Friday, November 14, 2025, 4:00 PM | Communications Building 150 (Studio C)
SHIMMERING (2025, 20 min) is an essay film poetically investigating creation, extraction, and second lives. Guided by the luminous figure of Hummingbird, SHIMMERING moves through place-based ways of knowing, tracing the entanglement between biological studies of hummingbirds and the rise of military drone technology. The film also features storytelling and insights from Mutsun Ohlone and Tribal Chair of Indian Canyon, Kanyon “Coyote Woman” Sayers-Roods. Through interwoven narratives of land, militarization, taxidermy, Native regalia, the filmmaker’s relationship with their trans identity—and with a hummingbird they name Anna–the filmmaker learns about Central California Native Land and culture. Blurring the lines between documentary, personal letter, and ecological study, the film invites viewers to consider new forms of kinship across species, systems, and histories. Gentle yet provocative, SHIMMERING offers a multispecies meditation on knowledge, power, and connection.
The screening is followed by a Q&A with Matte Hewitt (SocDoc ’25), joined by the Assistant Director of the Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History, Gizelle Hurtado, Associate Professor of Film & Digital Media, Selmin Kara, and Director of the UCSC American Indian Resource Center, Angel Riotutar.
| This event, which is free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by The Center for Documentary Arts and Research (CDAR) and the UCSC American Indian Resource Center (AIRC) |
Public Talk and Discussion, Tuesday, May 6, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM | Communications Building 130 (Studio A)
CDAR invites all to join us for a talk and discussion with documentary studies scholar Dr. Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa. This event is co-sponsored by CDAR and the Film & Digital Media Department and is open to the public.
Comparisons between humans and animals are foundational to the experimental branches of medicine and psychology. Yet converting the bafflingly complex bodies and behaviors of nonhuman animals into scientific models is not a straightforward process. Film has been an essential, yet largely overlooked, element within this process. Often treated as purely transparent scientific recordings, the films produced out of animal research are in fact deeply formalist works that tested what film could capture through the image of an animal—variously proposing that they could visualize pure thought, the processes of history and culture, and the influence of environment on an organism.
Drawing on his recent book, The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research Into Animal Life, Schultz-Figueroa will speak and present filmed examples of primate insight and creativity, Alfred Kinsey’s experiments into animal sexuality, lab rats made to live in a model of a dystopian future, animal recreations of Marxist theory, and more. This work uncovers a dynamic field of scientific looking, where the distinctions between nature and culture are inscribed and reinscribed into animal images, generating concepts that broadly shaped the politics of immigration, labor relations, educational practice, and gender identity, well beyond the walls of the lab.
| Dr. Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa is Associate Professor of Film and Media at Seattle University. His research focuses on the history of scientific filmmaking, nontheatrical film, and animal studies. Among other venues, his writing has been published in JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History and Journal of Environmental Media. His book The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life (University of California Press) was published in 2023. He is currently working on two other book projects, tentatively titled “Against Encounter: The Problem of Organicism in Animal Documentary,” and “Beastly Futures: Right WingAnimal Aesthetics in the 21st Century.” |
Public Talk and Discussion, Tuesday, April 8, 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM | Kresge Academic Building (Film & Digital Media Graduate Commons)
CDAR invites all to join us for a talk and discussion with documentary studies scholar Dr. Laliv Melamed. This event is co-sponsored by CDAR and the Film & Digital Media Department and is open to the public.
How can we explain decades of Israeli civil society’s consensus around a regime of oppression and impunity? What mediated attachments and disavowals mandate settler colonial violence? In this talk Laliv Melamed follows what she terms the private media complex to articulate the intimate channels through which state sovereignty is distributed, structured and internalized. A prerequisite to the current genocidal moment, Melamed analyzes the seamless paths of mundane violence in post-Oslo Jewish-Israeli public sphere.
