UnionDocs is excited to present a showcase of female-directed short films produced by Field of Vision, a filmmaker-driven documentary unit that commissions and creates original short-form nonfiction films about developing and ongoing stories around the globe.

We are also very happy to welcome directors Farihah Zaman,  Jessica Bruder, and Sierra Pettengill back to UnionDocs for a post-screening discussion of their work.

For nearly a decade, Amazon has recruited thousands of RVers for a seasonal labor unit called CamperForce. Adapted from the book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

See how alt-right icon Steve Bannon’s years as a documentary filmmaker catapulted him to Breitbart News and the Trump White House.

Using over 100 years of archival footage, director Sierra Pettengill explores the history of the largest Confederate monument, Georgia’s Stone Mountain.

A unique portrait of CAIR – the Council on American-Islamic Relations – in the first days of the Trump administration as the civil rights organization responds to the new president’s agenda for Muslim-Americans.

In 2015, the state of Alabama closed 31 DMVs across the state. Many of these closures occurred in the Black Belt, a predominantly African-American region, directly impacting voter enfranchisement in a state that requires photo IDs at the polls.

In 2016, transgender teen Gavin Grimm sued his local school board after its members refused to let him use the bathroom of his choice. He was ready to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court—and then the election happened

Farihah Zaman is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, critic, and programmer who is currently the Production Manager for Field of Vision. She began working in the industry as the Acquisitions Manager for indie film distribution company Magnolia Pictures in 2006. Her first feature film is the award-winning documentary Remote Area Medical, followed by the short Kombit (2014 Sundance Film Festival) and second feature This Time Next Year (2014 Tribeca Film Festival). She currently writes for Reverse Shot, Huffington Post, Film Comment, and The A.V. Club, among others.

Jessica Bruder is a journalist who reports on subcultures and economic justice. For her recent book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (W.W. Norton & Co.), she spent months living in a camper van, documenting itinerant Americans who gave up traditional housing and hit the road full time, enabling them to travel from job to job and carve out a place for themselves in our precarious economy. The project spanned three years and more than 15,000 miles of driving—from coast to coast and from Mexico to the Canadian border.

Jessica has been teaching at Columbia Journalism School since 2008. She has written for publications including Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, WIRED, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, O: The Oprah Magazine, Inc. Magazine, Reuters and CNNMoney.com, along with The Oregonian and The New York Observer — where she worked as a staff writer — and Fortune Small Business magazine, where she was a senior editor. Her long-form stories have won a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism and a Deadline Club Award. This spring, she will be a resident fellow at Yaddo.

Sierra Pettengill is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and archivist. Town Hall, her feature-length documentary, broadcast nationally on PBS in 2014. She is the producer of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Cutie and the Boxer, which also won the directing award at the Sundance Film Festival 2013 and a 2015 News and Doc Emmy. Most recently, she was the archivist on Jim Jarmusch’s Gimme Danger (Cannes ’16), Mike Mills’ 20th Century Women (New York Film Festival ’16), and Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine (Sundance ’16) amongst many others. Most recently she co-directed and produced the all-archival documentary The Reagan Show (Tribeca Film Festival ’16).