EVENT TIMING

11 am — IRL Doors at UNDO

11:30am — Screening begins

(in-person & online)

1pm — CineClub Conversation

(in-person & online)

LOCATIONS

IRL @ UNIONDOCS
352 ONDERDONK AVE
RIDGEWOOD, NY

ONLINE – 11:30AM

Artistic Differences — produced by UnionDocs and hosted by Cíntia Gil—is our cineclub that gathers online and in person on the first Saturday of every month! Each month, we invite you to experience a film that demands deeper discussion. Think Saturday morning cartoons, but instead, it’s bold, boundary-pushing documentary cinema from around the world, curated by the brilliant Cíntia Gil.

For May, we’re honored to present The Garden Cadences by Dane Komljen, a lyrical and fleeting portrait of a disappearing community. Komljen’s film drifts through the final summer of the “Mollies,” a queer feminist collective that lived in a Berlin trailer park and garden for a decade before their eviction in 2022. But rather than offering a definitive history, The Garden Cadences is a mosaic—glimpses of intertwined bodies, hands in the dirt, techno reverberating through makeshift walls. A radical act of tenderness, the film resists easy conclusions, preserving the texture of a place and time that has since vanished.

Komljen’s approach to portraiture is impressionistic, embracing the tension between presence and loss. Opening with a solitary plastic crate in the grass, bathed in fluctuating light, the film unfolds as a series of painterly vignettes—lush radishes, reeds trembling in the wind, lovers dozing in the heat. At times, the camera lingers in stillness; at others, it moves with euphoric abandon, dissolving into bursts of blurred color and light. As one community fades, another is set to replace it: an aquarium, an artificial ecosystem where bodies—no longer human—will be contained behind glass.

There are two ways to join:

In-person: Visit our Ridgewood space! Grab a ticket to save your spot. UNDO Members can attend for free with their Member Coupon Code at checkout.

Online: Stream the event live from wherever you are—just sign up!

Following our screening, we’ll gather reflections, questions, and insights to create a longform podcast interview with Dane Komljen—a collective exploration of the film’s themes and creative process. Want to be part of the conversation? Join the club and add your voice to the mix!

Program

The Garden Cadences by Dane Komljen

62 mins, 2024

Jone is ready to fly. She finds herself at the beginning of something new, but before she moves on, there needs to be a closure. Jone is one of Mollies, the queer-feminist collective that had been living for a decade at a trailer park next to Ostkreuz, Berlin. This film traces their last summer together before being evicted.

Program Duration: 62 mins

Bios

Dane Komljen, born in 1986 in Banja Luka. He made three feature films, THE GARDEN CADENCES, AFTERWATER and ALL THE CITIES OF THE NORTH, and numerous shorts exploring notions of body, space, utopia and being together. His films were awarded at Festival del Film Locarno, IFF Rotterdam, Festival de Cannes, Sarajevo FF, New Horizons IFF, Festival de Sevilla and shown at Berlinale, Cinéma du Réel, FID Marseille, Toronto IFF, New York FF, FIC Valdivia, VIENNALE, Mar del Plata IFF, FICUNAM, Hong Kong IFF, CPH:DOX, Jeonju IFF, Art of the Real, 25 FPS and others. His work has been presented at the ICA in London, Volksbühne in Berlin, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Union Docs in New York, Lagos Biennale and elsewhere. He lives and works in Berlin.

Born in Portugal, Cíntia Gil studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon Theatre and Film School) and holds a degree in Philosophy from the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto), where she has also taught seminars on aesthetics. From 2012 to 2019, Cíntia Gil served as co-director and then director of Doclisboa, Portugal’s most important and steadily expanding documentary film festival, where she launched the Ibero-American lab Arché. From 2019 to 2021 she has directed Sheffield DocFest.