UCSC Center for Documentary Arts and Research (CDAR)

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 Rodrigo Reyes (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 Madsen Minax 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.

Friday May 7, 2021, 12 PM – 1:30 PM PDT, virtual event
REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT

On February 7, 2020, weeks before Covid-19 disrupted our lives, a group of activists and academics gathered to discuss the growing movement to cancel student debt and transform higher education. You Are Not a Loan documents a unique gathering that brought together student debtors, organizers, and esteemed scholars to discuss the perils and possibilities of the moment. The dialogue that ensued is both deeply personal and profoundly philosophical, historically grounded and engagingly hypothetical. What would free college—meaning free as in cost and aimed at liberation—be like? How have racism and capitalism sabotaged public education as we know it? And what will be required to bring a radically different system into being? Featuring leaders of the country’s first student debt strike and some of the most revered thinkers of our day (including Wendy Brown and Barbra Ransby, Stephanie Kelton, and others) the film offers an intimate view of the ongoing and urgent grassroots struggle to democratize education—a topic that has only become more timely since it was shot. As a result of the pandemic, colleges across the country are facing budget shortfalls and student debt cancelation has become a mainstream issue. YOU ARE NOT A LOAN puts the current debates in a deeper context, and points toward the utopian horizon we will have to reach toward if we want to truly solve the current crisis.

Astra Taylor and Erick Stoll will be in conversation about their activist and filmmaking work, joined by Film and Digital Media PhD student Yulia Gilich and Latin American and Latino Studies Professor Jessica Taft. The discussion event will consider political filmmaking, as well as larger (and local) questions around student debt, student workers, and the state of higher education right now.

Please view YOU ARE NOT A LOAN on The Intercept website prior to attending this discussion event.

Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director, most recently, of What Is Democracy? and the author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone and the American Book Award winning The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. She is co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union for debtors, and contributed the foreword to the group’s new book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition. Her latest book is Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions.

Erick Stoll is a non-fiction filmmaker and cinematographer in Cincinnati, Ohio. Working across diverse documentary forms, their work has focused on gentrification, gendered labor, and left and right populist movements. Erick co-directed the feature documentary América, which was nominated for Peabody and Independent Spirit awards, and was cinematographer on the Academy Award winning documentary American Factory, among others.

Yulia Gilich is a scholar, media artist, and community organizer. They received their MFA in Media Studies from SUNY Buffalo and are a PhD candidate in the department of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. Their work is primarily concerned with the use of settler colonization in larger imperial projects, particularly those of the United States and Israel.

Jessica Taft is a Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on youth activism and the ways that girls, children, and youth participate in social movements in the Americas. Building on the contributions of Latin American social movements and critical approaches to childhood, her work challenges the naturalization of adults’ power over children and furthers our understanding of how young people can (and should) be included in democratic social and political life. She is the author of Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas and The Kids Are in Charge: Activism and Power in Peru’s Movement of Working Children, as well as numerous articles on youth movements.

Friday April 24, 11 AM – 1 PM
Details will be provided to registered participants

During the workshop, we will discuss the US colony of Puerto Rico as a fertile case study for unpacking a multitude of intersecting socio-political forces–disaster capitalism, colonialism, austerity, climate change, and popular protest–that are directly relevant to the current pandemic. How does climate change accelerate pre-existing issues of colonialism and economic justice, and how can frontline communities affected by disaster be approached as crisis experts instead of victims? How do we make art during times of disaster, and what possibilities does it offer for political organizing and collectivity? In this moment when the future is so illegible, how do we imagine and fight for the worlds we want?

Cecilia Aldarondo is a documentary director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora who makes films at the intersection of poetics and politics. Her work has been supported by ITVS, HBO, A&E, the Sundance Institute, Cinereach, Firelight Media, Field of Vision, IFP, the Jerome Foundation, and many others. Her debut documentary Memories of a Penitent Heart had its World Premiere at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on POV in 2017. She is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2017 Women at Sundance Fellow, two-time MacDowell Colony Fellow, and recipient of a 2019 Bogliasco Foundation Residency. In 2019 she was named to DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 list and is one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film for 2015. She teaches at Williams College.

