Feminist filmmaker Victoria Schultz has trained her documentary lens on women and marginalized subjects in her politically charged films for over 40 years. She has traveled and documented around the world as an independent filmmaker and documentary staff producer for the United Nations. This evening will include a sneak peek of her latest personal documentary,  My Resistance, and her 2002 film To Be A Woman In Kosovo, where she encountered and interviewed women still experiencing age-old traditions of enslavement in Albanian villages following the fall of Serbian rule in 1999. We’ll also dedicate a portion of the evening to diving into Schultz’s photo slide archive for a game of Memory Roulette with photographer Samuel Budin.

photo credits: ©2018,victoriavschultz, all rights reserved

Victoria Schultz made her documentary TO BE A WOMAN IN KOSOVO three years after the war against Serbian rule ended in 1999. She had lived and worked in Kosovo for several years as a UN television producer. Her reports showed on CNN weekly. When she was about to leave Kosovo she filmed what she had learned, focusing on talking with Albanian women in villages. She wanted people to know that although the land had been liberated, women continued to be enslaved by age-old traditions and social customs, such as arranged marriages. Even though many women were constrained in ways that elsewhere in Europe would have been unimaginable, a number of young women who were courageously becoming independent.

A finished slide takes a moment from the past, compresses it, and makes it into something that can be carried around in a pocket. It can be expanded again and revisited, instantly, without any need for special paper or chemistry–just a light, a lens, and a wall. It holds a static image, but it activates memory, and the story that goes with it animates it. For tonight’s program, Victoria has provided a number of slides from her archive, from which a selection has been made. She does not know what images will be shown

Victoria Schultz grew up in Finland with the strong belief that, although different, women and men are equal. This feminist sensibility shaped the political documentaries she has produced during a forty year film career, both as an independent and a documentary staff producer at the United Nations.

Schultz is currently producing My Resistance, an independent feature film based on her own story from her late teens when she had a relationship with an older man. The events are staged but true. It was shot last summer at the Cormont Studios in France on 35mm film with an Arriflex camera from 1958. The teaser for the film illustrates the style and content of this movie.

When filming social issues, instead of letting the men in a position of power have the last word, she went out of her way to record the voices of women, usually in lower positions. She is now redistributing her films, so that history that keeps repeating itself will not be forgotten.

Samuel Lang Budin is a social documentary photographer living in Brooklyn and working primarily in the depressive realist mode. He presents his work in the form of narrated 35mm or digital slide lectures. He has exhibited at BAM and MoMA PS1 Print shop, has been published internationally in Hungry Eye Magazine and Barbed Magazine. He was a 2017 UnionDocs Collaborative Studio Fellow. and was photographer-in-residence for the 20th annual Windgate ITE Residency Program at the Center for Art in Wood in Philadelphia, PA that same year. He is a 2018 Puffin Foundation Grantee and is currently developing a project about ocean level rise and the psychology of climate change.