A nuts-and-bolts professional development series designed for the emerging or intermediate documentary filmmaker, Documentary Fundamentals @ UnionDocs is a seven-part program taking place over the course of one weekend. Registrants can also attend individual sessions. This curriculum developed out of our experience hearing what fundamentals documentarians need to understand to plan, produce, and release an independent documentary today.

This year’s Documentary Fundamentals course is led by the duo behind Kiki, a dive into the LGBTQ Ball subculture in NYC. Join us for a special weekend where we will screen the film and have discussions with director Sara Jordenö, producer Gabriel Sedgwick and many special guests.

The full series pass includes access to all of the 2017 Documentary Fundamentals sessions listed below and the public screening of Kiki. You can also tailor your Doc Fundamentals attendance to your personal needs and select each course a la carte for $25/session.

Sara Jordenö is a NYC-based documentary filmmaker, visual artist, researcher and educator. Jordenö’s longitudinal projects often engage with communities who reside in the margins, focusing on their strategies of survival. In the process of making these works, Sara has collaborated with (and at times shared authorship with) sociologists, activists, community organizers and members of the communities that she investigates. Her feature documentary KIKI, which premiered in the US documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2016, has since been shown in over 60 festivals on five continents. KIKI, which was co-written with community leader Twiggy Pucci Garcon and produced by Story and Hard Working Movies, was awarded the Teddy Award for Best Documentary Film at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Kathleen Bryan Edwards Award for Human Rights at Full Frame Documentary Festival, The German Queerscope Award and Outfest’s Emerging Talent Award, among other awards. KIKI was released theatrically in Sweden in the summer of 2016 by Folkets Bio and the US in the spring of 2017 by Sundance Selects/IFC. For KIKI, Jordenö was nominated for the 2017 Film Independent Spirit Truer Than Fiction Award. In 2016 she was named by Variety and EFP as one of “Ten Women Filmmakers to Watch.”

Gabriel Sedgwick hails from Sweden but lives in New York City, where he has produced several award-winning films that have screened at festivals such as SXSW, New Directors/New Films, Urbanworld, BAM’s New Voices in Black Cinema, and Karlovy Vary, including Lanre Olabisi’s fiction features AUGUST THE FIRST and SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE (both distributed by Film Movement in the US). As Head of Production at Brooklyn-based production company Hard Working Movies, he also co-produced Jeremiah Zagar’s feature-length documentary CAPTIVATED: THE TRIALS OF PAMELA SMART, which premiered in competition at Sundance 2014 and was broadcast on HBO in the US and on television all over the world, and recently line produced Sara Jordenö’s KIKI, which premiered in competition at Sundance 2016, won the Teddy for best feature-length doc at the Berlin International Film Festival 2016, and is distributed in the U.S. by IFC Films. He most recently produced Penny Lane’s short documentary JUST ADD WATER for CNN Films, and is currently in production on a bunch of wacky things. He is a National Board of Review fellow, a Berlin Film Festival Talents alumni, and when not making movies, can be heard emitting falsetto noises in the Brooklyn-based musical constellation Odd Rumblings.