| Dr. Laliv Melamed is a Professor of Digital Film Cultures at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her research focuses on media and forms of governance in Israel-Palestine. Melamed is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence, published by the University of California Press in 2023. Dr. Melamed serves on the editorial board of the Configurations of Film book series with Meason Press. With the break of what is known as the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 Melamed launched a series of vignettes in Social Text titled “Society for Sick Societies.” The essays set to dissect the malaise of contemporary societies through the lens of disability, disfunction and the quotidian, all traces of larger forces of global capitalism. In addition, she edited, together with Philipp Dominik Keidl, Vinzenz Hediger and Antonio Somaini, a collection of essays on media malleability during the pandemic, titled Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory (Meason Press, 2020). Additional collaborative works include “Screen Memory,” a special issue of International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society edited together with Lindsey Freeman and Benjamin Neinass (2013); a special issue of the journal World Records, together with Jason Fox, dedicated to documentary’s modes of organizing (2018); a collection of translated essays on documentary (in Hebrew), titled Truth or Dare, together with Ohad Landsman (Am Oved, 2021). Currently, she is working on a special issue on the intimacies of scale for the journal Feminist Media Histories together with Tess Takahashi and J.D. Schnepf, and a special dossier for the journal Discourse on operative images and their imaginaries together with Abe Geil. She has served on the governing council of Visible Evidence (2022-2024) and is on the journal World Records Advisory Board. In addition to her academic activities, Melamed has served as a senior programmer at DocAviv Film Festival and and has curated programs for The Left Wing film club in Tel Aviv and Oberhausen Film Festival. |
Public Screening and Discussion, Monday, February 10, 7:00 PM Communications 150 (Theater C)
CDAR is pleased to co-sponsor this Visiting Artist’s Series screening of the feature-length creative documentary exploring Chinese birth tourism in Southern California. How to Have an American Baby is “a kaleidoscopic voyage into the shadow economy catering to Chinese tourists who travel to the US to give birth for citizenship. Told through a series of intimately observed vignettes, the story of a hidden global economy emerges-depicting the fortunes and tragedies that befall the ordinary people caught in its web.” (PBS/POV premiere 12.11.2023)
Leslie Tai is a Chinese-American filmmaker hailing from San Francisco, California. After graduating from UCLA with a B.A. in Design|Media Arts, Leslie moved to China on a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship in 2006. There, she earned her filmmaking chops in the underground Chinese documentary world as a student of Wu Wenguang, a founding figure of the New Chinese Documentary Movement. From 2007 to 2011, she made and exhibited films as an artist at Wu’s Beijing-based studio, Caochangdi Workstation. Tai is the recipient of a 2019 Creative Capital Award and a graduate of the MFA Program in Documentary Film and Video at Stanford University. Her short films have premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, Visions du Réel (Nyon), International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and broadcast on The New York Times.
Following the screening, Leslie Tai will be present for a Q&A moderated by Film + Digital Media Professor Yiman Wang.
As part of the Visiting Artist’s series, this event also includes a Masterclass with Leslie Tai on Tuesday, February 11, 11:40 AM – 2:40 PM. This will be a deep-dive conversation about structuring nonfiction films and her own process of making this ten-year project. While the workshop will be part of the second-year MFA editing class, it is open, as usual, for others to join. Those interested must RSVP to ilusztig@ucsc.edu in order to join. Masterclass will be held in the SocDoc Lab Seminar Room, West Side Research Park.
Public Screening and Discussion, Tuesday, November 19, 7:00 PM Communications 150 (Theater C)
In her directorial debut, Mary Jirmanus Saba deals with a forgotten revolution, saving from oblivion bloodily suppressed strikes at Lebanese tobacco and chocolate factories. These events from the 1970s, which held the promise of a popular revolution and, with it, of women’s emancipation were erased from collective memory by the country’s civil wars. Rich in archival footage from Lebanon’s militant cinema tradition, the film reconstructs the spirit of that revolt, asking of the past how we might transform the present. FIPRESCI International Critics Prize Winner at the 2017 Berlinale Forum. – Malgorzata Sadowska.
Mary Jirmanus Saba is a geographer who uses film and other media to explore labor movement histories, connections among unstable landscapes and legacies of colonialism in the Arab World, Latin America and Turtle Island and the everpresent resilience of everyday life. Her debut feature film A Feeling Greater Than Love (2017) premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival Forum where it received the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize, making several “Best of 2017” lists. From 2006-2008, she produced the community broadcast television program, Via Comunidad with art collective Vientos del Sur in Ibarra, Ecuador. An avid producer of anonymous and collective agitprop, her latest film Mahdi Amel in Gaza (2024) is screening in community spaces, protest sites, and sometimes festivals. Saba is a member of UAW Labor for Palestine, the People’s CDC and a UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Cruz in Film and Digital Media.
