Doors 7:00p
Show 7:30p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

UnionDocs is thrilled to invite you to a night celebrating the incredible artists supported by our Fiscal Sponsorship program! Come through and tune into a special showcase of work with the following artists in attendance: Yehui Zhao, Nathan Fitch, Art Jones, Amanda Katz, Roseanne Malfucci, Jess Shane, Mitra Kaboli, Stephanie Kariuki, Danya Abt, Alexander Porter, Mike Crane,  and Brian Becker.

Their work spans rich conceptual terrains – from a Chinese family’s enduring bond with a long-forgotten village, an exploration of the US’s nuclear legacy in the Pacific, an experimental oral history about Mount Lebanon, a multi-year film portrait depicting the ever-changing commercial spaces of Brooklyn’s Nassau Avenue, and an experimental manifesto of an underground hardcore music community in New York City over the last decade!

This is a free community event. Come through and toast these pioneering artists and their budding projects!

Program

May the Soil be Everywhere by Yehui Zhao

In a remote Chinese village, a peasant family survived wars, revolution, and a devastating famine. Hardship eventually forced the family to scatter. Against the backdrop of rapid urbanization, the filmmaker sets out to unearth her family’s enduring bond with this long-forgotten village hidden deeply in the vast mountain range of Loess Plateau.

On Essential Lands by Nathan Fitch

On Essential Islands (working title) will be a feature length documentary that explores the US nuclear legacy in the Pacific, and issues of health equity, through the lens of members of the Marshallese community in Arkansas and abroad. Originally this community was told their islands in Micronesia were essential for the good of mankind for Operation Crossroads, a series of nuclear tests in Bikini Atoll and beyond commencing in 1946. In a highly choreographed scene photographed by an array of military cameras, the Marshallese begin the process of leaving their home islands for an exile that has now lasted 78 years. On Essential Islands will explore this topic.

Live to DIY by Art Jones

Live to DIY is an experimental manifesto of an underground hardcore music community in New York City over the last decade-plus.

All the Storefronts of Nassau Avenue by Amanda Katz

All the Storefronts of Nassau Avenue is a 60-minute nonfiction film that documents each of the 145 storefronts along a discrete commercial corridor in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, New York. Situated within a historically Polish-immigrant enclave, Nassau’s demographics have been changing since the early 2000s. Now, with increasing acceleration, mom and pop spaces quietly close, giving way to new businesses that cater to wealthier and younger clientele. It’s a street that will look completely different within a year. But if you haven’t been paying daily attention, you’d never know how.

The Sum of Our Parts by Roseanne Malfucci

Roseanne and Kelly are partners in love and business, revitalizing old clothes for shoppers of all genders. A new law offers Roseanne a time-limited chance for justice against her abusive childhood neighbor – at the same time Kelly’s gender affirmation surgeries begin. Colliding emotions tear their relationship at the seams. Can love mend the past?

The Hand Between Us by Jess Shane and Kristine White

The Hand Between Us is an expanded cinema performance about devalued care work, which uses the metaphor of touch to explore how the forces of capitalism become embodied in our interpersonal relationships.

Making Utopia by Mitra Kaboli

Making Utopia is an experimental oral history about Mount Lebanon in upstate New York. This project spans the history of the mountain from pre colonial times to the present. This documentary weaves the voices of 5 different people who have personal histories with the mountain.

The Last of Black Bedstuy by Stephanie Kariuki

The project is an audio experience featuring various audio stories from Black people who have grown up in or invested into Bed Stuy through the rapid change.

The Deep by Danya Abt

The Rockaway peninsula of NYC is the jumping-off point for The Deep, an experiential documentary about life at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Interconnected stories unfold around the shifting, ever-changing space between water and land, testing this boundary and raising questions about our elemental relationship to water.

