Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p
Tickets $12
Jun 25, 2026 at 7:30 pm
Eastern Anthems
With Jean-Jacques Martinod & Rebecca Shapass
UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY
We’re delighted to kick off our workshop Embracing Adrift: The Documentary Travelogue with a special screening and conversation with workshop lead, the brilliant filmmaker & media artist Jean-Jacques Martinod!
Working across ethnofiction, anthropology, and surregionalism with haptic artisanal film techniques, Jean-Jacques Martinod’s work traces the intertwined relations between the human and the non-human: living mythologies, disappearing memories, biomes and techne as they manifest in relation to living worlds. Eastern Anthems is a relay between two artists. This experimental film shows the return of a species of cicada that only emerges every 17 years in an America that also may be starting a new cycle. In Datura’s Aubade, a farmer discovers a fallen meteorite in the high deserts of New Mexico. The Alien Earth and the Earth Alien commingle under the spell of a deadly nightshade.
Jean-Jacques Martinod will be joined in conversation by filmmaker and artist Rebecca Shapass following the screening. Come through!
Program
Eastern Anthems by Jean-Jacques Martinod & Matthew Wolkow
2024, 78 min, Canada, USA
Datura’s Aubade by Jean-Jacques Martinod & Bretta C. Walker
2021, 17 min, USA, Mexico
Program Duration: 95 mins
Watch the conversation between Presenter1, Presenter2 and Presenter 3 on the UnionDocs’ Membership hub.
Bios
Jean-Jacques Martinod is a filmmaker, media artist, film curator, abyssological researcher, and clandestine anarchivist. His work is engaged within extended modes of noetic and intersubjective experience, manifest in an ongoing practice of experimental documentary cinema: the human/non-human, folk mythology, anemic memory, sur-regional biomes, hydra techno-logics, and the poetic mediation of living worlds and their extended cohabitants. Martinod’s work has been showcased in leading festivals, museums, and cinematheques worldwide, including the IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam, FIDMarseille, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Frontera Sur, First Look at MoMI, CIFF Camden, Novos Cinemas Pontevedra, PHI Centre Montreal, Cinemateca do MAM Rio de Janeiro, Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador, Cinemateca de Bogotá, and the European Media Arts Festival, among many others.
Rebecca Shapass is a filmmaker and artist investigating documentary form and archival practice through the creation of film & video, photo, installation, and text. Shapass’ work combines techniques of optical & aural abstraction with documentary sensibilities to propel audiences into a space of questioning not only what they see & hear – but how and why. Shapass is compelled by the uncapturable – what escapes both image & language — and how these absences haunt memory & archive.
From the Event
