2017 will be the second year of the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio to focus on the new multi-platform production JUST TO GET BY. This project highlights the creative solutions and difficult choices that individuals in NYC make everyday to survive the city, at a time when 50% of the population lives near or below the federal poverty level. The project brings attention to the difficult choices and resourceful solutions this underrepresented population must make in order to survive the city today. To access such stories, images, and sounds, fellows will pursue partnerships with local, low-income artists and craftspeople who have—so far—been unable to reach privileged networks of creation and distribution, often called ‘outsider artists.’
Through JUST TO GET BY, we are developing ways that the authorship of documentary can be shared with the subjects at the same time that fellows are encouraged to develop work across perceived boundaries of social class, age and race. Projects are not intended to be “outsider artist” biographies or portraits, rather each short documentary project produced will offer a different answer on what it takes “just to get by” and a different attempt to break with the conventions of documentary and address the problematics of representing people under the pressures of poverty.
2016 Just To Get By Short Films Suite Produced by UnionDocs Collaborative Fellows
Jon Appel, Beata Calińska, Jenny Catherall, Ann Chen, Sarah Jacobson, Carly Anne Kenneally, Emile Klein, James Nguyen, Patrick Offenheiser, Angel Urrutia, Livia Vonaesch & Tracie Williams
