2008 Featured Flaherty Filmmakers

Oliver Husain is a filmmaker and artist from Germany, currently based in Toronto, whose short works include Squiggle (2005), a video on mud architecture and folk dance shot in Andrah Pradesh, India; Swivel (2003-05) a continuous pan of Shanghai; and Shrivel (2005), a mystery soap shot in Jakarta. Q (2002), a video collage on event culture using 3D animation and documentary, won the award for best German Short Film in 2003 (Bundesfilmpreis). In 1997, Oliver helped form the theater troupe Da Group with Claus Richter and Sergei Jensen. Among the many international film festivals that have shown Oliver’s films are the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Mar del Plata Festival in Argentina, and the Urban Festival in Teheran.
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Laura Waddington was born in London in 1970 and currently lives and works in Brussels. She studied English literature at Cambridge University before moving to New York and then Paris, where she made short films and videos. Her work has screened at numerous international film festivals including Locarno, Rotterdam, Montreal, Edinburgh, New York Video Festival, Film Society of Lincoln Center, on ARTE television, and in museums such as The Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, and The Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis. She has received awards including the ARTE Prize for Best European Short Film at The 48th International Oberhausen Short Film Festival, First Prize at Videoex Zurich in 2002 and 2005, and The Grand Prix Experimental-essai-art video, Cote Court 2005, France. Focuses on her work include a retrospective at The 51st Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, an homage to her videos at The 41st Pesaro International Film Festival, and "Vidéo et après: Laura Waddington" at The Pompidou Center, Paris.
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Lee Wang is a documentary filmmaker based in New York City. Her documentary Someone Else's War won the Student Visionary award at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and an honorable mention at the Atlanta Film Festival. The film, which documents the lives of Filipino contractors working on US military bases in Iraq, was also showcased at the Expresion en Corto film festival in Mexico. She is currently producing a longer version of Someone Else's War for PBS. Wang has also directed and produced documentaries on the globalization of the U.S. Navy and the surge of Chinese nationalism for CNN and PBS, respectively. She began her career as a journalist and is currently producing short videos about the 2008 presidential campaign for Newsweek.com. She received her BA in English and Ethnicity, Race and Migration from Yale University and her masters in journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Renee Tajima-Peña is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker whose previous works include Who Killed Vincent Chin?, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha, The Mexico Story of The New Americans Series and Labor Women (PBS); The Last Beat Movie (Sundance Channel), Jennifer’s in Jail(Lifetime), and The Best Hotel on Skid Row (HBO). Her films have premiered at major festivals including Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, San Francisco, London and New Directors/New Films. Tajima-Peña has been awarded the Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video, two Rockefeller Fellowships in Documentary Film, a Peabody Award, a Dupont-Columbia Award, and other honors. She began her filmmaking career at Third World Newsreel and Asian Cine-Vision, and has been a film critic for The Village Voice and cultural commentator for NPR.
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Ursula Biemann studied first at the Bellas Artes in Mexico, then in New York at the School of Visual Arts (BFA 1986) and the Whitney Independent Study Program (1988). As an artist, theorist and curator, Biemann has produced a considerable body of work on the gendered dimension of geopolitical displacement and migrant labor. Border and mobility are recurring themes in her video essays from Performing the Border (1999) to Contained Mobility(2004). She initiated the collaborative projects Kültür (1997) on Istanbul’s urban politics and B-Zone, a territorial research on post-socialist spaces, which includes her video research Black Sea Files (2005) on the Caspian oil geography. The latest multi-channel video, Sahara Chronicle (2006-2007), investigates trans-Saharan migration systems. All of her projects are carried out in complex forms of collaboration including anthropologists, cultural theorists, NGO members, architects, as well as scholars of sonic culture. She published numerous books and essays and is a researcher at the Art and Design University Zurich.
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James T. Hong has been producing thought-provoking, unconventional, and occasionally controversial films and videos for a decade in San Francisco, California. "His moving image works are a sump-hole of chilling irony in which neo-fascist pronouncements vie for primacy with proto-liberal anxieties," according to the Pacific Film Archive. In 2006, he was honored with a Goldies Award in Film from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, where Cheryl Eddy wrote: "It's rare when a filmmaker is able to match provocative themes with evocative imagery — and do it consistently. Addressing race and class issues in his arrestingly photographed works, James T. Hong is one such artist" (Vol. 41, No.6).
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Bahman Ghobadi was born on February 1st, 1969 in Baneh, a city near the Iran-Iraq border in the province of Kurdistan, Iran. After receiving his high school diploma from Sanandaj, he moved to Tehran in 1992 in order to further his studies. Ghobadi started his artistic career in the field of Industrial Photography. Although he earned a B.A. in Film Directing from the Iranian Broadcasting College, he never properly graduated because he believed that he learned more by creating short films than with his formal studies. Beginning in the mid-1990s Ghobadi's short films received many foreign and domestic awards. Life in Fog (1995) became known as "the most famous documentary ever made in the history of Iranian cinema" and won several different International Awards. With the making of his full-length feature A Time for Drunken Horses (1999) (the first Kurdish full-feature film in the history of Iranian cinema), Ghobadi came to be recognized as the pioneering Kurdish director from Iran.
