May 1, 2026 at 10:00 am – May 3, 2026 at 1:30 pm

An Audience Yet to Come:
Projective Documentary
and The Essay Film

Name: An Audience Yet to Come: <br> Projective Documentary <br> and The Essay Film
Start: 2026-05-01T10:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-05-03T13:30:00-04:00

With Kevin B. Lee, Lynne Sachs, Gala Hernández López and Jane Gaines

“You didn’t know, and couldn’t know, and didn’t care, safe in your pram”
— A Diary for Timothy (1945), Humphrey Jennings

When we make a documentary, we rarely know who will ultimately watch it. Films travel through time, across contexts and generations. They may be seen years—or decades—after they are made. So how do we speak to or project to an audience we cannot know?

In this workshop, essay filmmaker, critic and scholar Kevin B. Lee (Transformers: The Premake, Afterlives) will explore this idea of “projective documentary”, asking how filmmakers address audiences that are distant, unknown, or yet to come. A pioneer of the desktop documentary and a master of the essay film form, Kevin will guide participants through ways of thinking about documentary as a conversation across time.

Essay films often speak directly—to a person, a community, a future viewer, or even to someone who may never respond. This act of address allows filmmakers to reflect on the present while imagining how it might be understood in the future. What does it mean to document our moment with viewers we cannot yet see? And how might the way we speak shape how that future understands us?

Across three days of artist talks, screenings, and feedback sessions, participants will examine different ways documentary filmmakers have addressed their audiences—from wartime letter-films to contemporary desktop documentaries. Together we will think about how voice, form and structure can help create films that endure beyond the moment in which they are made.

The workshop will revolve around questions such as:

What does it mean to make a film for someone who cannot respond?

Who gets to speak—and who is spoken for?

How might we represent the present for viewers in the future?

Do we ever truly know who our films reach?

What forms work best when addressing an unseen or unknown audience?

How might emerging technologies, including generative AI, change how we imagine the future viewer?

What happens when images are generated rather than captured?

Joining Kevin for the workshop is a group of invited filmmakers, thinkers and researchers working across moving-image practice. Film scholar Jane Gaines will bring a historical approach to projective documentary. Filmmaker Gala Hernández López will join remotely to discuss how AI and digital culture shape her approach to documentary and essay filmmaking. And Lynne Sachs will walk participants through her extensive experience with the essay form. Participants will also be encouraged to share their own work in the context of a creative feedback session with Kevin.

Details

Who is eligible?

Open to everyone, though the workshop setting is best suited for filmmakers, film producers, journalists, curators and media artists.

Give us an idea of who you are and why you are coming. When you register you will be asked for a short statement of interest that should briefly describe your experience and a film project (it would be great if you have a project in progress that you would present to the group during the work-in-progress critique sessions), plus a bio. There’s a spot for a link to a work sample (and CV, which would also be nice, but is not required).

Cost

$295 early bird registration ends on April 21, 2026.

$350 regular registration.

Refund Policy

The deposit is non-refundable. Should you need to cancel, you’ll receive half of your registration fee back until April 21. After April 21, the fee is non-refundable.

Technology Requirements

No animation software is required for participation in this workshop.

In order to keep costs down, this workshop is a BYOL, i.e. bring your own laptop. Students must be fully proficient using and operating their computers.

Registration & Cancellation Policy

To register for a workshop, students must pay in full via card, check, or cash . After the early bird registration deadline of April 21, course fees are not refundable or transferable and any withdrawals or deadlines will result in the full cost of the class being forfeit. There will be no exceptions. To withdraw from a course please email info-at-uniondocs.org.

In the event that a workshop does not receive sufficient enrollment, it may be canceled. Students will be notified at least 48 hours prior to the start of a cancelled workshop and will be refunded within 5 business days. If we reschedule a workshop to another date, students are also entitled to a full refund. UnionDocs reserves the right to change instructors without prior notification, and to change class location and meeting times by up to an hour with 48 hours prior notice.

