March 2020
“Why don’t we stop writing so much and do much... why don’t we deliberately choose one of our own and plug it for all it is worth, all of us together for once. This is exactly the sort of effort the Robert Flaherty Foundation is... These films are life expressed in motion. When we study them we study that. They take us into new and fresh point of views; we shake off old habits. We do not learn to visualize with the top of our heads; we learn, deep down under, to see... through the camera.”
Celebrating The Flaherty at the Oscars
We are incredibly proud and want to congratulate Flaherty filmmakers Julia Reichert, Steve Bognar, Jeff Reichert, Carol Dysinger, and Elena Andreicheva for winning Academy Awards in February. Reichert and Bognar’s American Factory took home the prize for Best Documentary Feature, while Dysinger and Andreicheva’s Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) won the award for Best Documentary Short.
Both of these films and their recognition are testaments to the experiences of the Flaherty Seminar and we wanted to share an excerpt from a letter Julia Reichert wrote to be shared prior to the 2014 conference. We are incredibly grateful and fortunate to be able to share, develop, and create a space that fosters intellectual curiosity and boundary-pushing exploration in the documentary field and are incredibly happy that our filmmakers go on to receive such wonderful recognition from the larger film community.
Excerpt from Collective, Julia Reichert, 2014:
“The first Flaherty I attended was in 1971. Jim Klein and I drove from Ohio in our extremely beat-up car. We had no idea what the Flaherty Seminar was. Willard van Dyke had called us on the phone and asked us to be there to discuss our film, Growing Up Female, with about 100 people and then stay a couple of days. That was pretty much what we knew.
The world opened up to us during those days: the world of people who deeply cared about documentary film, who thought about it, created it, and especially who discussed it. It was definitely a life changing experience. At that Flaherty, we entered the world of independent film just as a new generation was coalescing, just as new ideas were sprouting.
The Flaherty gave us: continuity with the past, mentors, and an intelligent ear to our brash pronouncements. It was a civilizing force in the best sense of that word.
Our close connection to the seminar stretched across the next dozen years or more. Whether we were there or not, what went on each summer was of keen interest to us. We were there probably half the time, and we heard all the details of the other seminars from the many friends and colleagues we’d made. We all knew what the important discoveries were, who got trashed, what the big guests were like, who fought with whom of the older guard.
…
Of course, we made many lifelong friends at the seminars and had the opportunity to deepen, year by year, many relationships. This was especially valuable for us, since we made our home in a remote outpost of the filmmaking world. Flaherty was a kind of home for us during our formative years as filmmakers.”
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 - Katarina Docalovich
We are excited to announce our new Winter/Spring intern Katarina Docalovich has joined us and will be helping with the 2020 Flaherty Seminar preparations and much more.
Katarina Docalovich is a film writer and programmer living in Brooklyn. She recently received her Bachelor’s degree in Cinema from VCUarts in Richmond, Virginia, where she programmed the film series “For a Dollar Name a Woman” dedicated to queer women directors and women directors of color. She has volunteered at the Cannes Film Festival, Sundance, and the Brooklyn Film Festival. She produced the short film “Here Lies Beatrice” (2019), which was officially selected to Shortie Film Festival, James River Short Film Showcase, and Queens World Film Festival. You can find her writing in the online film journals Much Ado About Cinema, Screen Queens, and Flip Screen.
Flaherty NYC Presents: The Unwriting of Disaster
This program – the first-ever retrospective of films screened across the 66-year history of the Flaherty Seminar – brings together works that exist in opposition to the spectacularization of tragedy.
To write the disaster, to document the catastrophic, to bear witness to the unbearable event – all seem to have become default impulses in times of crises. Luckily, this fervor to record has not remained unchallenged. Image-makers from all over the world continue to create works that bring about a much-needed overhaul to that free-floating belief in the merits of visibility, inscription, archiving, and remembering.
