“Only the imagination can get us out of the bind of the eternal present, inventing or hypothesizing or pretending or discovering a way that reason can then follow into the infinity of options, a clue through the labyrinths of choice, a golden string, the story, leading us to the freedom that is properly human, the freedom open to those whose minds can accept unreality.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin

While “speculative” has become a buzzword in contemporary culture—and a term many artists use to describe their work—we’re inviting a deeper exploration: What exactly is meant when a documentary is deemed “speculative”?

For our first Fall 2025 workshop, we’ve invited filmmaker Hannah Jayanti (Truth or Consequences, Topography) to guide a three-day search for clarity and complexity around this terminology.

In today’s landscape, “speculation” carries many meanings—from land-based investments and high-risk global trading, to contemporary modes of science fiction and critical fabulation, to eco-feminisms, indigenous futurities, queer histories, and Afrofuturisms. The word traces back to specere, Latin for “to look,” sharing roots with speculum (mirror) and specula (watchtower). These origins evoke reflection, surveillance, perception, and the liminal edge between the known and the unknown.

Over the course of the workshop, we’ll be joined by a stellar lineup of artists and thinkers to expand our frames of reference. Writer and filmmaker Toby Lee will join to discuss her pivotal essay The Radical Unreal: Fabulation and Fantasy in Speculative Documentary, where she argues for “the radical potential of the unreal—as experiential category, as representational strategy, and as a politics.” Renowned filmmaker and video artist John Greyson will beam in to share about his hybrid, playful, and deeply political body of work which employs experimental documentary approaches in service of queer activism and social justice.  Jackson Polys, co-facilitator of New Red Order and a multidisciplinary artist will join to share his practice exploring Indigenous futurities and institutional critique. 

Together, we’ll examine how these varied lineages and definitions apply to documentary’s seemingly privileged relationship to the real. We’ll spotlight formally expansive tendencies and ask how experimentation in documentary can function not just poetically, but politically—especially in our contemporary moment of democratic and ecological crisis, and in an increasingly risk averse documentary landscape.

Hannah brings a singular blend of ethical, formal, and political inquiry to her practice, and will lead us in considering: What does the speculative offer documentary makers? How can speculative approaches expand how documentary engages with time, history, and alternative futures? What kinds of methodologies, media, and technologies become possible when the real is pushed? How can we both interrogate new technologies and new media and consider their uses as new distributive forms?

Participants will be invited to share their own projects, receive feedback, and add their questions to the evolving conversation.

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

Hannah Jayanti is a documentary filmmaker, organizer, and educator. Her work is dedicated to the ethical and political possibilities of process-driven and formally expansive nonfiction. Through this lens she circles around questions of landscape, listening, memory, and time. For the last decade she has collaborated with Alexander Porter on multiformat projects that combine documentary with emerging technology alongside social practices. These range from speculative feature documentaries such as ‘Truth or Consequences’ (Rotterdam, 2020), to virtual reality documentaries including ‘Blackout’ (Tribeca, 2017), to live-edited performances such as ‘Strata’ (Transmediale, 2023), to co-creating large scale community projects such as the free and public arts festival, ‘Meteoric’, which takes place annually in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. They are currently working on a multi-format documentary project called ‘Topography’ which explores the histories, and futures, of increasingly imperiled public land within the United States. She is pursuing a practice-led PhD at UC Santa Cruz in Film & Digital Media, where she focuses on spatial knowledge practices, speculative documentaries, experimental and non-linear storytelling, and ethical collaborative practices.

John Greyson is an award-winning Toronto video/film artist. Since 1984, his many features, shorts and transmedia works use humour and song to explore such queer activist issues as police entrapment, prison, AIDS activism, global solidarity, homo-nationalism and apartheid (both South African and Israeli). The winner of 4 Teddies, 4 Canadian screen awards, and Best Film Prizes at over 50 international festivals, his works include: Door Prize (2025),  Death Mask (2024), Photo Booth (2023),  International Dawn Chorus Day (2020), Mercurial (2018), Gazonto (2016), Murder in Passing (2013), Fig Trees (2009), Proteus (2003),  Lilies (1996), Zero Patience (1993), The Making of Monsters (1991) and Urinal (1989).

Toby Lee is an artist, anthropologist, and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She works across video, installation, performance and drawing, and her work has been been exhibited at the Locarno Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), and the 2014 Whitney Biennial. Her research interests include visual and media anthropology, the anthropology of cultural institutions, cultural citizenship, expanded documentary, and cultures of surveillance and documentation. Her dissertation, an ethnographic and historical study of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, examines the relationship between state, citizen, and public culture in contemporary Greece. She has a PhD in Anthropology and Film & Visual Studies from Harvard University, where she was a member of the Sensory Ethnography Lab. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Dan David Foundation, the Film Study Center at Harvard University, and the Flaherty Film Seminar. From 2012 to 2014, she was the Director of the Collaborative Studio program at UnionDocs: Center for Documentary Art in Brooklyn, NY.

Jackson Polys of the New Red Order (NRO). The New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Jackson Polys, Adam Khalil, and Zack Khalil. Polys is a multi-disciplinary artist who examines negotiations toward the limits and viability of desires for Indigenous growth. He holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and was the recipient of a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Mentor Artist Fellowship. Adam Khalil is a filmmaker and artist whose practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of image making through humor, relation, and transgression. He received his B.A. from Bard College and is co-founder of COUSINS Collective.  Zack Khalil is a filmmaker and artist whose work explores an Indigenous worldview and undermines traditional forms of historical authority through the excavation of alternative histories and the use of innovative documentary forms. He received his B.A. at Bard College in the Film and Electronic Arts Department, and is a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and Gates Millennium Scholar.  Their work has appeared at Artists Space, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Lincoln Center, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Biennial 2019, Walker Arts Center, and Whitney Biennial 2019, among other institutions.