Please note: Participants are accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Schedule

Friday, May 1st

10:00am – 10:30am Welcome & intros

10:30am – 12:30pm Intro session with Kevin B. Lee

12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Jane Gaines

4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Kevin additional exercises / discussion

Saturday, May 2nd

10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references, case studies

10:30am – 12:30pm Session with Lynne Sachs

12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm – 4:00pm Remote Session with Gala Hernández López

4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Kevin, additional exercises / discussion

Sunday, May 3rd

10:00am – 12:30pm Creative work-in-progress session with Kevin

12:30am – 1:30pm Wrap-up discussion and final thoughts

Each day follows this general structure, with some minor variations and substitutions:

10:00a

Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.

10:30a

Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique

11:45a

Discussion

12:30p

Share / Discussion / Exercise

1:00p

Lunch (on your own)

2:00p

Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique

3:15p

Discussion

4:00p

Workshop Exercise + Critique

5:00p

Wrap Up

Bios

Kevin B. Lee is the Locarno Film Festival Professor for the Future of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). A filmmaker and media researcher, he has produced nearly 400 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning film Transformers: The Premake introduced the “desktop documentary” format. His recent work includes the feature film Afterlives (2025), which premiered at the BFI London Film Festival and DocLisboa. He co-leads the Swiss National Science Foundation research project “The Video Essay: Memories, Ecologies, Bodies”. Lee is a 2018 Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Grantee and has screened his work at the Museum of Modern Art, Berlinale, and International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Gala Hernández López is an artist, filmmaker and researcher. Her interdisciplinary practice combines filmmaking with the creation of video installations, performances, and publications. More specifically, her work critically analyzes new modes of subjectivation produced by computational capitalism. She examines the imaginaries circulating in virtual communities, the desires conveyed by disruptive technologies, and new reactionary techno-utopias as shared fictions that populate our collective unconscious. Her works are based on research, combining materialist analysis with poetry, intimacy, and dreams with the aim of dissecting fantasies of unlimited techno-scientific control over reality. Her work has been presented at international festivals and institutions such as Cannes, Berlinale, Rotterdam, IDFA, DOK Leipzig, Cinéma du Réel, Curtas Vila do Conde, IndieLisboa, Berlinische Galerie, Palais de Tokyo, Sarajevo Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival, Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Camden Film Festival, Courtisane, transmediale, Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, FRAC Île-de-France, among others. Her film La Mécanique des fluides won the César for Best Documentary Short Film in 2024. She regularly gives workshops, lectures, and talks at venues such as Beaux-Arts de Marseille, Freïe Universität, Kunsthochschule Kassel, Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, Beaux-Arts de Paris, The Photographers Gallery, Locarno Film Festival, Harvard University, Goldsmiths University of London, University of British Columbia and University of Michigan.

Jane M. Gaines is Professor Emerita of Literature and English, Duke University and currently Professor of Film, Columbia University. She is the author of three books, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industry? (University of Illinois, 2018), Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (North Carolina, 1991), and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago, 2001). In 2018, Prof. Gaines received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Distinguished Career Award and in 2023, an Honorary doctorate from University of Stockholm. A founder of the Visible Evidence conference on documentary, she continues to publish on documentary activism, intellectual property in the internet age, the history of piracy, and has critiqued the “historical turn” in film and media studies as “What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?” and “Eisenstein’s Absolutely Wonderful, Totally Impossible Project,” in Sergei M. Eisenstein: Notes for a General History of Cinema. Forthcoming is What Happened?: Documentary Media and the Dilemmas of Historical Time. The online resource, Women Film Pioneers Project, published by the Columbia University Libraries, launched as a pilot project in the future of publishing in 2013.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. She has produced over 50 short and feature-length films. Sachs creates cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living and studying in San Francisco. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her body of work ever since. Lynne’s films have screened at MoMA, Wexner Center for the Arts, New York Film Festival, Sundance, Punto de Vista, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at Museum of the Moving Image, Ambulante, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Cámara Lúcida, China Women’s Film Festival, Cork Int’l Film Festival, Costa Rica Int’l Film Fest, and Oberhausen. In 2021, Edison and Prismatic Ground Film Festivals honored her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields. Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s Year by Year Poems in 2019, and Punctum Books published Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry written by Lynne and playwright Lizzie Olesker in 2025. In 2026, the San Francisco International Film Festival and the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive gave Lynne their annual Persistence of Vision Award which honors “filmmakers whose achievements go beyond the boundaries of the traditional film form.”

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2026.05.01 Early Bird Registration

Early Bird Registration

$ 295.00

6 available