Lale Namerrow Pastor is a woman and transfeminist person. Born in Rió Piedras and raised in Puerto Nuevo to a Dominican mother and absent father, they completed undergraduate studies in Photography and Art History at the University of Puerto and continued academic studies in Film Production and Direction at the New York Film Academy in New York City. Lale currently resides in Puerto Rico, where they are a distinguished musical curator in the subversive queer/cuir scene, archival researcher, and audio visual producer. Among so much, they are Caribbean, activist, videographer, editor, advisor, partner, marica, bucha, troublemaker, and possibly everything that fits between those labels.

co-sponsored by Porter College and UCSC Film + Digital Media Department

Monday, February 24, 2020, 7 PM | Communications 150 (Studio C)
A Moon for My Father (US Premiere)
screening and discussion with MANIA AKBARI in person
*** preceded by brief teach-in about the UCSC COLA STRIKE***

Mania Akbari collaborates with British sculptor Douglas White to coin a tender fusion of language, where a meeting of cinema and sculpture investigates the processes of physical and psychological destruction and renewal. Begun a matter of weeks after first meeting, the film charts a deepening artistic and personal relationship exploring the nature of skin, family, death, water, desire and, throughout, a powerful will to form. Akbari looks into the connection between her body and the political history of Iran, investigating the relationship between her own physical traumas and the collective political memory of her birthplace. As she undergoes surgeries on a body decimated by cancer, remembrance and reconstruction provide a framework for investigating how bodies are traumatized, censored and politicized, and yet ultimately remain a site of possibility. We are lucky to be the first US venue to host Mania Akbari and to present her new film.

“A Moon for my Father is a deeply intimate, personal and moving work from Mania Akbari (whose movies have often been meditations on beauty and body image), a form of digressive-poetic cinema, connecting images and ideas in a dream-associative logic. Calmly, almost miraculously, it avoids the tones of tension or trauma or ostentatiously courageous humor.” – The Guardian

co-sponsored by Porter College, Film + Digital Media, The Humanities Institute’s Body, (Anti)Narrative, and Corporeal Creative Practices Research Cluster, and The UCSC Center for the Middle East and North Africa

Screening is free and open to the public.

POST-REALISM SEMINAR #19: BODY POLITICS

Tuesday, February 25, 2020 4:30-7:30 PM
***Relocated to HubX space, 312 Lincoln St, Santa Cruz***

Our bodies live in their current contexts with their historic, scientific, genetic and social memories. Yet how do these memories take shape today in interactions with machines? Machines that are manufactured by our bodies and machines that simultaneously manufacture our bodies as well? When the human organs become centralized in confrontation with various situations, new political movements arise. The deepest part of humans’ bodies is the skin and the furthest part, the geopolitical borders. Contemporary bodies carry the deepest and the furthest at the same time. They socialize with their internal geopolitical borders.

MANIA AKBARI (b. Tehran, 1974) is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. Her provocative, revolutionary and radical films were recently the subject of retrospectives at the BFI, London (2013), the DFI, Denmark (2014), Oldenburg International Film Festival, Germany (2014), Cyprus Film Festival (2014) and Nottingham Contemporary UK (2018). Her films have screened at festivals around the world and have received numerous awards including German Independence Honorary Award, Oldenberg (2014), Best Film, Digital Section, Venice Film Festival (2004), Nantes Special Public Award Best Film (2007) and Best Director and Best film at Kerala Film Festival (2007), Best Film and Best Actress, Barcelona Film Festival (2007). Akbari was exiled from Iran and currently lives and works in London, a theme addressed in ‘Life May Be’ (2014), co-directed with Mark Cousins. This film was released at Karlovy Vary Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary at Edinburgh International Film Festival (2014) and Asia Pacific Film Festival (2014). Akbari’s latest film ‘A Moon For My Father’, made in collaboration with British artist Douglas White, premiered at CPH:DOX where it won the NEW:VISION Award 2019. The film also received a FIPRESCI International Critics Award at the Flying Broom Festival, Ankara. She is currently working on a new project ‘Libido’ with her son Amin Maher.

