February 3, 2022

THE 67TH FLAHERTY FILM SEMINAR: CONTINENTS OF DRIFTING CLOUDS

by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka
June 25 - July 1, 2022 at Colgate University & Online

SAVE THE DATE! The Flaherty is excited to announce that the 67th Flaherty Seminar Continents of Drifting Clouds, programmed by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka, will be held from June 25 - July 1, 2022 at Colgate University (Hamilton, NY) and online.

This will be The Flaherty’s first hybrid seminar. In addition to the in-person seminar at Colgate University, we will welcome participants from far and wide in an online space carefully designed by artists and technologists to accommodate a variety of time zones, languages, and abilities. Our registration rates in 2022 will reflect our commitment to making the seminar more affordable to international attendees, working artists, and the precariously employed.

We will announce more details and open registration on Tuesday, March 1st.

Continents of Drifting Clouds

A collective myth isn’t a reality, neither is a national one. Collectivity and myth are in the stories we tell ourselves, to ourselves, that make witnesses out of audiences and participants out of witnesses, as we sail like clouds between archipelagos of thought and identity.

Errancy is adrift and the boundaries and borders of what we’ve been taught to understand as proper or traditional no longer hold meaning. What we’ve been told is only an extraction, a sequential story by those who wrote history with their own tools. The colonies are being questioned and in their stead, nebulous definitions of place, space and power have been set and proffered by filmmakers and artists using their mediums to examine imagined and incidental narratives that are unbalanced, obsolete, and dangerous in their reach beyond their geographical limits.

This 67th Flaherty Film Seminar invites filmmakers whose works reflect the multiple realities and intrinsic relationships between the local and the global. In times of responsive acts to settler colonial action and imperialism worldwide, our program offers a shift of the discussion from ways of seeing to changing the ways we know; promoting nuance and gesture of space over paternalistic attitudes of classification and domination, and maybe even welcoming the passive voice.

-Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka, February 2022

*The title ”Continents of Drifting Clouds” is from a passage in Sea and Fog (2012) by Etel Adnan

2022 Flaherty Film Seminar Programmers : Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka

Almudena Escobar López is a curator, archivist, and researcher from Galicia. She is the Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG) in Rochester, NY. She is completing her Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. As a guest curator, 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. 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. Since 2017 she serves on the Board of Trustees of the Visual Studies Workshop, and the Advisory Board of Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center in Buffalo, NY. 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.

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.

OPACITY SEMINAR CATALOGUE

*Graphic by Rid, Darwin Marinho, and Ella Monstra of ‘Carnaval no Inferno’ Collective*

Pre Orders now available! Pré-venda já disponíveis!

The bilingual print edition of the expanded Opacity Seminar Catalogue will be available in April 2022. Please help us assess our printing needs by pre-ordering your copy before March 1. A edição impressa bilíngue do Catálogo do Seminário de Opacidade expandido estará disponível em abril de 2022. Ajude-nos a avaliar nossas demandas de impressão encomendando sua cópia antes de 1º de março.

Pre order your copy here! Peça sua cópia aqui!

The Opacity Catalogue is co-edited by Dessane Lopez Cassell and Carol Almeida, with contributions by Tina Campt, Tatiana Carvalho Costa, Amaranta César, Christopher Harris, Janaína Oliveira, Athi-Patra Ruga, Yeelen Cohen, and Grace Passô. Managing editor: Jason Fox. Design by Rid, Darwin Marinho, and Ella Monstra of ‘Carnaval no Inferno’ Collective. O Catálogo do seminário Opacidade é coeditado por Dessane Lopez Cassell e Carol Almeida, com contribuições de Tina Campt, Tatiana Carvalho Costa, Amaranta César, Christopher Harris, Janaína Oliveira, Athi-Patra Ruga, Yeelen Cohen e Grace Passô. Coordenador de Edição: Jason Fox. Design de Rid, Darwin Marinho e Ella Monstra do Coletivo ‘Carnaval no Inferno’.

Other News

Flaherty Filmmakers

In Event of Moon Disaster, a work by Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund (Flaherty NYC, Fall 2019), has its North American premiere installation at Museum of the Moving Image as the centerpiece of the exhibition “Deepfake: Unstable Evidence on Screen.” On view through May 15, 2022.

Flaherty Fellows

The Pine Barrens Project features experimental film and video that celebrate and reflect on the natural world in the historic diorama halls of America's first museum of Natural Sciences —featuring three 2015 fellows: David Kessler, Emily Drummer, and Josh Weissbach. Kessler's documentary The Pine Barrens will feature a live score. Saturday, February 12, New Jersey Pine Barrens.

Congratulation! Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Arts Center is excited to announce the appointment of Zainab Saleh (Flaherty Fellow 2015) as the organization’s new executive director. Saleh comes to Squeaky Wheel with a background of scholarship in media history and theory, essential experience in leadership, development, and community-building roles at multiple non-profit arts organizations, and a commitment to social justice that meshes strongly with Squeaky Wheel’s mission. Saleh will continue the stellar leadership legacy of outgoing executive director, Maiko Tanaka.

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