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

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re delighted to welcome filmmaker Iva Radivojević for a special screening of her luminous, genre-defying feature ALEPH, presented in conjunction with her 3-day workshop It’s All Rhythm: Finding Poetry in the Edit, led alongside Deborah Stratman, Corina Copp, and Jay Rabinowitz.

Loosely inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, ALEPH unfolds as a labyrinthine travelogue across language, geography, and time. Moving through ten countries on five continents, the film gathers the dreams of its protagonists into a constellation of stories that gesture toward what Borges called “the unimaginable universe.” What emerges is not a single narrative but a vivid mosaic: a meditation on presence, distance, and the shared rhythms of human experience.

Premiering at New Directors | New Films in 2021, Aleph has been celebrated as “a work of philosophy applied to the world of cinema” (Cineuropa) and praised for its breathtaking range of styles, from austere long takes to psychedelic reverie (Filmmaker Magazine). The film invites viewers not to find themselves, but to lose themselves—releasing ego and perspective in favor of a cosmic sense of connection.

Following the screening, Iva will be in conversation with filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar Andrea Sisson around the film’s making and its deep investment in rhythm, language, and form—offering a bridge into the questions at the heart of It’s All Rhythm: Finding Poetry in the Edit. Together, the screening and workshop form a shared inquiry into how cinema moves, breathes, and thinks: how images, sounds, and cuts become a kind of poetry.

An evening for anyone curious about editing as composition, filmmaking as dreaming, and cinema as a way of listening to the world.

Program

Aleph by Iva Radivojevic

91min, USA, Qatar, Croatia, 2021

Loosely inspired by the works of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, Aleph is a labyrinthian travelogue, unveiling like a dreamscape across language, geography and time. The dreams of protagonists in ten countries spanning five continents are revealed through conversation, activity and contemplation. These collective stories serve as pieces of a puzzle that lead to what the Borges called ‘the unimaginable universe’.

Program Duration: 92 mins

Bios

Iva Radivojevic is an artist and filmmaker who currently divides her time between Athens and Lesbos. Iva’s films have screened at the New York Film Festival, Locarno IFF, New Directors/New Films, Rotterdam IFF, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Jeonju IFF, Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art.  She is the recipient of the Sundance Art of Non-Fiction Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Jerome, NYFA and Princess Grace Film Fellowship. Her book Avenue of The Living, was published by Big Black Mountain Press, while her recent short story When The Phone Rang was is published by red herring press in the UK. She’s a PhD candidate at Villa Arson in Nice.

Andrea Sisson is a filmmaker, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar whose work bridges experimental documentary, social practice, and psychoanalytic inquiry. Sisson is a Fulbright Fellow, and she holds an MFA from Bard College and an MSW from Hunter College, focused on psychodynamic study. Her award-winning films have screened internationally at the São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound and SFE ART TV at the Palais de Tokyo, and have been recognized by the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, The New York Times, and Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. Sisson’s film projects move between experimental documentary and narrative invention, examining systems of memory and the limits of perception. Her work often merges the personal and the structural, using poetic form and hybrid storytelling to explore thresholds between visibility and erasure. She also writes at the intersection of practice, filmmaking, and psychoanalysis, with work published in Filmmaker Magazine and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.