Following Maurice Blanchot’s questioning if the horrors of disaster can ever be articulated while their “infinite threat” looms ever-present, this retrospective of films previously screened at the Flaherty Seminar looks at how artists and filmmakers have responded to the explosive, destructive, and inescapable forces of their times. This event takes place Saturday, April 25 at 7:00pm, and will also serve as the welcoming reception for our 2020 Flaherty Seminar Fellows. Past fellows are also invited to participate and give a welcome to the recently selected ones. Films to be announced; for more details visit: https://theflaherty.org/
This is the first screening organized and curated by our new Flaherty NYC programmers Alia Ayman, Suneil Sanzgiri, and Devin Narine-Singh. 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.
2020 Flaherty Seminar
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.
The 66th edition of the Flaherty Film Seminar will inspire us to look defiantly at the opaque spots in our understanding of images. As suggested by the writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the works presented will “clamor for the rights to opacity for everyone” in their irreducible singularities. Opacity here is like an unfolding force that creates openings and endless possibilities of cinematic existence, especially for subjects hitherto excluded or less valued on conventional screens. The Seminar will be an opportunity to experience the moving image in its power, beauty, and, most of all, ordinariness. As an invitation for displacement or provocation, that points to an open future, to cultural, formal, aesthetic freedoms, where questioning is prioritized over finding answers.
Uncertainty, fragmentation, opacity. We live in a time when the transparency of convictions and definitions and the desire for total understanding of differences that historically guided the Western world of images no longer holds. In cinema, the boundaries between center and margin have been loosened and dissolved. Today, the critical issue may no longer be to relocate the center but our perceptions of the margins. The traditional geographical boundaries of cinemas have proven unsatisfactory, as cultural and historical connections are continually reworked. Moving images require both filmmakers and viewers to negotiate what is not understood: there is no such thing as a blind spot; there never was. The spots are opaque, and they compel us to shape new tools for describing what we see, feel, and think.
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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Flaherty Filmmakers
Bill Basquin’s will be presenting his feature length documentary, From Inside of Here (2020) at MoMA on Monday, March 23 at 7pm. Basquin calls the work a “feminist ethnographic landscape film,” adding that it is “his (transgendered) body that functions as the experiential organ through which the film is structured.”
Shot in the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, From Inside of Here conveys both the stunning tranquility and majesty of 19th-century landscape photography and an ever-present foreboding of 21st-century violence. Basquin filmed this experimental film over the course of three years using 16mm film, HD video, infrared still photography, and sound recordings. Filming alone in the forest, Basquin encountered a limited group of fellow campers—either hunters or government agents— who were suspicious of his California roots and reasons for being there.
Flaherty Fellows
Chet Pancake (Flaherty Fellow 2019) will be presenting their feature-length documentary QUEER GENIUS, as a part of the “The Cinema of Gender Transgression: Trans Film” series at Anthology Film Archives, on Saturday, March 14 at 7:30pm.
QUEER GENIUS is a cinematic exploration of four visionary queer artists transcending traditional narratives in their lives, their art, their identities, and their definitions of genius. The film features intertwined portraits of Barbara Hammer, Eileen Myles, Black Quantum Futurism, and Jibz Cameron, breaking down barriers in their creative fields as they confront fame, failure, censorship, family, gender, and sexuality. The communal possibilities of “genius” are embraced from a particularly queer perspective, crossing genres and generational perspectives.
Chet Pancake, along with special guest artists, will be present for the screening. There is also an additional screening with the filmmaker and guest artists in attendance on Sunday, March 15 at 4:45pm.
Call for Entries
Now in its 16th year, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival is the UK's Festival for New Cinema and Artists' Moving Image. A platform for emerging and established artists and filmmakers, the Festival is inspired by its surroundings to push boundaries and explore the unexplored.
Film entries of all lengths and formats are encouraged and will be considered across all areas of our programme. All selected artists and filmmakers will receive a screening fee, festival accommodation and a contribution towards travel costs. All single screen works under 60 minutes in length are eligible for the Berwick New Cinema Competition which has a £1,000 prize.
Deadlines:
Regular: Friday 20 March 2020
Late: Monday 6 April 2020
For more information on how to apply, visit Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival’s site here.
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.
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
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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.
