYC
MFA Social Documentary at SVA – Apply Now for Fall 2021
Info sessions:
Online: Monday November 2 or Wednesday December 2, at 7pmET
Art is back! SVA’s graduate documentary film program sharpens your artistic voice, helps you succeed in amplifying bold, visual stories and inciting the desire to make a difference. SocDoc challenges you to take your craft to the next level. Gain mentorship from award-winning filmmaker faculty and make your own films as a part of New York City’s prolific documentary community. Alumni find great success; winning Emmy and Student Academy Awards, and with their films in major festivals and broadcast around the world. Find out how SVA SocDoc will further your documentary career. Or, get in touch for a personal virtual tour of the department.
Call for entries
Working Films: Call For Media To Amplify Abolition
What does it really mean to defund the police and abolish prisons? Working Films, in partnership with The Center for Political Education, Critical Resistance, MPD150, and Survived and Punished, is launching a new film-driven organizing campaign to inspire people to imagine and take action towards a world without police and prisons. Filmmakers: submit your completed documentary or narrative film for consideration, OR apply for completion funds to finish a work in progress.
The 2020 Docs in Action program has two tracks for filmmakers:
Submit your completed documentary or narrative film to be included in a compilation that will be toured in the US in 2021, and
Apply for up to $30,000 in funding for short documentary films. Works-in-progress, or cut-downs of longer-form documentaries are eligible to apply for funding.
More information and directions for how to apply can be found HERE. If you have a film that can be described in one or more of the following ways, please apply to one or both of these opportunities.
Submit to our e-newsletter through our website.
We will no longer send a separate email for submissions, please visit our site anytime for instructions to submit your listing for our newsletter through the ‘About’ section of the site’s drop-down menu.
2019 Catalog Available Now!
The 2019 Seminar Catalogue includes detailed information about the 65th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. This publication is the result of a collaboration between Flaherty / International Film Seminars, Inc. and World Records, in conjunction with the Action: the 2019 Flaherty Film Seminar, programmed by Shai Heredia.
Thank you to all our contributors: Shai Heredia, Jason Fox, Abby Sun, Joel Neville Anderson, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Priya Sen, Ani Maitra, Pooja Rangan, Aparna Sharma, Jim Supanick, Tenzin Phuntsog, Jheanelle Brown, Chet Pancake, and Carl Elsaesser.
Edited by World Records
Design by Dan Schrempf
Copy Editing by Nadine Covert
SUPPORT the Flaherty
With your support, we will continue to bring filmmakers and audiences of all levels together. All contributions, whether large or small, help ensure the excellence of Flaherty programs for many years to come. Every donation makes it easier for us to support the artists in their art and to inspire others to create. Any amount you are able to donate will have a big impact. During COVID-19, The Flaherty can continue to present thoughtful interactive programming about the exploration of film culture and time-based media. Cinemas may be closed, but we must continue to preserve film history and hope to support the restoration of important works for many years to come. This year, your donation will be more impactful than ever.
If you prefer to donate by check please make it out to: The Flaherty, 80 Hanson Place, #603, Brooklyn, NY 11217.
About the Flaherty
The Flaherty is a media arts organization that brings together diverse, curious minds to foster an in-depth discourse on film and the creative process. We believe in the transformative power of the moving image and its ability to change how we think about film, and the world we live in. Since 1954, our unique Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, has provided an unparalleled opportunity to explore beyond known limits of the moving image and renew the challenge to discover, reveal and illuminate the ways of life of peoples and cultures throughout the world.