Strata by Alexander Porter and Hannah Jayanti

Strata is an experiential installation set in an explorable virtual landscape. Immersed in a small 3D scanned region of the Badlands of South Dakota, visitors piece together a chorus of perspectives—from paleontology to foraging, wildlife management to nuclear arms, ethnobotany to cattle ranching. What seems like a small patch of barren land is revealed to be a vast and verdant terrain. Built from documentary footage, spatial sound, and immersive projection, Strata combines natural sciences, deep time, and personal anecdotes, inviting the complex narratives embedded in all lands to the surface.

Malls of America by Brian Becker

When an Albanian immigrant semi-accidentally purchases a Pennsylvania mall in 2023, he uproots his life and tries his hand at reviving it. Utilizing the aesthetics of 90s Hollywood mall movies and an incredible cache of teenage mallrat archival, Malls of America creates a thought-provoking and humorous dialogue between the mall’s storied past and its uncertain future.

Liberty by Mike Crane

A feature-length docufiction film about the search for a lost fortune buried in a quiet town in upstate New York by a convicted Albany drug runner and his billionaire brother who once represented Exxon Valdez in the 1989 oil spill class action lawsuit.

Bios

Yehui Zhao is a multi-media artist whose work explores migration, decolonization, heritage, and regeneration. As an immigrant born in China and living in the US, Yehui thinks of film as her third language. Her work takes root in the feminist legacies of the global south, drawing inspiration from revolutionary history, womanhood and daughtership, and the community’s undocumented collective memory. Yehui’s films have been featured at UnionDocs, DOC NYC, Prismatic Ground, Microscope Gallery, Asian American International Film Festival, Spain Moving Images Festival, Timeless Awards, Festival of Animated Objects, and other programs. Yehui has published paintings, prints, and writing at Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Review and Action, and Spectacle. She is a recipient of the IDA Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts grant, and the York Women in Film and Television Scholarship. Yehui holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and a Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University. Yehui is an Adjunct Professor at Marymount Manhattan College in the Communication and Media Arts Department, and she currently serves as the Art Director of 128 LIT, an award-winning international art and literature platform and publisher.

Nathan Fitch is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor at The New School University. A member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, Nathan’s award winning films have been published by The New York Times Op Docs,TIME, The New Yorker, PBS/America ReFramed, and NPR, to name a few. Nathan’s feature length directorial debut, Island Soldier, won a number of film festival awards, and was broadcast on PBS in 2018. Nathan holds an MFA from the Integrated Media Arts program at Hunter college, where he was the recipient of the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, and a Picture of the Year International award. Nathan’s most recently completed project, IN EXILE, has played extensively at film festivals both in the United States and abroad, winning the Reel South Award at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in 2023. IN EXILE was broadcast on PBS in April 2024.

Art Jones works with sculpture, time-based media, and installation. His object-based work concerns the inter-relationships between collective memory, history and power at specific locations. Jones’ work often utilizes mainstream media and popular culture as raw material to be sampled, remixed, and re-combined in order to examine implicit meanings or suggest new ones. Working with a particular genre or mode, the work seeks to explore, destroy or re-orient the conventions of how information is transmitted and received. Jones was raised and lives in the Bronx, New York.

Drawing from experimental filmmaking traditions and urban studies scholarship, Amanda Katz’s films observe daily life in New York City, its built environments and the tensions between its public and private spaces.

Katz’s films have screened at film festivals, museums, galleries and community spaces including the San Francisco International Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, DOCNYC, Antimatter, FLEX Festival, EDOCS (Ecuador), Athens International Film and Video Festival, Artists’ Television Access, UnionDocs, Sunview Luncheonette, Astoria Historical Society, and Microscope Gallery. Her work has been supported by institutions including the New York State Council on the Arts (2024 & 2013) and the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York.

