Opacity on Criterion
Nov 1 +
We are thrilled to announce the Opacity Collection on the Criterion Channel–launched TODAY!
The series, programmed by Janaína Oliveira, revives 14 titles from the 66th Flaherty Film Seminar, Opacity (2021), with works by Garrett Bradley, Isaac Julien & Mark Nash, Isael & Sueli Maxakali, André Novais Oliveira, Grace Passô, Morgan Quaintance, Athi-Patra Ruga, and the Sudanese Film Group (Suliman Elnour, Eltayeb Mahdi, Ibrahim Shaddad).
The following films are now available:
Africa, The Jungle, Drums and Revolution, Suliman Mohamed Ibrahim Elnour, 1979
A Camel, Ibrahim Shaddad, 1981
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, Isaac Julien, 1995
. . . After He Left, Athi-Patra Ruga, 2008
Fantasmas (Ghosts), André Novais Oliveira, 2010
Public Service Announcement, Athi-Patra Ruga, 2014
Another Decade, Morgan Quaintance, 2018
Long Way Home, André Novais Oliveira, 2018
America, Garrett Bradley, 2019
Missing Time, Morgan Quaintance, 2019
Dazed Flesh, Grace Passô and Ricardo Alves Jr., 2019
Nũhũ yãgmũ yõg hãm: This Land Is Ours!, Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Carolina Canguçu, and Roberto Romero, 2020
Republic, Grace Passô, 2020
Yãmĩyhex, the Women-Spirit, Sueli Maxakali and Isael Maxakali, 2020
let’s all be lichen
November 7 & 10
Please join us next week for the last screenings of asinnajaq’s formidable series let’s all be lichen, Flaherty NYC Season 24.
There are two remaining screenings in New York City next week (Nov 7 & 10), with additional screenings and events at Colgate University (Nov 8-11).
On November 7th, we will feature artist, filmmaker, and academic Zinnia Naqvi. The program of three films brings into question all that is left in and out of frame, the way that meaning is made from images. In OUT OF SIGHT, HELD IN MIND, Naqvi tries to express in concise phrases and images uncomfortable circumstances that have long been accepted as truth and left unquestioned.
Our closing program on November 10th will be a doubleheader, pairing Letter from Siberia by Chris Marker (1957), and a Siberian response, 65 years later, by filmmakers Svetlana Romanova and Chelsea Tuggle with the film арыҥ Season of Dying Water (2022). MUTATIONS will be both in person at e-flux Screening Room, and online at virtual.theflaherty.org with filmmakers joining for the conversation, moderated by Jem Cohen.
Still from SEAVIEW (2015) by Zinnia Naqvi
A spotlight introducing artist, filmmaker, and academic Zinnia Naqvi.
Zinnia Naqvi, SEAVIEW, 2015, 12 min
Zinnia Naqvi, THE TRANSLATION IS APPROXIMATE, 2021, 11 min
Zinnia Naqvi, FARZANA, 2021, 34 min
Still from Тарыҥ - SEASON OF DYING WATER (2022) by Svetlana Romanova, Chelsea Tuggle
Starting with the same inspiration, building with a vastly different set of tools.
Svetlana Romanova, Chelsea Tuggle, Тарыҥ SEASON OF DYING WATER, 2022, 62 min
Chris Marker, LETTER FROM SIBERIA, 1957, 61 min
HYBRID EVENT + CLOSING NIGHT RECEPTION
Closing Night
November 10
FREE Online Screening & Discussion
Closing Night films, Program 4: MUTATIONS, will be available online for a 24-hour screening window, for the entirety of November 10, wherever you are in the world, including a hybrid discussion with the filmmakers moderated by asinnajaq and Jem Cohen at 9:30 pm Eastern Time.
Please register. We’ll send you more details shortly:
asinnajaq
Flaherty NYC Season 24 Curator
asinnajaq is from Inukjuak, Nunavik and lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal).