Following the screening, Mary Jirumanus Saba will be present for a Q&A moderated by Professor Peter Limbrick, author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema (2020).
Preceded by Workshop Monday, November 18, 4-7 PM, Communications 139
***RSVP to ilusztig@ucsc.edu to join***
In this workshop, filmmaker and scholar Mary Jirmanus Saba will discuss her recent work on films made in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, exploring the emergence of the “character driven resilience documentary.” Using her own work as an example, Saba will facilitate a discussion about the political economy of arts funding and social movements.
event co-sponsored by Center for the Middle East and North America and Film & Digital Media Department
By request, please wear a mask to both of these events.
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Screening at 6:30 PM UCSC Communications 150 (Theater C) FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
USA / 2023 / 93 minutes
Built by the US government to house the Hanford nuclear site workers who manufactured weapons-grade plutonium for the Manhattan Project, Richland, Washington is proud of its heritage as a nuclear company town and proud of the atomic bomb it helped create. RICHLAND offers a prismatic, placemaking portrait of a community staking its identity and future on its nuclear origin story, presenting a timely examination of the habits of thought that normalize the extraordinary violence of the past. Moving between archival past and observational present, and across encounters with nuclear workers, community members, archeologists, local tribes, and a Japanese granddaughter of atomic bomb survivors, the film blooms into an expansive and lyrical meditation on home, safety, whiteness, land, and deep time.
Following the screening, IRENE LUSZTIG will be present for a Q&A moderated by Jennifer Horne.
event co-sponsored by SCIENCE & JUSTICE RESEARCH CENTER
IRENE LUSZTIG
IRENE LUSZTIG (DIRECTOR / PRODUCER / EDITOR) is a feminist filmmaker, archival researcher, educator, and amateur seamstress. She works in a space of delicate mediation between people, their pasts, and the present- tense spaces and landscapes where unresolved histories bloom and erupt. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present, inviting viewers to contemplate questions of politics, ideology, and the complex ways that personal, collective, and national memory are entangled. Born in England and raised in Boston, Irene is a first generation American whose parents fled Ceaucescu’s Romania as political asylum-seekers. Her work, including three previous feature length films, has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, BFI London Film Festival, Melbourne Film Festival, DocLisboa, and RIDM Montréal. She has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2021), the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fulbright, two MacDowell fellowships, the Flaherty Film Seminar, and the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship. She previously directed the Center for Documentary Arts & Research and teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz, where she is Professor of Film and Digital Media and Director of Graduate Studies for the Social Documentation Program.
Monday, October 23, 2023, 7:30 PM, UCSC Communications 150 (Theater C)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
USA / 2022 / 83 minutes
During his day job as a Spanish criminal interpreter in a small town in California, filmmaker Rodrigo
Reyes met a young man named Sansón, an undocumented Mexican immigrant sentenced
to life in prison without parole. Sansón and Reyes worked together for over a decade, using hundreds of
letters as inspiration for recreations of Sansón’s childhood—featuring members of Sansón’s own family.
The result is a vibrant portrait of a friendship navigating immigration and the depths of the criminal
justice system, pushing the boundaries of cinematic imagination to rescue a young migrant’s story
from oblivion.
Rodrigo Reyes will be present for a Q&A following the screening.
event co-sponsored by Porter College
THE ART OF NONFICTION: CAPTURING ESSENTIAL REALITIES (A WORKSHOP WITH RODRIGO REYES)
Tuesday, October 24, 9:50-12:50 PM / Communications 130 (Theater C)
Please join us for a workshop with filmmaker Rodrigo Reyes. Director Rodrigo Reyes will discuss his process around hybrid filmmaking, working with actors, recreations, and real people to tell urgent documentary stories. RSVP for this event by emailing Professor Irene Lusztig at ilusztig@ucsc.edu.
