February 2020
“A Flaherty film must not be confused with the documentary movement, which has spread all over the world, which was fathered, not by Robert Flaherty –– an Explorer, but by John Grierson, a Scotsman who was a teacher and a preacher and was from its very beginning all preconceived for preaching and teaching purposes. Just as many of our most famous films would be conceived for political purposes, for propaganda, and as Hollywood preconceives for the box office.”
2020 Flaherty NYC Programmers-in-Residence
We are excited to announce that Alia Ayman, Suneil Sanzgiri, and Devin Narine-Singh have been selected as the inaugural programming team for the redesigned Flaherty NYC program. They will develop an ambitious screening series in New York City for the fall and participate in other professional development opportunities. Flaherty NYC is one of the cornerstone projects of the Flaherty, we look forward to working with the trio to engage the New York public with thoughtful and provocative cinema, rich with discussion and discourse.
The programmers for this series hail from the beautiful diasporas of Egypt, India and the West Indies, and in turn their program reflects questions of emergence and opacity, highlighting works by underrepresented voices, canonic names, and promising new filmmakers that amplify characteristics of what writer Sylvia Wynter called “a new poetics of the propter nos”—a radical reversal in the belief that instead of the world being created for “us,” we were, in a sense, created for each other.
Alia Ayman makes and curates film and video and lives between Cairo and New York. She is the cofounder of Zawya, an art-house cinema located Cairo and a doctoral student at NYU where she is working towards a dissertation on decoloniality, difference and the global circulation of documentary images.
Devon Narine-Singh is a filmmaker and curator. His works have screened at Microscope Gallery, UltraCinema, The New School and The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. He has presented screenings and presentations at NYU Cinema Studies, UnionDocs, The Film-Makers Coop, and Maysles Cinema. He has a BFA in Filmmaking from SUNY Purchase. He is currently pursuing his MA in Screen Studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College.
Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. His work spans experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, and contend with questions of identity, history, culture, and diaspora in relationship to structural violence. His work has screened nationally and internationally, and his 3rd short film, "At Home but Not At Home," makes its World Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2020. In 2017, he graduated with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology from MIT, and in 2016 was a resident of the SOMA program in Mexico City.
Dušan Makavejev Retrospective February 26-March 8
In commemoration of the one-year anniversary of the passing of Dušan Makavejev, we will co-present with Anthology Film Archives a comprehensive 35mm retrospective of this world-renowned director, curated by 2018 Flaherty Seminar programmer Greg de Cuir, Jr. & Professor Pavle Levi of Stanford University. Best remembered for his unhinged sense of humor, his provocative and pioneering methods of montage, and his uncompromising political engagement, Makavejev made fundamental contributions to the golden age of European and international film modernism in the 1960s and 70s.
Dušan Makavejev (b. 1932) came of age in the post-WWII era, during the early years of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. For some five decades he actively participated in shaping the cinematic as well as the broader cultural and intellectual currents in his homeland. From a kino club member and activist in the 1950s, to a director of unconventional documentary shorts in the early 1960s, Mak (as he was known by his friends and colleagues) established himself in the mid-to-late 1960s as a highly innovative author with radical aesthetic and socio-political sensibilities.
His debut feature-length narrative film, Man is Not a Bird (1965), was made in the midst of the prolific New Film tendency in Yugoslav cinema. By the end of the decade he rocketed to international fame with two more features, and in 1971 directed his masterpiece, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, an iconic work of both the politically controversial Yugoslav “Black Wave” and the transatlantic countercultural revolution. A number of international productions and co-productions, unmistakably rooted in Makavejev’s emancipatory political-surrealist idiom, followed in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
Flaherty Intern - Satya Hariharan
We are excited to announce our new Winter/Spring intern Satya Hariharan has joined us and will be helping with the 2020 Flaherty Seminar preparations and much more.
Satya Hariharan is a writer and filmmaker, currently based in Queens, NY, particularly interested in non-fiction and hybrid works, especially those that eschew traditional narrative forms. His writing and short essayistic works seek to engage with the impacts of capitalism and colonialism on image production and consumption, the proliferation of images in contemporary media culture, and the representation of the poetic across forms of media. He completed his A.A. at Clark College in 2018, and will complete his B.A. in Media and Documentary Forms at The New School in May 2020.
Firelight Groundwork Lab x Flaherty in Miami
Flaherty co-presented a screening on January 19 as part of the Firelight Media Groundwork Lab weekend activities in partnership with South Florida PBS, Oolite Arts, and Third Horizon. Invited guests included lab participants, local filmmakers, and artists invited by Oolite Arts. Former Flaherty Trustee and 2007 Seminar Artist Juan Carlos Zaldivar presented an excerpt of his film 90 Miles and participated in a discussion about his practice and issues relevant to South Florida filmmakers.