Wednesday, January 15, 2020, 7 PM |Communications 150 (Studio C)
The American Sector
PREVIEW SCREENING with COURTNEY STEPHENS

The American Sector (2020, 67 min., co-directed with Pacho Velez) is a timely feature documentary that documents large panels of the Berlin Wall (30 years after its fall) around America, visiting sites where remnants have been installed as monuments — but to what? The film traverses the country, stopping at over seventy-five locations that have the Wall on display, such as the CIA, the college in Missouri where Churchill gave the “iron curtain” speech, and a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! across from the Alamo. The film captures the ways that Americans have transformed this decommissioned East German border wall into a decidedly American monument, touching on deeper ideas of bondage and freedom, and shows how citizens work, in their own small ways, to push the country towards embodying its own ideals. The American Sector will have its international premiere screening in February 2020 and is being shown as a preview / work-in-progress screening.

Screening is free and open to the public

COURTNEY STEPHENS is a filmmaker and programmer based in Los Angeles. Her non-fiction and experimental films have appeared at NYFF, SXSW, Hong Kong IFF, Dhaka IFF, Mumbai IFF, San Francisco IFF, The Exploratorium, DokuFest, Onion City, Orphans Film Symposium, Crossroads, and elsewhere. She co-founded the Highland Park microcinema Veggie Cloud, and has curated programs at institutions including the Museum of the Moving Image, the J Paul Getty Museum, Union Docs, and Flaherty NYC. She attended the American Film Institute, and has received fellowships to Yaddo and MacDowell, a Fulbright scholarship to India, and lectured on subjects related to female travel and film at the Royal Geographical Society and elsewhere.

More at https://courtneystephens.net/

Monday May 20, 2019 7 PM Communications 150 (Studio C)
CAMERAPERSON with filmmaker KIRSTEN JOHNSON
co-sponsored by Porter College and Film + Digital Media

Documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson (Citizenfour, Fahrenheit 9/11) has spent decades traveling the world, amassing a treasure trove of footage that she has assembled into an insightful, visually bold memoir about the power of images.

A boxing match in Brooklyn; life in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina; the daily routine of a Nigerian midwife; an intimate family moment at home: these scenes and others are woven into Cameraperson, a tapestry of footage collected over the twenty-five-year career of documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson.

Through a series of episodic juxtapositions, Johnson explores the relationships between image makers and their subjects, the tension between the objectivity and intervention of the camera, and the complex interaction of unfiltered reality and crafted narrative. A hybrid work that combines documentary, autobiography, and ethical inquiry, Cameraperson is both a moving glimpse into one filmmaker’s personal journey and a thoughtful examination of what it means to train a camera on the world.

Screening is open to the public and accessible to the Deaf and hard-of-hearing on request.

POST-REALISM SEMINAR #17
Navigating the Visible and Invisible of Identities and Systems When Filming
Monday May 20, 2019 2:30-5 PM Communications 113 (Studio D)

Camerawork is a practice that engages the body, the intellect, aesthetics, the instincts and the heart. I think of the moving images I create as relationships that get made in a vivid present moment but move forward endlessly into an unknown future. In this dynamic between those who film and those who are filmed, identities, context and power matter, yet are often unknowable and invisible. I assume that my visual searching is profoundly subjective, in spite of the observational and investigative work I do. My actions as I film and the images that emerge are full of blindspots, misapprehensions, and projections. This workshop opens up the questions of how to enjoy navigating the challenges of this multi-level work with rigor, kindness and aspiration.

KIRSTEN JOHNSON is currently grappling with her father’s dementia and the state of the planet by making a comedy about death. Her film Cameraperson premiered at Sundance 2016, was short-listed for an Academy Award, won the National Board of Review “Freedom of Expression” prize, and was named one of the ‘Top Ten Films of 2016’ by The Washington Post and The New York Times. Her short film, The Above premiered at the 2015 New York Film Festival and was nominated for the IDA Best Short of 2016. Kirsten’s camerawork has appeared in the Academy Award-winning Citizenfour, Academy Award-nominated The Invisible War, Tribeca Documentary winner, Pray The Devil Back To Hell, and Cannes winner Farenheit 9/11. She is curious about the future of image literacy, the nature of subjectivity, and believes in cinema.