Gestures of Refusal
71st Flaherty Film Seminar
October 8–11, 2026
Marlboro-Vermont, Global Pods and Online
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Poster Art by Adam Maida
Gestures of Refusal
71st Flaherty Film Seminar
Programmed by Ruth Somalo and Juan Pedro Agurcia
At a time when images risk losing their capacity to affect and transform sensibilities, as Spanish philosopher Andrea Soto Calderón proposes, this year’s Flaherty Film Seminar turns toward images that resist such disintegration: works that excavate what empire and erasure have buried beneath landscapes, archives, and the surfaces of images themselves.
If to imagine is to register a possibility for life, then this potential loss of images signals not only an aesthetic crisis, but an existential one. And yet, before accepting such disintegration, we might ask instead: how can images take on other forms, other temporalities, other densities? How might they interrupt the ways we have been taught to see, feel, and make sense of the world? The films in this program enact gestures of refusal, scrambling familiar modes of perception and opening cracks through which other forms of attention, memory, and possibility might emerge.
Across this year's program, acts of remembering, reworking, and refusing take shape through gestures of archival intervention, fragmented narration, and embodied recollection, exploring how memory is constructed, displaced, or reclaimed. Territory and home appear not as stable grounds but as haunted, contested spaces. The material properties of the image carry political weight. In these films, every grain, pixel, and trace of archival residue makes visible what has been concealed. This year’s invited artists and their works engage with grief and historical erasure not by resolving them, but by creating spaces for their partial reappearance and shared witnessing.
But how do we encounter such images together? With this program, we offer a model of thinking without the reliance on fixed frameworks or inherited categories, a program that asks us to remain open, provisional, and exposed to uncertainty. These films challenge habitual modes of spectatorship and require a different kind of attention: durational, relational, and willing to inhabit ambiguity. Confusion here becomes generative, not a failure of meaning but a condition through which new forms of understanding might emerge collectively.
Programmers
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Ruth Somalo is a Spanish-American visual artist, filmmaker, curator, educator, and film programmer based in New York. Her interdisciplinary practice moves between nonfiction filmmaking, curatorial work, and research, exploring emotion, myth, fragility, death, and ritual. Her recent work engages with taboos surrounding the female body, chronic illness and narrative medicine, grief, tears, ritual healing, and the legacies of the Witch Hunts.
Her films have been presented internationally at festivals, cinemas, and museums including Museo Reina Sofía, Cineteca Matadero de Madrid, San Sebastian International Film Festival, Cinéma du Réel, Documenta Madrid, L’Alternativa, and Anthology Film Archives, with screenings as part of Expo 1 at MoMA PS1 and Spanish Cinema Without Fear at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam.
Ruth works as Premieres Programming Consultant at Film Forum and Senior Programmer at DOC NYC and the Architecture & Design Film Festival. Her independently curated programs include The Affection for Small Things, Filming One’s Own Ghosts, Ritual and Magic: Portals for Audiovisual Creation & Healing, Holy Fluids and Absent Wounds, Queer Utopias, and the Flaherty NYC series Broken Senses at Anthology Film Archives.
She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the Autonomous University of Madrid, where her dissertation, Mending Objects: Mourning, Healing and the Self in Contemporary Nonfiction Film, received Summa Cum Laude distinction. She is a member of Hist-Ex (Anthropology of Experience), an international research group at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where her research has included the study of gesture as a form of community building and political distinction.
Ruth mentors and teaches at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, advises MFA thesis students at the School of Visual Arts, and provides creative guidance to nonfiction filmmakers. A former President of the Flaherty Board of Trustees, she currently chairs its Programming Committee.
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Juan Pedro Agurcia works in film programming, production, promotion, and distribution, with a focus on access, experimentation, and building community through cinema. Working for The Flaherty since early 2022, he now serves as Director of Programs, having previously been Online Producer of the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar (Continents of Drifting Clouds), co-producer of the 68th (Queer World-Mending, 2023), and Producer of the 69th (To Commune, 2024) and 70th (ONWARD!, 2025) editions of the Seminar. He has collaborated with organizations including Cinema Tropical, UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, and Camden Film Festival. He is Artistic Director, programmer, and co-founder of Tercer Cine Honduras, the only independent exhibition and distribution project in Honduras. He has served as a juror for the Ícaro Central American International Film Festival in Honduras, a selection committee member for the IDA Awards (2022, 2023, 2024), and an evaluator for Development funds for FDC – Proimágenes Colombia (2025). He has also participated in the Locarno Industry Academy Latin America in Morelia (2022) and Locarno LATAM U30 (2024), FICUNAM's Public Seminar of the Future (2022), and was a Getting Real fellow of the International Documentary Association in 2024.
Image of Seminar participants in Vermont with Frances Flaherty.
What to expect at the 71st Flaherty Seminar
The Seminar is an enriching experience focused on bridging diverse and often divergent cultural spheres through communal engagement with non-fiction cinema. Through several immersive days of watching, discussing, and debating, participants explore the impacts and possibilities of non-fiction cinema in our world.
The Seminar is an exploratory process, which emulates the concept of non-preconception. To this end, we do not announce the Seminar program beforehand. Beyond the programmers and production team, no one knows what they will be watching until the lights go down in the cinema. Film notes and trigger warnings will be made available upon request to participants before each screening begins. The Seminar is programmed as a continuum wherein individual screening programs relate to, riff off of, and expand upon one another.
The 2026 Flaherty Seminar programming begins on the evening of Thursday, October 8, and concludes on the night of Saturday, October 10th. The morning of Sunday, October 11th, will be dedicated to breakfast and departure.
Seminar check-in will open mid-day at the Campus at Marlboro Music on Thursday, October 8th, and continue through the evening. The opening program will begin at approximately 6 pm ET on Thursday.
The seminar schedule is rigorous, with up to 2-3 screenings and discussions each day, punctuated by communal coffee breaks and meals. Seminar artists, fellows, and general participants take part in the program collectively at the Campus at Marlboro Music and engage in daily screenings, active discussions, shared meals, and social events.
*Please note that the Fellowship program begins a day earlier, on October 7th.