RODRIGO REYES
Mexican director RodrigoReyes (Mexico City, 1983), makes films
deeply grounded in his identity as an immigrant artist, crafting a
poetic gaze from the margins, using striking imagery to portray the
contradictory nature of our shared world, while revealing the
potential for transformative change. He has received the support
of The Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE), Sundance and Tribeca
Institutes, while his films have screened on PBS and Netflix. His film
“499,” won Best Cinematography at Tribeca and the Special Jury
Award at Hot Docs. Rodrigo is a recipient of the prestigious
Guggenheim and Creative Capital Awards, as well as the Rainin
Fellowship, the SF Indie Vanguard Award and the Eureka Fellowship.
His latest film, “Sansón and Me,” won the Best Film Award at Sheffield DocFest, and is the opening film for the 2023 season premiere for the celebrated documentary series Independent Lens, on PBS.
Tuesday November 15, 2022, 7:30 PM
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC [captioned accessible screening] *** VENUE CHANGE: SCREENING WILL BE HELD OFF-CAMPUS AT INDEXICAL***
Tannery Arts Center 1050 River St. #119 Santa Cruz, CA 95060
After the inconclusive death of his young niece, filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax returns to his rural Michigan hometown, preparing to make a film about a broken criminal justice system. Instead, he pivots to excavate the depths of generational addiction, Christian fervor, and trans embodiment. Lyrically assembled images, decades of home movies, and ethereal narration form an idiosyncratic and poetic undertow that guide a viewer through lifetimes and relationships. Like the relentless Michigan seasons, the meaning of family shifts, as Madsen, his sister, and his parents strive tirelessly to accept each other. Poised to incite more internal searching than provide clear statements or easy answers, NORTH BY CURRENT is a visual rumination on the understated relationships between mothers and children, truths and myths, losses and gains.
Angelo MadsenMinax will be in conversation with Film + Digital Media PhD student and curator Bradford Nordeen following the screening.
WORKING FROM THE INSIDE OUT (WORKSHOP) Wednesday November 16, 2:40-5:40, RSVP to ilusztig@ucsc.edu to join *** off campus location will be provided to participants ***
From personal experience navigating mainstream outlets, Angelo Madsen Minax discusses his process for making unconventional films from the margins while interfacing with the documentary industrial complex.
Angelo Madsen Minax is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire. Madsen’s works have shown at Berlinale, Tribeca Film Festival, BAM CinemaFest, Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, Anthology Film Archives, British Film Institute, and dozens of LGBT film festivals around the world. He is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Sundance Film Institute, BAVC Media, New York State Council on the Arts, the Warhol Foundation, LEF Foundation, and has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yaddo, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. His film, “North By Current” (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. A New York Times Critics Pick, “North By Current” has been called “A beautiful, complex wonder of a film,” by Rolling Stone and “A titanic work” by Criterion. Madsen is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont, a Queer|Art Mentor, and a current Guggenheim Fellow.
Bradford Nordeen is a writer, curator and the founder of Dirty Looks Inc. He has written for Frieze, Art in America, Afterimage, and Butt Magazine, and was a 2018 recipient of the Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. He was Platinum Programmer for Outfest Los Angeles (2013-2016), and guest curator for the inaugural season of public programs at The Broad Museum. He has curated exhibitions and screenings at ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, Film Society at Lincoln Center, Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, SFMoMA, and The Hammer Museum. His publications include Because Horror (with Johnny Ray Huston), Check Your Vernacular, Dirty Looks at MoMA, Fever Pitch, and the Dirty Looks Volume series (editor). Nordeen holds a BFA from CalArts and an MA in Contemporary Cinema Cultures from King’s College London. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Tuesday January 31, 2023, 7:00 PM, UCSC Communications 150 (Studio C)
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
USA / 2020 / 100 minutes
After nearly a decade exploring different facets of the African diaspora — and his own place within it — Ephraim Asili makes his feature-length debut with The Inheritance, an astonishing ensemble work set almost entirely within a West Philadelphia house where a community of young, Black artists and activists form a collective. A scripted drama of characters attempting to work towards political consensus — based partly on Asili’s own experiences in a Black liberationist group — weaves with a documentary recollection of the Philadelphia liberation group MOVE, the victim of a notorious police bombing in 1985. Ceaselessly finding commonalties between politics, humor, and philosophy, with Black authors and radicals at its edges, The Inheritance is a remarkable film about the world as we know it.
