September 2020
The community gets ready for September
In an effort to keep the organization awake during these times of pandemic, at The Flaherty we are exploring various ways to create content and schedule meaningful events for our community. Each week of this month you will find on our instagram account a brief and educational review about one of our filmmakers invited to the Flaherty Seminar called “Flaherty Filmmaker Friday”. Make sure to visit @theflaherty for our previous and future posts.
September is a month in which the reactivation of the educational system in New York brings many uncertainties, but we hope that with the presence of many students, either online or slowly in person, there will also be a safe increase of activities in our city. It will undoubtedly be a testing month for many of our filmmakers, programmers, fellows and seminar participants, who are dedicated to the world of academia and we wish all of them the best during these challenging times.
Flaherty Filmmaker Fridays “Frederick Wiseman”
Flaherty Filmmaker Fridays “Barbara Kopple”
Dispatch: “Reflections on The Unwriting of Disaster”
by Devon narine-Singh, Suneil Sanzgiri, Alia Ayman
Where does the impulse to record arise? That urge to contain, to capture, to imprint, to index the elusiveness of the passing moment—a moment of import or nothing at all. And what of meaning-making? What triggers the desire to point and shoot?
What if one was to refuse to document, even in the face of imminent demise, eternal crises, or immediate tragedy? The filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha writes of the act of “speaking nearby,” a practice of non-enclosure, and radical resistance to humble oneself before the task at hand, refusing to objectify, and in its place, a space for reflection—inward, outward, and in-between.
Our programming collective “DNA” (Devon, ‘Neil’, Alia) began meeting in January to consider these questions as we approached the Flaherty Seminar's archive to create the program that would become 'The Unwriting of Disaster'. It took many shapes and forms: some are the normal occurrences that happen when dealing with a project of this scope, others not so much. Films were added, subtracted. The in-person screening at Anthology Film Archives that was supposed to happen in April was moved online and occurred in August hosted by Mimesis Documentary Festival.
Even thinking April to August brings to mind the litany of events that occurred. As Suneil Sanzgiri, the N of DNA summarizes our program began “before the pandemic started, before the people’s righteous uprising that occurred and is still occurring all around us before Beirut suffered a massive loss at the hands of a corrupt government’s negligence.”
Before going further it is important to acknowledge that due to the explosion in Beirut where she and her family are based, Mounira Al Solh, one of our artists for this program couldn’t partake in the moderated discussions that occurred. She wrote a letter, an excerpt of which is below:
“Today, as we are trying to understand what happened in Beirut on August 4 at 5:30 PM, it is very strange to see that film, 'Now Eat My Script', or rather, the textual ballad which I made in the form of a film. Around the end of 2013, I had the urge to make the video 'Now Eat My Script' as the situation was escalating in Syria, and family members were escaping from there or trying to escape and arrange visas/work permits elsewhere, to save themselves from the war, and we were all terribly affected specifically at that time by the chemical attacks that took place in Ghouta. This occurred on August 21, 2013! If you remember at that time, Obama and other political leaders were pretending that chemical attacks are the red line for the Assad Regime. But in fact, the chemical attack happened and soon after, no one did anything. Assad is still here until today.”
With her letter, Al Solh illustrates perhaps the most demanding experience of this whole process: It doesn’t matter if you think about the disaster before the next one happens or ignore it, the disaster is here, it was already here, and it is happening right now. The disaster is occurring as I type: A white supremacist teenage shooter in Kenosha, WI murdered protesters fighting against the state-sanctioned stealing of Black life, while Jacob Blake survives an attack by the police state only to be shackled to his bed (minutes ago, after writing this, it is announced he will be unshackled).
