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

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to welcome filmmaker Miryam Charles for an evening of cinema and conversation centered on her renowned feature Cette Maison, alongside an intimate sneak peek of a brand new work-in-progress short!

Cette Maison weaves documentary and reenactment into a luminous meditation on loss. Inspired by the life of of Charles’ late cousin, the film reimagines her as Tessa, eternally on the threshold between life and afterlife. Moving between Montreal, Quebec, and imagined visions of Haiti, the film follows Tessa and her mother across spaces that blur memory, theater, and dream.

Through incantatory voiceover and ornate imagery, Charles conjures a ghost story that is also a reflection on mourning, inheritance, and the afterlives of colonial violence. As The New Yorker writes, the film is “a daring blend of documentary and fantasy that invests a deeply personal drama with a wide historical scope…”

The evening celebrates Miryam’s work over her 2022 Fellowship year at UNDO, culminating in our publication Forms of Errantry, edited by Charles’ partner in the fellowship, writer Lakshmi Padmanabhan. Together, the films and the book consider how experimental documentary can address the legacies of colonization as they are lived today. Between India and Haiti, the publication follows the routes opened up by this inquiry to explore histories of survival and the aesthetics of errantry with commissioned contributions from Dessane Lopez Cassell, Christopher Harris,  Yasmina Price, Chloé Savoie-Bernard with translation by H. Felix Chau Bradley and from Miryam herself.

Forms of Errantry will be available at the event, you can also grab a copy online!

Miryam will be in attendance alongside some fellow contributors to the book who will share some excerpts from their writing. Following the screening we’ll be hanging out for a toast, and celebration to Miryam and this work.

Come through!

Program

Cette Maison by Miryam Charles

75 min, 2022

Bridgeport, 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else.

Program Duration: 90 mins

Bios

Miryam Charles is a filmmaker of Haitian origin living in Montreal. Her films have been shown at various festivals in Quebec and abroad. Her first feature, Cette maison, premiered at the Berlinale, then presented at the AFI Film Festival, and was included in the TIFF Top 10 and Sight and Sound‘s Best Films of the Year in 2022. Her work has been shown at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery, the Everson Museum and the Palais de Tokyo.

Dessane Lopez Cassell is a New York-based editor, writer, and creative producer. Her work spans the intersections of film and visual art, with a particular interest in artist’s moving image, documentary, and experimental film.

Cassell’s writing and cultural criticism has been published in various outlets, journals, and books, including the Los Angeles Times’s Image magazine, Film Comment, MUBI Notebook, The Criterion Collection’s Current, Metrograph Journal, and Hyperallergic, as well as catalogues issued by The Museum of Modern Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

As a producer, Cassell has worked across disciplines to produce performances, live events, and various media projects, including campaigns and content for Hourglass Cosmetics and Armani, a live film score at MoMA, and podcasts and radio shows for Microsoft (in collaboration with Listen), Roskilde Festival (Denmark), Bay FM and Creative X (both South Africa).

An itinerant curator and former museum worker, Cassell has organized exhibitions, screenings, and performances at MoMA, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Metrograph (in partnership with Abrons Arts Center), Anthology Film Archives, Bartram’s Garden, and the Black Women’s Film Conference, among others. Additionally, Cassell programmed for BlackStar Film Festival from 2018 to 2023, and previously served as Editor-in-Chief of BlackStar’s journal, Seen, where she platformed film, art, and visual culture writing by and about people of color, with an emphasis on nuanced, slow journalism. Prior to joining Seen, she was the first dedicated reviews editor at Hyperallergic, where she focused on growing the publication’s film coverage and championing writers and artists from underrepresented communities.

Cassell is a former Fulbright fellow, and has received scholarly awards and fellowships from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, the Ford Foundation, CUNY Graduate Center, and Oberlin College. She was named a DOC NYC Documentary New Leader in 2022 and serves as Vice President of the board of The Flaherty.