Registration & Fellowship Applications for the 2020 Seminar are open
Illustration by Nico Bascuñán
The Flaherty International Film Seminar began in 1950s-before the era of film schools-when Robert Flaherty's widow, Frances, convened a group of filmmakers, critics, curators, musicians, and other film enthusiasts at the Flaherty farm in Vermont.
Registrations are on a first come, first served basis. Please email ifs@flahertyseminar.org if you have any queries.
Regular registration: $1,550
Late registration: $1,650 (after April 1 – if space is available)
Student registration: The students slots have all been filled.
The Flaherty offers a limited number of fellowships and grants to graduate students, emerging filmmakers, and mid-career professionals who would be unable to attend the Seminar without financial support. The fellows’ program is rigorous and rewarding and is designed to encourage diversity of geography, ethnicity, class and experience levels within the participant pool, which is essential in providing the unique critical experience of the Flaherty.
2020 Seminar Programmer
Janaína Oliveira has a Ph.D. in History and is a professor at the Federal Instituto of Rio de Janerio (IFRJ) and Fulbright scholar at the Center for African Studies at Howard University, in Washington D.C. She is the head programmer of the Zózimo Bulbul Black Cinema Encounter in Rio de Janeiro, part of the programming committee of the FINCAR, International Women Filmmakers Festival in Recife, and the advisor for African and black diaspora films for the Locarno Film Festival, in Switerzland.
She is a member of the Association of Black Audiovisual Professionals (APAN) and is the founder and coordinator of the Black Cinema Itinerant Forum (FICINE). Oliveira becomes the first Brazilian to program the seminar since its creation in 1954, and the sixth Latin American programmer.
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Applications NOW OPEN for the Oberhausen Seminar (Germany) which runs from May 13 - 18 in conjunction with the Oberhausen Short Film Festival. The Flaherty is happy to partner with Oberhausen to organize the seventh Oberhausen Seminar
The Oberhausen Seminar is an experimental course that examines the moving image in contemporary art in the context of a renowned international film festival. International actors from various fields - artists and filmmakers, curators and scientists - use the Short Film Festival as a laboratory in which curatorial preconditions, infrastructures in which these moving images circulate, and the critical parameters according to which they are analyzed are questioned. The seminar will be held in English.
For further information and application information visit: Oberhausen Seminar.
Application deadline is February 15, 2020.
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
Flaherty Filmmakers
Pawel Wojtasik's feature-length documentary on labor, Every Pulse of the Heart Is Work, will have its NYC premiere as part of DocFortnight at MoMA on February 10 (and will also screen on February 17). Filmed largely in India’s ancient holy city of Varanasi, the film is a study of people at work—a street beggar, a surgeon, a weaver, a priest, a masseur, a tabla drum maker, and a crane operator: people who in their intense concentration and ritualized movements evoke the idea of human labor as an act of spiritual devotion and social interdependence.
Flaherty Fellows
Miguel Hadari (Flaherty Fellow 2018) will be presenting his feature-length documentary Compañía, along with his short Bocamina, at “Neighboring Scenes” at Lincoln Center, February 15. Compañía, prizewinner at Visions du Réel 2019, is having it's US premiere. The film is a lyrical and mystical documentary about an indigenous community who migrated to the city and have returned to their small mountain village in the Andes to honor the memory of their ancestors for a festival of the dead.
Filmed in the Bolivian city of Potosí, Bocamina concerns the miners who work in Cerro Rico, the mountain of silver ore that overlooks the city. Emerging from the darkness, faces begin a dialogue with those from years long past.
Call for Entries
Squeaky Wheel’s Workspace Residency is for artists and researchers working in media arts. The residency is open to applicants who seek resources, time, and support for ongoing projects or new work. The summer 2020 session offers up to $1550 in stipends, and travel and accommodations for non-local residents. DEADLINE February 20; applicants will be notified by May 1.
Let’s Talk About Water is soliciting short films—up to two minutes—that inform, educate, inspire and motivate people to come together and embrace our ubiquitous need to value water and to share compelling narratives on how to cope with too little, too much, or too dirty water. Top prize winner will receive $10,000. Co-founded by longtime Flaherty attendee and supporter Linda Lillienfeld.
More information about the festival, prizes, and submission requirements can be found here and submissions for the festival are accepted here. DEADLINE April 30.
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.
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.
