August, 2021
Opacity Reverberations
Frame from Insan by Ibrahim Shaddad (Sudanese Film Group)
For Opacity, our 66th Flaherty Film Seminar, a custom-built platform hosted over 400 guests from over 40 different countries. Across time zones and realities, this first online seminar harnessed the power of online spaces to recreate much of the Flaherty traditions, including Frances Flaherty’s notion of non preconception. Each of the 18 programs were attended by hundreds of guests who did not know what they were about to witness. Together we plunged into programmer Janaína Oliveira’s worlds: series of shorts, feature films, artist talks – all accompanied by deep and extended discussions with our guest artists Deanna Bowen, Garrett Bradley, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Isaac Julien, Isael and Sueli Maxakali, Arjuna Neuman, André Novais Oliveira, Grace Passô, Morgan Quaintance, Athi-Patra Ruga, Larissa Sansour, and the Sudanese Film Group, as well as anti-keynote special guests Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman.
Not even a month since the seminar ended, it continues to live on inside us. We would like share with you some of the quotes left by our participants and thank you all for your heartening responses. Through your words we relive glimpses of a seminar that has left us forever transformed.
"The cinematic future is Black, Indigenous, Palestinian, queer, and femme. This is the intellectual and political avant-garde" - anonymous
"The seminar took me out of my minutae, I ran across time, found visual treats, longed for forgotten lives, and revelled in that faintly familiar but pre-pandemic, post-hate emotion, that was called hope." - Tarini Manchanda
"I heard about Flaherty from my professors and colleagues and I am lucky that this year it is held online so I can attend from Indonesia! Even though I have to set my alarm at 10 PM and 2 AM every night, I made sure not to miss any of the programs as they advance my vocabulary of experimental documentary form and artists." - Azalia Muchransyah
"The experience was truly enlivening (very much needed after a difficult year +). I came away feeling renewed by the power of the seminar's ever expanding collective intelligence and care. It's an enormous privilege to be a part of such thoughtful and generous discussions. Also, my god, brilliant programming this year. Deeply grateful." - Erica Levin
"Cinema can hurt, can burn, and can heal all at the same time!" - Homa Sarabi
"The 2021 Flaherty Seminar will go down in history as the most down-to-earth, yet technologically sophisticated seminar to date. […] Janaína Oliveira's programming had us all considering so many things around the theme of opacity, including family heritage, the future of archives, myths and shamans, the need to know and the need to leave unknown, the heat of sound, the spiral of understanding, letting go of transparency, and so much more."
- Kelly Spivey
"I felt immensely enriched and my perception of the world was permanently altered"
- Pawel Wojtasik
"I was skeptical an online experience would be so transformative, inspiring, and fun. I was happily proven wrong! The Flaherty experience will live within me, and I'm so grateful. "
- anonymous
Announcing the
2022 Flaherty Film Seminar
Programmers:
Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka
After the success of Opacity, it is our great joy to turn our sights to next year’s Flaherty Film Seminar. We are delighted to announce our venerable 2022 programmers Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka.
Almudena Escobar López by Rachel Liz
Almudena Escobar López is a curator, archivist, and researcher based in Rochester, NY where she is the Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG). She is completing her Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. Almudena has curated and co-curated a number of film and video series which have been presented at Anthology Film Archives, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá, UnionDocs, ICDOCS, Visual Studies Workshop, Cineteca Nacional de México, Alternative Film/Video, among others. She was program advisor of the 2020 edition of Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and more recently has joined the programming committee of Media City Film Festival. Her writing has been published at MoMA Magazine, Vdrome, Vertical Features, MUBI Notebook, The Brooklyn Rail, Afterimage, and Film Quarterly, among other publications and catalogs.
Sky Hopinka
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, CA, Portland, OR, and Milwaukee, WI. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fictional forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and teaches at Bard College.
His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2018 FRONT Triennial. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and was a part of Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018-2019 and Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, and is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.
Mimesis Documentary Festival is back
with a new Flaherty x Boulder collaboration
For a second consecutive year, The Flaherty was present at the Mimesis Documentary Festival. This year, the Flaherty x Boulder in-person programs included work by Sokhi Wagner, Peggy Ahwesh, Pelle Lowe, Nina Fonoroff and Sky Hopinka, as well as the “Earth Dancing” workshop with artist and writer Jane Wodening.
Solace In the Shadows
Programmed by Kelsey White and L u m i a
The decline of civilization casts a long, dark shadow. The Earth is not dying, we are making it uninhabitable. Where can we find solace? At times, cinema has been a fertile land where the complex reality of existence took on many forms, and a constant search for new ideas strengthened viewers’ resistance against homogenization. These two programs investigate the current state of this cultural war, highlighting filmmakers who search for new languages to respond to the many crises that mark this epoch of chicken bones and cheap condos.
Click on the live links to find out more about the Flaherty x Boulder programs and the 2021 Mimesis Documentary Festival that continues to run until this Saturday, August 14.
Zone by Sokhi Wagner (1983, Super 8, 8’)
Mimesis (n.) /məˈmēsis/
Resemblance, receptivity, representation, and the act of expression.
The second annual Mimesis Documentary Festival, presented August 4-10, 2021 in Boulder, Colorado, is an immersive theatrical and virtual experience featuring in-person and at-home screenings, workshops, and conversations with documentary artists, scholars, and producers from across the world.
CALL FOR ENTRIES
Applications Open for Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies' DocX Archive Lab
Virtually hosted with retreat in Durham, NC
What could manifest when we reimagine, repurpose, and rewrite the documentation of who we are? Apply for the CDS DocX Archive Lab! Six BIPOC fellows will explore, pose questions, and create with Lead Artist Facilitator and Lab Collaborator Nyssa Chow, Martine Granby, and several guest artists. Fellows also receive $3000. Apply by August 16.
Share your news and 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.
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.
If you prefer to donate by check please make it out to: The Flaherty, 80 Hanson Place, #603, Brooklyn, NY 11217.
Add the 2019 Robert Flaherty Seminar Catalogue to your library!
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
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.