Her work includes filmmaking, writing, and curating. She co-created Tilliraniit, a three-day festival celebrating Inuit art and artists. asinnajaq’s work has been exhibited at art galleries and film festivals around the world. asinnajaq wrote and directed Three Thousand (2017) a short sci-fi documentary. She co-curated Isuma’s presence in the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. She co-curated the inaugural exhibition INUA at the Qaumajuq. In 2020, asinnajaq received a Sobey Art Award.
Deadline Extended
Submit your Letters of Intent for
the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar (2024)
Agnès Varda at the Flaherty Film Seminar in 1976
Our seminar programmers are selected through an open call, and we are now seeking the programmer or programmers of our 69th Edition, which will take place in 2024.
Please send us your programming proposals! You can submit your ideas via a short letter of intent here. The deadline has been extended for submissions to Sunday, November 20, 2022.
Programmers can be individuals or small programming teams. The Flaherty Programming Committee will ask for a second round of application materials by mid-December, and make a final selection in January 2023.
DOC NYC
November 9–27
GET YOUR DISCOUNT CODE!
Join our friends at DOC NYC for the 13th annual edition of the largest documentary film festival in the US, November 9–27 in theaters and online.
We are happy to provide a discount code on tickets (capacity permitting) for the following films:
I'M PEOPLE, I AM NOBODY, Director: Svetislav Dragomirovic
WORLD PREMIERE | Stevan, a 60-year-old, former porn performer from Serbia awaits the outcome of a Kafkaesque trial process in a Maltese prison. The moody landscapes reflect the loneliness and desperate state he was in prior to his arrest for public exposure in this bizarre story, which unspools like an eerie mystery.
FOR YOUR PEACE OF MIND, MAKE YOUR OWN MUSEUM, Director: Pilar Moreno, Ana Endara
US PREMIERE | Senobia was a self-made artist and a surrealist collector who transformed her home into the “Museum of Antiquities of All Species.” In her small Panamanian village, the extraordinary world she built with her artistic creations and her writings impacted the lives of other women struggling with the patriarchal system around them. In this luminous portrait, her friends conjure her indomitable spirit while wearing her clothes in her kitchen.
MOTHER LODE, Director: Matteo Tortone
NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE | Jorge leaves his family and his moto-taxi business on the outskirts of Lima to try his luck in the most dangerous Andean gold mine in Peru. The precarious nature of life and labor ground this documentary-infused drama set in a frontier town where the flow of gold requires human sacrifice. Captured with exquisite black-and-white cinematography, the boundaries between reality, magic and folklore merge in this extraordinary fable of neoliberalism.
WHITE NIGHT, Director: Tania Ximena, Yollotl Gómez Alvarado
US PREMIERE | A sensorial film about the members of a Zoque community in Chiapas, whose village was buried in a volcano eruption in 1982. Thirty-eight years later, a poet named Trinidad, prophetically born on the day of the eruption, leads the community to excavate their former town and unearth the relics of their church. Their moving encounter with grief, with their ancestors, and with the spirit of the volcano is conjured in this cinematic delight.
DARK LIGHT VOYAGE, Director: Tin Dirdamal, Eva Cadena
US PREMIERE | After a shocking discovery about the fate of an old friend, director Tin Dirdamal embarks on an entrancing train through Vietnam to visit him with his young daughter. Along the way, father and daughter ponder unanswered questions, with the sights they encounter on their journey resonating with the depths of their philosophical insights. A film created under the rules of the Hanoi Dogma that will never be shown again after two years.
OUR MOVIE (Nuestra Película), Director: Diana Bustamante
INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE | An extraordinary and necessary essay film constructed entirely out of a vast archive of news footage from the ‘80s and ‘90s, OUR MOVIE (NUESTRA PELICULA) is a response to the violent history that imprinted itself on the director in her formative years in Colombia. Images of blood spatters, bullet holes, coffins, and Colombians marching in the streets become an abstract net of quotidian sorrow.
