The 59th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar will take place upstate again at Colgate University June 15-21.

History is What’s Happening, programmed by Pablo de Ocampo, will examine both the frame and subject of history in cinema to understand how the social and political conditions of the past are inextricably linked to the present. Featuring film and video works which employ radical gestures in both form and political position, the Seminar will draw upon strategies of performance, collective production, re-speaking, and archival research to consider the ever-shifting contexts and conditions in which images from the past are watched and repurposed. Here, documentary listens as much as it tells; it produces an engaged space which hopes to create the conditions for communication. Questioning the effect of nostalgia in relationship to archives of images, the works in this program put forth the proposition that the function of history in cinema is not about remembering or recording, but

about its potential for action. Seminar guests include Deborah Stratman, The Otolith Group, Wendelien van Oldenborgh and Sarah Maldoror.

Join us for this final regular weekend screening of the season before we break until mid-September, which will present a taste of the Seminar. We will showcase additional rare and in-progress work from presenting artists who will be in-person. Line up to be announced after the Seminar is underway.

Pablo de Ocampo is a curator based in Toronto where he is the Artistic Director of The Images Festival. In addition to the ten-day annual festival he oversees, he has worked with the festival to curate a number of special screenings and projects which have been presented at EX-iS Festival in Seoul, Korea; Experimenta Festival in Bangalore, India; the British Film Institute in London, England; the Festival de Nouveau Cinema in Montréal, Quebec; Arsenal Institute of Film and Video in Berlin, Germany, Lightcone in Paris, France; Anthology Film Archives in New York; and SAW Video in Ottawa, Ontario. As an Independent curator he has worked with Gallery TPW to present of survey of photographic and video works by the Delhi-based, Pakistani artist Bani Abidi as well as an ongoing series of film/video-based projects for the Time Based Arts Festival/Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Prior to his post at Images, Pablo was a co-founder and collective member of Portland’s Cinema Project.

The Flaherty/International Film Seminars, Inc. (IFS) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the proposition that independent media can illuminate the human spirit. Its mission is to foster exploration, dialogue, and introspection about the art and craft of all forms of the moving image. IFS was chartered in the state of Vermont but is based in New York City. It was established in 1960 to present the annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar which provides media makers, users, teachers, and students an unparalleled opportunity to confront the core of the creative process, reaffirm the freedom of the independent artist to explore beyond known limits, and renew the challenge to discover, reveal, and illuminate the ways of life of peoples and cultures throughout the world.