Katz works professionally as a film editor, and has taught film production courses at Fordham University, Hunter College and Rutgers University. She holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College– City University of New York, and a BFA in Film & Television Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Roseanne Malfucci is a life-long advocate for equity and access, using personal stories to illuminate macro issues for marginalized people. She has written on grappling with queerness as a cis person with a trans partner and negotiating privilege in the workplace. In the noughties she balanced time tackling gender justice in an intimate violence non-profit and DJing to crowds of hundreds alongside every D-list queer celebrity in NYC. Her later roles include coaching tech execs and building the platform for the largest global LGBTQ rights organization online. Roseanne has presented at conferences like Lesbians Who Tech and Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Currently she keeps restorative justice circles with other survivors of child sexual abuse and is directing her first film. She lives in the Hudson Valley, where she constantly rearranges furniture with her partner Kelly and their chihuahua-cattle dog mix Wylie.

Jess Shane is an artist and documentarian from Toronto. She is the co-founder of Constellations and creator of the Radiotopia Presents podcast series, Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative. Jess teaches film and media studies at Hunter College and Pratt institute.

Kristine White is a multidisciplinary artist with a practice rooted in visual and installation arts, as well as live performance. Fascinated by the simplicity of light and shadow, much of Kristine’s work uses shadow puppetry, light boxes, and/or paper-cut shadow castings.

Mitra Kaboli is an award winning documentarian and artist working professionally in audio since 2012. Most recently, she was the host and producer of the critically acclaimed podcast, Welcome to Provincetown. Mitra is an adjunct professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and at Hunter College.

Danya Abt is a film director and editor living in Brooklyn, NY, where she keeps one foot planted in the documentary art world and one in more conventional documentary forms. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and a former Uniondocs Studio Collaborative fellow. Danya’s films have played at the Museum of Modern Art, the True/False and Camden Film Festivals, DOC NYC, and others. Her piece for BBC Reel, “The Cake That Survived WW2,” was selected for a Lovie Award “Honouring the best of the European Internet.” Her work as an editor includes documentaries and TV series for Vice, Showtime, PBS, and the History Channel. She is an active member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and the Alliance of Documentary Editors.

Stephanie Kariuki is an award-winning audio journalist and the founder of Earthtone Media. Stephanie is currently an Executive Producer at Conde Nast. She was previously an EP at Vice News and co-created the documentary unit at Stitcher. Stephanie has contributed to the pilot-making and green-lighting of dozens of award winning podcasts. She has also enjoyed teaching audio storytelling throughout her 10+ years in audio.

Brian Becker is a New York-based filmmaker who directed and produced Time Bomb Y2K (co-directed with Marley McDonald) which premiered on HBO in December 2023. The film’s lengthy festival run included True/False Film Festival, Hot Docs, Sheffield DocFest, IDFA, Camden International Film Festival, and DocNYC. Brian served as archival producer on Free Chol Soo Lee, MLK/FBI, Spaceship Earth, and The Fourth Estate, and as co-producer on Bobby Kennedy for President. He began his career on the Oscar-winning O.J.: Made in America. Brian is a 2022 Doc NYC 40 Under 40 recipient, Impact Partners Producing Fellow, Points North Fellow, and a FOCAL Jane Mercer Researcher of the Year award nominee. He is a board member of the guerrilla television archive organization Media Burn. Before turning to production, he worked as a mosquito ecologist.

Alexander Porter is an Emmy award-winning director and artist who creates documentary films and interactive works using computational photography and immersive tools. He founded a leading immersive studio and created widely-adopted software for volumetric video production. Porter adapts these emerging technologies to explore environmental justice, mental health, and ecology, creating grounded experiences that encourage connection rather than escape. He teaches his approach to spatial production and volumetric production at Johns Hopkins’ immersive film program.

Hannah Jayanti is a documentary filmmaker, organizer, and educator. Her work centers process-driven and formally expansive nonfiction as ethical and political practices. Through this lens, she circles around questions of landscape, listening, memory, time, and interdependence. Her work as an educator is focused on mentorship and low-cost media training through nonfiction art spaces and community centers. Her organizing work includes co-creating spaces that model mutual-aid practices while creating surprising futures.