Ephraim Asili will be in conversation with film scholar Althea Wasow following the screening
event co-sponsored by Porter College
STRANGE MATH (WORKSHOP WITH EPHRAIM ASILI)
Wednesday February 1, 3-6 PM / Communications 113 (Studio D)
Artist and Filmmaker Ephraim Asili will discuss his trajectory as an artist along with a presentation of short films including his most recent work, Strange Math, a work commissioned by Louis Vuitton.
Ephraim Asili is an African American artist, filmmaker, DJ, and traveler whose work focuses on the African diaspora as a cultural force. His childhood and adolescence were imbued with hip-hop music, Hollywood movies, and television. Often inspired by his day-to-day wanderings, Asili creates art that situates itself as a series of meditations of the everyday. He received his BA in film and media arts from Temple University and his MFA in film and interdisciplinary art at Bard College. Asili is currently the director of the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College, where he is also an associate professor teaching film production and film studies.
Asili’s films have screened in festivals and venues all over the world, including the New York Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, the Berlinale, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Asili’s feature debut, The Inheritance, premiered at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. The Inheritance was recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art for its permanent collection and is currently in distribution with Grasshopper Films. In 2020, Asili was named as one of “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker magazine. In 2021, Asili was a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recipient. Most recently, Asili directed the short film, Strange Math, and a live fashion show at the Louvre for Louis Vuitton.
Althea Wasow is President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at UC Santa Cruz. Her current book project, “Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives,” analyzes the complicity and resistance between police power and motion pictures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her research interests include silent film and precinematic visual culture, black studies, comparative ethnic studies, and critical carceral studies. She obtained her PhD in Film & Media with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley and her MFA at Columbia University.
Monday April 17, 2023, 7:30 PM, UCSC Communications 150 (Studio C)
[OPEN TO THE UCSC COMMUNITY] USA / 2023 / 91 minutes
open captions
From 2011 to 2013, a string of puzzling burglaries took place in Southern California: tubas went missing from a dozen high schools. Alison O’Daniel’s genre-defying debut was sparked by these events. Imagining what a band might sound like stripped of its deepest sound, the visual artist and filmmaker asks what it means to listen. The film winds through storylines blending documentary, narrative, and reenactment—one centered on a Deaf drummer playing a fictionalized version of herself, another following the school communities dealing with the theft—with ingenious interpretations of history-making concerts, from John Cage’s 4’33’ to the last punk show at San Francisco’s Deaf Club, interspersed throughout. A story told through sound and its absence, The Tuba Thieves embraces the possibility of miscomprehension and delay in a meditation on access and loss. Featuring a cinematic experience of Los Angeles rarely seen—or heard—before, and incorporating open captions as a rich narrative space, O’Daniel’s work is profound in its prompt for (hearing) audiences to tune in differently.
Alison O’Daniel will be in conversation with Film + Digital Media Associate Professor Anna Friz following the screening
event co-sponsored by Porter College
LISTENING AS FILMMAKING
[WORKSHOP WITH ALISON O’DANIEL]
Tuesday April 18, 1:30 – 4:30 PM / Communications 139
This workshop will propose ways that complex embodiment and variations in audiences’ reception of film can complicate and complete production. Foregrounded in visual and musical scores, closed and open captions, soundtracks, and storytelling ‘mistakes’ as fluid modes of perception or as assistive listening devices, we will consider the poetic possibility within gaps of information and mis-communication as models for creating. / RSVP to cdar@ucsc.edu if you would like to attend
Alison O’Daniel is a d/Deaf visual artist and filmmaker who builds a visual, aural, and haptic vocabulary that reveals (or proposes) a politics of sound that exceeds the auditory. O’Daniel’s film ‘The Tuba Thieves’ had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and is currently on the film festival circuit. O’Daniel is a United States Artist 2022 Disability Futures Fellow and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Film/Video. She is represented by Commonwealth and Council in Los Angeles and is an Assistant Professor of Film at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
She has received grants from Ford Foundation; Sundance; Creative Capital; Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation; and others. She has attended residencies at the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio Program; Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
She has exhibited in galleries and museums internationally, including Kunsthalle Osnabrück, Osnabrück, Germany; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Centro Centro, Madrid, Spain; Renaissance Society, Chicago; Art in General, New York; Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle, Brest, France; Tallinn Art Hall, Estonia; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha.