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PEDRO COSTA was born in Lisbon in 1959. A former rock guitarist, Costa entered the then nascent Lisbon Film School in 1977, existing on a steady diet of cinema classics and contemporary criticism that were soon channeled into his astounding debut film, The Blood. His later features, especially his Fontaínhas neighborhood trilogy, abandoned the hectic cineaste’s dazzle ofThe Blood for a nuanced, intimate, and rigorous aesthetic of observation and poetic interludes, marked by Vermeer-like domestic tableaux and a compassionate attention to his dispossessed, forgotten characters. Costa’s method, shooting over extended periods and working with non-actors “playing” fictional versions of themselves, adds an intimacy unprecedented in either fiction or documentary. “Few movies,” wrote Dennis Lim in the New York Times, “are as concretely rooted in physical reality or as profoundly attentive to their social context as Mr. Costa’s. Staking out a radical middle between documentary and fiction, he has invented a heroic and quite literal form of arte povera, a monumental cinema of humble means.”
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LONNIE VAN BRUMMELEN (Soest, 1969) studied art at Rietveld Academy and Rijks Academy in Amsterdam, and Philosophy at University of Amsterdam. Initially being trained as a painter, van Brummelen started working with film end of the 1990’s. In 2005, van Brummelen won the Dutch art price Prix de Rome for Lefkosia, the third chapter of Grossraum, a silent 35mm film sequel exploring the landscape at the borders of Europe. Together with Siebren de Haan, who also studied art at Rietveld Academy and Philosophy at University of Amsterdam, she has collaborated since 2001 on site-specific exhibition projects and essays. In collaboration, they recently produced a sculptural piece and a 16mm film, Monument of Sugar - how to use artistic means to elude trade barriers, which explores subsidized economy. Van Brummelen's works have recently been exhibited at Gwangju Biennale, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, TPW Gallery in Toronto (Images Festival), Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and Argos in Brussels. Siebren de Haan and Lonnie van Brummelen will participate in the 2008 biennials of Brussels and Shanghai.
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Allan Sekula is one of the most thoughtful historians, critics, and practitioners of photography working today. For more than three decades his images and writings have shifted the terms on which the medium is understood and has influenced a generation of artists and scholars. Whether articulating a semiotics of the photograph in his classic study Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973–1983 (1984) or investigating maritime space in the books and exhibitions comprising Fish Story (2002), Sekula is always in motion. His extensive travels to many of the world’s seaports are matched only by his enlightening journeys across history, politics, and aesthetics that, through their consummate intelligence, transform and connect domains usually considered separate.
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ALISON KOBAYASHI studied Art and Art History at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. In 2006 she was the recipient of The Bill Huffman Award for Excellence in Studio Practice. Her work has been screened at Justin M. Barnicke, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts, and Pleasure Dome. In February 2007, her 15-minute video installation Dan Carter was presented at the Blackwood Gallery in Mississauga as a series of characters inspired by a discarded answering machine tape. Her sarcastic and exaggerated performance reflects on the human condition by examining identity and exploring the imaginary. Kobayashi is captivated by found objects that contain traces of private experiences. She has collected over 70 answering machine cassettes donated to second-hand stores over the past two years. Her fascination lead to the creation of Dan Carter, named after the original owner of the answering machine tape.
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SYLVIA SCHEDELBAUER’S interest in filmmaking is fueled by the need to explore the personal and cultural effects of her half-German and half-Japanese heritage. At the crossroads of disparate cultures, she finds herself continually oscillating between different places of belonging while mediating inter-cultural relationships. Her films negotiate the space between broader historical narratives and personal, psychological realms mainly through poetic manipulations of found and archival footage. Her films have played at many festivals and venues around the world, including the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Shadow Festival in Amsterdam, and the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrueck where she was awarded the Best German Experimental Film Award for False Friends.
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ELLEN KURAS is a highly respected cinematographer who has won the Sundance Film Festival dramatic Excellence in Cinematography Award an unprecedented three times: for Tom Kalin’s Swoon in 1992, and for two of Rebecca Miller’s films, Angela in 1995 and Personal Velocity in 2002. She has also received two Emmy Award nominations: for A Century of Women and Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls. Other film credits include Blow, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind.
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THAVISOUK PHRASAVATH is extremely active in the Laotian-American community and has served as the primary liaison for Laotian residents in the New York City area, founding both gang-prevention and family crisis-intervention programs. His previous film work includes writing, directing, and editing such films as Summer School, Cuba Libre, Americanos, and Golden Venture.
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