Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We kick off our three day workshop Conjuring the Unreal: The Art of the Speculative Documentary with a screening of Truth or Consequences by Hannah Jayanti, a lyrical meditation on progress, memory, and how we stitch the past into the futures we imagine.

Set in the small desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico—beneath the orbit of the world’s first commercial spaceport—the film inhabits a near-future frame to follow five residents, weaving years of observational footage with archival materials, virtual worlds, and an improvised score by Bill Frisell.

We are excited to have director Hannah Jayanti to lead this inquiry across the weekend workshop, Conjuring the Unreal: The Art of the Speculative Documentary, asking what we mean when a documentary is called “speculative,” and this program takes Jayanti’s process and frameworks in the film as our first case study.

We’ll ask, how does an imagined near future refract our reading of the real? What can blending methodologies like use of archive, observational footage, interview, VR/photogrammetry, and formally expansive montage—do to loosen documentary from a single timeline and open it to alternate histories and possible departures? And where do the poetic and the political meet in that roominess that is opened up by these strategies?

Join us for an opening of this conversation and for a screening of this magnificent film that The New York Times called, “Haunting and Haunted” and that POV magazine called, “a profound reflection on mankind’s eternal urge to seek new frontiers”

Jayanti will be present for a conversation following the program. Join us and see you there!

Program

Truth or Consequences, Hannah Jayanti

103 mins, 2020

Set in the small desert town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, the film takes place in the shadow of the world’s first commercial Spaceport. Subtly set in a near future when space travel has begun, the film follows five residents in the town – Yvonne, Olin, Katie, Philip and George. Anchored in observational documentary footage filmed over three years, the film weaves together archival, virtual reality worlds, an improvised score by Bill Frisell and a speculative premise based on the very real spaceport located just outside of town. These intertwine to create a lyrical meditation on progress, history, and how we navigate a sense of loss within ourselves and a changing world. More at www.torcfilm.com.

Premiered in the Bright Future’s Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020. Supported by Sundance Documentary Fund, Sundance Edit & Story Lab, Tribeca All Access, New York State Council on the Arts, Jerome Foundation, Camden/TFI Documentary Retreat presented by CNN Films, True/False & Catapult Rough Cut Retreat, Puffin Foundation, Creative Culture Residency at Jacob Burns Film Center, Women Make Movies Production Assistance Program. Made in association with Arch + Bow Films and Genuine Article Pictures.

Program Duration: 103 mins

Bios

Hannah Jayanti is a documentary filmmaker, organizer, and educator. Her work is dedicated to the ethical and political possibilities of process-driven and formally expansive nonfiction. Through this lens she circles around questions of landscape, listening, memory, and time. For the last decade she has collaborated with Alexander Porter on multiformat projects that combine documentary with emerging technology alongside social practices. These range from speculative feature documentaries such as ‘Truth or Consequences’ (Rotterdam, 2020), to virtual reality documentaries including ‘Blackout’ (Tribeca, 2017), to live-edited performances such as ‘Strata’ (Transmediale, 2023), to co-creating large scale community projects such as the free and public arts festival, ‘Meteoric’, which takes place annually in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. They are currently working on a multi-format documentary project called ‘Topography’ which explores the histories, and futures, of increasingly imperiled public land within the United States. She is pursuing a practice-led PhD at UC Santa Cruz in Film & Digital Media, where she focuses on spatial knowledge practices, speculative documentaries, experimental and non-linear storytelling, and ethical collaborative practices.

Julia Gunnison is a writer, editor, and arts worker based in Brooklyn, New York. Her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Film Comment, Los Angeles Review of Books, Reverse Shot, Screen Slate, and Bright Wall/Dark Room. Her interests include nonfiction film forms and urban space on screen.

She is a 2025 UNDO Fellow with UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, and an alumna of the 2024 Film at Lincoln Center Critics Academy and the 2023–24 Reverse Shot Emerging Critics Workshop.

She is the co-founder and co-editor of Syllabus, a weekly publication for nontraditional syllabi.

She has served as a reviewer for the Sundance Institute, the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, the International Documentary Association, and the Catapult Film Fund, among others, and has moderated Q+A’s at the IFC Center and UnionDocs.