THIS MUCH WE KNOW, Director: L. Frances Henderson
NYC PREMIERE | Grieving the suicide of a close friend, a filmmaker travels to Las Vegas, America’s suicide capital. There she learns of the shocking death of Levi Presley, a local teenager who leaped from the roof of the city’s tallest casino. THIS MUCH WE KNOW takes an essayistic, metaphor-laden approach to the subject of self-annihilation, masterfully linking it to environmental issues.
THE WIND BLOWS THE BORDER (VENTO NA FRONTEIRA), Director: Laura Faerman, Marina Weis
US PREMIERE | On the violent border between Brazil and Paraguay, a battle between agribusiness and indigenous sovereignty wages. Filmmakers Laura Faerman and Marina Weis outline the clash between lawyer Luana Ruiz, heiress to the contested land and staunch Jair Bolsonaro supporter, and Alenir Ximendes, Guarani-Kaiowá leader, teacher, and activist. A powerful cinematic chronicle of Ximendes’s courageous fight against Ruiz and agribusiness to protect her community, culture and indigenous lands
FRAGMENTS OF PARADISE, Director: KD Davison
NYC PREMIERE | Jonas Mekas, the godfather of avant-garde cinema, emigrated to New York in 1949 and over the next 70 years drove the rise of the independent film scene. Filmmaker KD Davison allows Mekas (who died in 2019) to tell much of his own story, as he creates his celebrated diary films and searches for those elusive “fragments of paradise” that cinema can uniquely provide. Mekas championed exhibitions and pioneered distribution and preservation institutions. Along the way, he inspired countless artists, among them Martin Scorsese, Andy Warhol, John Lennon, and Jim Jarmusch.
HOW TO SAVE A DEAD FRIEND, Director: Marusya Syroechkovskaya
US PREMIERE | As a suicidal 16-year-old Marusya Syroechkovskaya falls in love with a humorous grunge kid named Kimi. Fueled by drugs and music, the inseparable couple films the euphoria, anxiety, and misery of their precarious existence under the shadow of their oppressive government. Captured over 12 years, this raw, exuberant, and moving love story, provides insight into a silenced generation of rebellious youths struggling to survive in Putin’s Russia.
AT CHECKOUT, ENTER DOCNYC_PTNR_22
The code will unlock the discounted price: $3 off all regular & matinee screenings (excluding Opening / Closing Night & Centerpiece). Find out more about DOC NYC at docnyc.net
Flaherty Fellow
SURPLUS CINEMA (Brussels, Belgium)
Feminisms and filmmaking in the context of Greece and intertwining diasporas, November 23, 24, 25. A series of screenings, conversations, a workshop, and a mistressclass inviting us to reflect on collaborative filmmaking practices (‘filming with’), camera work as care work, and cinema as community action.
Through humor and code-mixing, diasporic sisterhoods, afro confessions, queer joy and mourning, rerooting rituals, cinematic nests, and the pleasures of the sensorial, this program seeks to bridge communities and celebrate metaphoric ones.
Surplus Cinema echoes lived—unresolved, diasporic, wished—experiences. Program conceived by Maria Christoforidou, Rabab El Mouadden, Christina Phoebe (George Stone Fellow at the 2018 Flaherty Seminar) and Elli Vassalou in conversation with Sofia Dati.
Call For Entries
MDOCS Storytellers' Institute, May 31- June 30 (Skidmore Campus, Saratoga Springs NY). Applications due November 20 for the MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute fully funded, a non-fiction arts residency on Skidmore campus every June.
MDOCS is an interdisciplinary program presenting the stories of the human experience in documentary media and technologies: old and new; visual, oral, and written; analog and digital. Providing resources for and fostering collaborations between Skidmore’s academic programs and documentary practitioners, MDOCS invites students, faculty, and staff to learn and use the documentary arts for critical inquiry, discovery, civic engagement, and exposition. Find out more!
