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

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

Come for a night of short docs that explore the many pathways to building trust—between documentarians and their protagonists and subjects, and between artists and audiences—created by recent graduates of the prestigious, expansive co-presenters of this night’s program, The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.

Since 1973, the Salt Institute has helped emerging documentarians develop their storytelling through film, journalism, ethics, anthropology, art, and design fundamentals, and is now part of the Maine College of Art & Design in Portland, Maine.

These works traverse the region to form a constellation of Maine stories and the people who live them: a musical leader guiding The Ensemble of Color through a major transition; a tight-knit chess club tucked inside a local grocery store; a study of a man who chooses to forgo romantic attachment; and the uncovering of the “Valentine’s Day Bandit.” Built on time and care, these relationships unfold in surprising ways on screen and on the airwaves—reaching major film festivals and national radio.

Following the program, Director of the Salt Institute, Isaac Kestenbaum will be around for conversation along with the artists in attendance who can share a bit about these projects that capped their time at Salt. Join us for a rare glimpse into the creative processes and stories of an emerging cohort of documentary storytellers.

Program

Flowers

14 mins, 2024

Flowers follows The Ensemble of Color (TEoC) in Portland as they tour the children’s musical, Beautiful Blackbird around Wabanaki land. After a six-year hiatus, its co-founder, René Goddess, is guiding the Black artistic and political collective through a major transitional period. (Selected for the Camden International Film Festival)

Just Friends

How fulfilled can we be without romance? Steve Small has an answer to that. (Grand Prize Winner of the 2024 NPR Student Podcast Challenge)

Shannon’s Tree

Every Sunday morning, chess players in Westbrook meet at a local grocery store to play chess. This piece explores the boundaries of the chessboard, and tries to understand how community is formed from such a silent endeavor.

Red Paper Hearts

The Valentine’s Day Bandit has been a tradition in Portland for almost 50 years. What happens when a mythic-level local secret is revealed?

The Round Forest

After college, Silvia returns to the off-grid home her parents built by hand in rural Maine. What begins as a temporary stay turns into a struggle with the circular pull of the land, its quiet mysteries, and Silvia’s need for connection beyond her family’s homestead. The Round Forest explores family, memory, and the weight of inheritance.

Bios

Maria Carrasco, Salt Fall 2024, (she/they) is a filmmaker from The Bronx. Before attending the Salt Institute, Maria worked as a Creative Executive at the independent production company, 30KFT. While there, she co-produced an upcoming feature starring Los Angeles-based comedy troupe, The Dress Up Gang. Maria spent a year in Madrid prior to beginning her film career at Imagine Documentaries. An alumna of Duke University, who graduated with highest distinction in English and Film, they have a long-standing interest in storytelling, card games, and The New York Mets.

Jo Strogatz, Salt Fall 2024, likes sounds. A lot. As a baby, she made “chirping noises” just to play with her voice (doctor’s official diagnosis), and by 12 she began classical vocal training before shifting to jazz. Inspired by Bobby McFerrin, she learned to treat her voice like an instrument – composing, experimenting, and improvising. She studied Music and Psychology at Tufts before earning a Graduate Certificate in Radio & Podcasting at the Salt Institute. Since then, her audio work has caught the ears of NPR, the New York Festival Radio Awards, and the International Sound Art Competition. Now a Creative Production Intern at Antfood and a freelance musician and audio producer, Jo can usually be found chasing down the ice cream truck, enjoying reality TV (too much), and chirping in her bedroom.

Nic M. Neves, Salt Fall 2021, is a freelance writer and audio producer based in Brooklyn. He has contributed reporting, production, and/or sound design for Planet Money, Rough Translation, Invisibilia, Embedded, Throughline, Radiolab, Future Projects, and others. Right now he’s pursuing an MFA in Literary Reportage at NYU. He’s working on a longform project about end-of-life work, and what it can show us about American life—the choices we make, the reasons we make them, and what we’re meant to do with loss.

When Anisa Vietze, Salt Fall 2023, was 13 she roped her friends into making a podcast about their middle school lives, recorded on her iPod Touch (pink, 16 GB). Now, she’s Assistant Producer at Radiolab. In between those things she: refused to get braces, graduated from Oberlin College, lived in six different states, studied audio documentary at The Salt Institute, reported a couple stories for NPR’s All Things Considered, and briefly moved to Alaska to make radio about mountain climbers and subsistence fishing. She’s fond of rock climbing, binge-scrolling TikTok, and anyone who laughs easily even if the joke wasn’t that funny. Now an Assistant Producer at Radiolab, Anisa supports the team with Rewinds, cutting tape, and social media.

Nichole Whitney is a documentary filmmaker and photographer based in Portland, Maine, where she works as The Nature Conservancy in Maine’s Documentary Storytelling Fellow. She is a graduate of Vassar College and the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies.

Isaac Kestenbaum, Salt Fall 2008, is the director of the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies at the Maine College of Art & Design, and is currently leading his 10th cohort of students through the program. He co-created the podcasts Alaska Is the Center of the Universe (2023) and Midnight Son (2019) for Audible Originals, the latter of which was recently adapted for Hulu as the documentary film Blood and Myth. He is the former production manager at StoryCorps, and has also worked as a newspaper reporter and a commercial lobsterman.