A tradition now 10 years running, UnionDocs will host Shorts After the Flaherty on Saturday, July 23rd at 8pm. Seminar programmers Kevin Jerome Everson and Greg de Cuir Jr  will be in attendance and Everson will treat us with a premiere of a short work. Guests of the Flaherty, Kitso Lynn Lelliot, an artist working in performance installation and film from South Africa and Želimir Žilnik, a major figure of the Yugoslav Black Wave film movement, will share their films along side three short films chosen in response to this year’s theme The Necessary Image. These films chosen in response are selected by three young, exciting and emerging curators and film programmers in attendance at this year’s Seminar, Victor Guimaraes, Matthew Barrington, and 2018 Fall Flaherty NYC programmer Dessane Lopez Cassel. Toast Flaherty 2018 with one final screening and hurrah! We’ll have a brief post-screening discussion with artists and programmers in attendance and a reception to follow in UnionDocs backyard garden.

Tickets will be available at the door on a first-come first-served basis. Doors open at 7:30PM.

Special performance from Synthhumpers (Joshua Solondz & Jim Supanick plus some guest performers) to follow!

With a sense of place and historical research, Kevin Jerome Everson films combine scripted and documentary moments with rich elements of formalism. The subject matter is the gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working class African Americans and other people of African descent. The conditions are usually physical, social-economic circumstances or weather. Instead of standard realism he favors a strategy that abstracts everyday actions and statements into theatrical gestures, in which archival footage is re-edited or re-staged, real people perform fictional scenarios based on their own lives and historical observations intermesh with contemporary narratives. The films suggest the relentlessness of everyday life—along with its beauty—but also present oblique metaphors for art-making.

Greg DeCuir, Jr. is a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. He holds a M.A. in Cinematic Arts from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma. He has worked as a producer/director of documentary and reality programming for MTV Networks (Santa Monica), TV Metropolis (Belgrade), and Emotion Productions (Belgrade), and as a writer of animated programming for Nickelodeon Animation Studio (Burbank).

DeCuir’s critical writing has appeared in Cineaste, Kultura, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, KinoKultura, and Prelom as well as other international publications and his book Yugoslav Black Wave: Polemical Cinema from 1963-72 in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was released by Film Center Serbia in 2011. DeCuir is a member of NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) and Eurodoc (The European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers) and is also the selector/programmer for the Alternative Film/Video Festival in Belgrade.

Kitso Lynn Lelliott is a filmmaker and artist based in Johannesburg South Africa. She has Bachelors degree in Fine Art and a Masters in Film and Television from The University of the Witwatersrand. She is preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond epistemic power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony. She is interested in ways that narratives and histories become privileged, those that proliferate being those that reflect and reinstate the power structures of globalisation as it has emerged from a colonial and imperial past. It is in the shiftiness of the crossroads where multiple and contesting narratives intersect with one another across their many temporalities – both pasts and projected futures- that she locates a space to engage with narratives moving in and out of settled form and where the elided might emerge.

Her work has shown at film festivals and exhibited in galleries and museum shows around the world including Africa in Motion, Cine Sud, Cap au Sud, Tri- Continental FF, Next Reel FF, the Uganda Museum, Galerija101 Lithuania, the Goethe on Main, Nubuke Foundation gallery in Accra and Johannesburg Art Gallery. She participated in the Durban Talent Campus and the Berlinale Talents. Kitso is alumna of the CCA Lagos Asiko art school residency at the 2014 Dak’Art Biennale. She was named as one of the Mail and Guardian’s 2014 leading 200 young South Africans, is laureate of the 2015 Visas pour la création Grant awarded by the French Institute and will exhibit in the Bamako Encounters 2015. She is currently working through video and installation dealing with socio-cultural formations that took shape over the Atlantic during the African slave trade, a project initiated during a two-month artist’s residency in Brazil supported by the UNESCO Aschberg Bursaries program and the Sacatar Foundation. She is pursuing her PhD, which is concerned with narratives of and enunciations form spaces of elision and the imaginative relationship between the African Diaspora in Brazil and the west coast of Africa.

Želimir Žilnik (born in 1942; living and working in Novi Sad, Serbia) has written and directed numerous feature and documentary films which have reaped many awards at domestic and international film festivals. From the very beginning his films have focussed on contemporary issues, featuring social, political and economic assessments of everyday life (A Newsreel on Village Youth in Winter (1967), Little Pioneers (1968), The Unemployed (1968), June Turmoil (1968), Black Film (1971), Uprising in Jazak (1972).

The student demonstrations of 1968 and the turmoil that followed the occupation of Czechoslovakia are at the centre of Žilnik’s first feature film Early Works (1969) which was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and four prizes in Pula that same year.