The staff and board of The Flaherty are filled with gratitude and inspiration after the 68th Flaherty Film Seminar (June 17–23, 2023 at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY).
We look forward to Seminars 69 and 70 with enthusiasm, and are delighted to announce the programmers for our next TWO editions!
As we move into a new season, we part with a valued long-time team member, Sarie Horowitz, who has been at the Flaherty since 2011.
warm | tinged with eroticism | challenging | intensive | thrilling | joyful | transformative | a thoughtful week of conversations | facilitated with a lot of care | edifying | humbling | energizing | engaging | fancy | porous | surprising | Queer People | provocative | interesting | revitalizing | generous | inspiring | loving | invigorating discussion | community | tender | deeply reflective | emotional | exciting | arousing | enlivening | productive | difficult | rigorous | expansive | enriching | exhausting | honestly…so much fun!
Photography by Bleue Liverpool
A Thrilling 68th Flaherty Film Seminar
The 68th Annual Flaherty Film Seminar, Queer World-Mending, concluded Monday July 31st, with the closing of our online asynchronous platform.
We were honored to welcome artists Sharlene Bamboat & Alexis Kyle Mitchell, Emily Vey Duke & Cooper Battersby, Theo Jean Cuthand, Shu Lea Cheang, John Greyson, Madsen Minax, James Richards, Roee Rosen, Amina Ross, Wu Tsang in our midst, as well as a host of elders whose presences were felt at every turn: Chantal Akerman, Barbara Hammer, Pat Hearn and Shelley Lake, George Kuchar, Curt McDowell, Gunvor Nelson, Edward Owens, Marlon Riggs, Beryl Sokoloff, Leslie Thornton and Ron Vawter, and Paul Wong.
Over five hundred people from around the world took part in this year’s programming – as Fellows, Seminar Participants, Pod Participants, or Online Attendees. We brought together creators, critics, and scholars in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Honduras, India, Ireland, Israel, México, Norway, Paraguay, Perú, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Slovenia, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Thank you to all who joined and supported this year’s seminar, to every member of the Flaherty Team, and the gracious folks at Skidmore who welcomed us so warmly on their verdant campus.
Read Mend the World: The 2023 Flaherty Seminar by Caden Mark Gardner, in the Film Comment Letter, July 31, 2023.
In this Blue Moon month,
The Flaherty is delighted to announce the programmers for the next two Seminars
May Adadol Ingawanij; Julian Ross photographed by Merel Hegenbart; Jemma Desai photographed by Christa Holka
May Adadol Ingawanij and Julian Ross will program
the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar To Commune in 2024
How does cinema enable us to commune? We’re interested in the potential of groups gathering around a screen over a period of time. We approach documentary filmmaking as that which brings together bodies, minds and spirits across different spaces, worlds and temporalities. […]
Our curatorial approach seeks to explore the tensions and the sparks of efforts to commune. Not to gather to recognize an identity or a common concern, but to make relations on grounds of radical differentiation.
— May Adadol Ingawanij & Julian Ross, August 2023
May Adadol Ingawanij | เม อาดาดล อิงคะวณิช is a writer, curator, and teacher. She works on Southeast Asian contemporary art; de-westernized and de-centred histories and genealogies of cinematic arts; avant-garde legacies in Southeast Asia; forms of future-making in contemporary Global South artistic and curatorial practices; aesthetics and circulation of artists’ moving image, art and independent films belonging to or connected with Southeast Asia. She is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Westminster where she co-directs the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media. May publishes regularly English and Thai for a wide range of publications. Her recent and ongoing curatorial projects include Legacies, and Animistic Apparatus.
Julian Ross is a researcher, curator and writer based in Amsterdam. He is an Assistant Professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, a film program advisor for IDFA, and co-organizer of Doc Fortnight at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, with Sophie Cavoulacos. He was a programmer at International Film Festival Rotterdam (2015-22), Locarno Film Festival (2019-20) and guest programmer at Singapore International Film Festival (2021). His curatorial work has been presented at Tate Modern, Art Institute of Chicago, e-flux Video & Film, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Eye Filmmuseum, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Harvard Film Archive and British Film Institute. He is co-director of the interdisciplinary research centre ReCNTR and editorial board member of Collaborative Cataloging Japan. He is co-curator of Animistic Apparatus with May Adadol Ingawanij, with whom he will co-programme the 69th Flaherty Seminar.
Jemma Desai Joins the Board of Directors as Programmer-in-Residence of the 70th Flaherty Film Seminar Yearning in 2025
What might happen if we used the phenomenology of yearning to appraise our cultural production infrastructure? Not yearning to belong to what we have, but yearning to be longing: to embody a desire for something else? How might both understanding more clearly our own desires as well as attending closely to the ways that reformism, managerial moderation and ‘professional practices’ contain the work that is possible lead us to more congruent and committed ways of working? —Jemma Desai, August 2023
In an effort to lift the veil between the leadership of The Flaherty, our history, and our programs, The Flaherty is honoured to work with curator, researcher, and writer Jemma Desai over the next two years. Her engagement with our board, staff, and the archives will culminate in her curation of the 70th seminar, tying our long history together with possible visions for the future.
Jemma Desai is a writer, educator and somatic facilitator based in London. Her practice engages film and other art forms through research, writing, performance, as well as informally organized settings for deep study. She has previously worked with the BFI and British Council, and is the creator of "This work isn't for Us” a multidisciplinary and auto-ethnographic research project on institutional racism in the UK arts sector. She was co-chair of LUX, a UK based international arts agency that supports and promotes artists’ moving image between 2017-22, the Head of Programming at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in 2021 is and is on the programming committee at Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia. She is a practice based PhD candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama thinking through the liberatory possibilities of abolitionist praxis to cultural production with a thesis entitled "what do we want from each other after we have told our stories?" She regularly writes, teaches and speaks on her research interests in a variety of academic and non-academic contexts.
Photographed by Scott Rudd at a 60th Flaherty Film Seminar screening in 2014
A heartfelt thank you Sarie Horowitz
The Flaherty Board of Directors and team send flowers and gratitude to Sarie Horowitz as we part ways. We wish her great success in her future endeavours. Sarie joined The Flaherty as seasonal seminar staff in 2011, working closely with Executive Director Mary Kerr. In her thirteen years working at our organization, she helped implement a dozen seminars and two dozen FNYC seasons, rising to the role of Program Director in 2019.
Sarie has been a gift to the Flaherty community. She has nurtured generations of dedicated staff, worked closely with programmers and artists, and is beloved for her perennial kindness, care, and warmth.
Call for Entries: MacDowell Residency
March 1 – August 31, 2024, Peterborough, NH
Apply by September 10
Apply for a MacDowell Fellowship! Filmmakers of all genres, in addition to artists across six additional disciplines, are eligible for MacDowell residency Fellowships. There are no residency fees, and need-based stipends and travel reimbursement grants are available to all artists awarded Fellowships. Deadline: September 10.