So the final reflection to be had on ‘The Unwriting of Disaster’ is that art and the brave artists that approach the flames of the fire, be it a literal confrontation as in Peter Hutton’s Boston Fire or a thematic one, help us to better understand what it might mean to return, to revisit, unsettle, disturb, shift, displace, and relocate meaning, time, history, and violence. We are grateful for the reflections in these works, reflections such as how to navigate an unstable, disturbed, shifting terrain in Patty Chang’s Losing Ground, reflections on the uncertainty of a post-independent India, reflections between the overlaps between state-sponsored violence, anti-Black media narratives, and questions of historical coincidence, repetition, and return in Renée Green and Portia Cobb’s works, reflections on addiction, hero-worship, and self-consciousness in Mary Filippo and Joanna Priestley’s works, reflections on the body and racial identity in Ngozi Onwurah’s film, pedagogical reflections on the impact of sound and narrative in thinking through historical trauma in Deborah Stratman’s reworking of a classic anti-Nazi propaganda film, a refusal to depict in Joyce Weiland’s film, and meditations on the unbearable act of witnessing in Mounira Al Solh’s film.
We are appreciative of the rich conversations we had over two days between artists who joined us for the Q&A’s allowed us to dive deeper and reflect on the ways an artist's practice can serve to navigate this world, even if that navigation is a refusal to navigate—an abdication of the very notion that anyone of us could comprehend the magnitude of time, memory, or violence itself.
2020 NYC programmers (left to right): Suneil Sanzgiri, Alia Ayman and Devon Narine-Singh.
Our office is seeing the light for the first time after our shut down in March, 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 ifs@flahertyseminar.org
Please continue to share your events and screenings with us, you can always submit your info here.
FLAHERTY FELLOWS
The People Are Not an Image: Vernacular Video After the Arab Spring by Peter Snowdon (2014 Flaherty Fellow) will be published by Verso Books on 29 September. The book explores online video as a vehicle for revolutionary self-representation, where political consequence cannot be separated from aesthetic form.
The People’s Revolt, 2020 Virtual Screening Tour, 97min. (Illustration by Nicolás Bascuñan)
“The Pleople’s Revolt/La Revolución Del Pueblo: Muestra De Nuevo Cine Experimental Chilenx” a screening curated by Anto Astudillo (2017 Flaherty Fellow) will be streaming at Maysles Documentary Center’s virtual cinema from September 1 to the 15. Tickets are available on a sliding scale with a suggested donation of $12.
New experimental cinema in Chile exposes and criticizes the abuse of power coming from governmental authorities, the police, and the military by borrowing elements of journalistic photography and Chile’s unique documentary culture. This program – organized on the occasion of Chile’s recent social uprising – presents a diverse selection of new experimental work made by Chilean filmmakers living in Chile and abroad.
Around The Virtual World
Calling all filmmakers! The SFFILM Programming team invites you to learn more about the submission process for the 64th San Francisco International Film Festival (April 2021), meet the programmers responsible for the official selections, and ask questions about the Festival and your film submission. The 2021 SFFILM Festival opens for submissions on September 8. This virtual event is scheduled for Wednesday, September 9 at 6:00 pm PDT.
In discussion with SFFILM's newly appointed Director of Artist Development Lauren McBride, the SFFILM programmers will highlight special opportunities for filmmakers, describe the overall approach to our hybrid in-person / online event planning, detail the application process, and share what makes for a strong submission.
My Name is Pedro, 2017, US, 98 min.
Latin Reel and Maysles Documentary Center are Co-presenting the film My Name is Pedro Directed by Lillian LaSalle online on September 17. First time director, Lillian LaSalle's award-winning, powerful documentary, explores what public education meant to South Bronx Latino maverick educator, Pedro Santana, and what he, in turn, meant to public education. The film is also especially timely in this moment of national reckoning since the murder of George Floyd, subsequent protests, and high attention being paid to public school parity.
After this content becomes available September 17 at 12:01 am EDT, you'll have 7 days to start watching. Once you begin, you'll have 30 days to finish watching the film. The August 31 at 11:00 pm livestream can be viewed anytime until September 30 at 11:59 pm. You can get tickets here, there is a suggested donation or “pay what you can” option.
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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.
