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

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to present THE IMAGINED IMAGE, an evening of animated documentary shorts presented in conjunction with filmmaker and animator Maggie Brennan’s 3-day workshop, Animating the Real: Documentary & the Imagined Image, led alongside Jonas Poher Rasmussen, Kathryn Hamilton, and Yehui Zhao.

The evening’s program will include the expansive work of Yehui Zhao, Chantal Kassarjian, Adrienne Nowak, Maggie Brennan, and Kathryn Hamilton and ​​​​​​​Deniz Tortum, each of their films harnessing animation as a radical tool for expressing our realities. Using varied techniques and points of entry, they probe the form’s capacity to render what is real, but perhaps not visible or accessible, and traverse time and perspective to give new shape to our realities. Together, they ask what animation can offer documentary practice and our experiences of nonfiction, whether surfacing the desired and imagined or unraveling the poetic, theoretical, comedic, or ethical components of a work.

From a vanished village reimagined through shadow puppetry to speculative virtual worlds that offer hyper-personalized intimacy, or a table of ghost stories inspired by shared pierogis, and even a digital Noah’s Ark archived to stave off ecological collapse, these films reveal how we might remember, memorialize and reimagine our worlds through the animated form.

We’ll welcome artists to introduce their work and hang after for informal conversation and a toast to kick off the workshop.

Come through for a night that will open minds and imaginations to new worlds and ways of seeing and to meet the artists behind the work too!

Program

To Grandma by Yehui Zhao

7 mins, 2020

To Grandma is a shadow puppetry animation that centers around the filmmaker’s grandmother, Zhang Xiuying, who grew up in a village on the barren land of Loess Plateau, in Shanxi, China. This village has since disappeared. The film adapts Xiuying’s memory to re-imagine life there in the 1940s.

Gusła or the spirits by Adrienne Nowak

8:36 mins, 2016

While preparing pierogi, a traditional Polish dish, four members of Adrienne’s family tell her ghost stories, some of them communists.

Recipe in Exile by Chantal Kassarjian

4 mins, 2019

Recipe in Exile tackles a very personal yet universal story about tradition, family heritage and adaptability. It is a story that spans a hundred years, juxtaposing the lives of two immigrant women and linking them through a traditional family recipe being passed on from generation to generation. The story is inspired by the Syrian refugee crisis in the context of the Armenian diaspora, highlighting the importance of holding on to our cultural heritage in order to stay connected to our roots.

To You by Yehui Zhao

9 mins, 2023

A letter to the filmmaker’s mom about daughtership and memories, To You frames their diasporic relationship with womanhood and daughtership memories. Using drawings, cyanotype, old photographs, live action, and stop-motion animation, To You provides a lens through which home can feel both close and foreign.

Our Bed Is Green by Maggie Brennan

7 mins, 2021

Realm, a virtual reality facility, is quite transparent about the erotic potential of its services. Wall to wall, Realm is lined with tempting previews from its menu of stock experiences. But it also offers something more: with the help of powerful data-mining technology, customers can create virtual facsimiles of real-life places and people. This hyper-personalization is what attracts clientele like Cecily, a young woman wavering between repression and obsession.

Our Ark by Deniz Tortum and Kathryn Hamilton

12 mins, 2021

OUR ARK is an essay film on our efforts to create a virtual replica of the real world. We are backing up the planet, creating 3D models of animals, rainforests, cities and people. We are archiving as if ecological collapse could be staved off through some digital Noah’s Ark of beasts and objects.

Program Duration: 50 mins

Bios

Yehui Zhao is an award-winning filmmaker and artist whose work explores migration, decolonization, heritage, and regeneration. Her work takes root in the feminist legacies of the global south, drawing inspiration from revolutionary history, womanhood and daughtership, and undocumented collective memory. Yehui’s films have been shown at True/False, Dokufest, DOC NYC, UnionDocs, Prismatic Ground, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Asian American International Film Festival, and other programs. Yehui has published paintings, prints, and writing at Brooklyn Rail, Brooklyn Review and Action, Spectacle. She is a recipient of the IDA Pare Lorentz Documentary Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts grant, and the York Women in Film and Television Scholarship. Yehui holds an MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College and a Master of Science in Social Work from Columbia University. Yehui is an Adjunct Professor at Marymount Manhattan College in the Communication and Media Arts Department.

Chantal Kassarjian is a Lebanese designer and animator of Armenian descent, based in New York City. Her cultural heritage is intricately woven into her design aesthetic and the polemic subjects she chooses to tackle. Having explored both the realms of graphic design and animation, her style is a patchwork of disciplines, techniques, and ideas. Her work embodies her playful artistic process and conveys her love for illustration, typography, photomontage, and motion arts.

Maggie Brennan is a Queens-based animator / director / writer / musician / etc. She is the creator of “Agoraphilia,” a series for Adult Swim SMALLS, which she also animated, directed, co-wrote, and scored. She wrote, directed, animated, and scored the short film “Our Bed Is Green,” which premiered at SXSW and went on to play numerous festivals worldwide. She also wrote, animated, and voiced a micro series for A Studio Digital, and her comics have appeared in publications like The New Yorker, The Fader, and Inverse. She is currently working on her next animated short, “Venerations,” which has been awarded grants from NYSCA and The Jerome Foundation.

Kathryn Hamilton aka sister sylvester is a multimedia artist. Her most recent works, Constantinopoliad, won the Interactive award at CPH:DOX 2025, and Drinking Brecht, an interactive documentary, premiered at IDFA 2024. Both continue to tour internationally. In collaboration with Deniz Tortum she created the VR documentary Shadowtime, (’23) which premiered at the Venice International Film Festival and toured to festivals including IDFA, GIFF, Thessaloniki Film Festival and SXSW; and the film Our Ark which premiered at IDFA (’21) and has screened at festivals internationally. In her live work she creates visual essays and books that become performances, spatial narratives that play with spoken and written text to create communal reading experiences. Most recently Constantinopoliad (live), with a score by Nadah El Shazly, was commissioned by the Onassis Foundation, and premiered at National Sawdust in NYC (‘23) as a site specific work in the Onassis Library, Athens, and at the Internationaal Theater of Amsterdam; and The Eagle and The Tortoise showed as a work-in-progress at National Sawdust NYC, and premiered at IDFA On Stage (‘22), and in NYC as part of Under The Radar 2024. She is a Creative Capital fellow, a current resident at ONX Studio; a 2019 MacDowell Fellow; an alumnus of the Public Theater New Works program and CPH:DOX lab. She co-teaches a bio-art class at Colorado College, and has also taught and lectured at MIT, Princeton, UCCS, Columbia University, and Boğaziçi, Istanbul.

Her work has been called ‘genuinely subversive’ by Time Out NY; ‘imaginative and original’ by New York Times; ‘pulse-raising’ by Exeunt Magazine, ‘apocalyptic’ by artforum, and an ‘otherworldly, intimate, off-kilter, queer artistic orgasm’ by Life Magazine, Greece.

​​​​​​​Deniz Tortum works in film and immersive media. His work has screened internationally, including at the Venice Film Festival, SxSW, IFFR, IDFA, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Hot Docs, True/False and Dokufest. His latest short Our Ark (2021, co-dir Kathryn Hamilton) has premiered at IDFA 2021 and won Best Short Film award at Istanbul Film Festival. His latest feature film Phases of Matter (2020) premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2020 and received the Best Documentary awards at Istanbul and Antalya Film Festivals. He has worked as a researcher at the MIT Open Documentary Lab and MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, where his research focused on immersive media. In 2019, he was featured in Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.