Jun 26, 2026 at 10:00 am – Jun 28, 2026 at 1:30 pm
Embracing Adrift:
The Documentary Travelogue
With Jean-Jacques Martinod, Khalik Allah, Antes Muerto Cine & Tiffany Sia
What does it mean to move through a place with a camera—not to capture it, but to engage with its present, histories, absences, and afterlives? In this workshop, filmmaker & media artist Jean-Jacques Martinod invites participants to look anew at the documentary travelogue as a speculative, political, and poetic form.
The travelogue, an extension of the diary form, has long served as a structuring device for filmmakers; changing landscapes and passing time offer a visible and legible analog to the development of a narrative and the journey taken by its protagonists. Drawing from his own practice between fieldwork and reflection, Martinod approaches travel not only as discovery, but as a process of listening, wandering, and attunement to what lingers beneath the visible. The travelogue as a form then encounters the unexpected, the mistake and the incomplete into the creative process.
We’ll be exploring questions like: how does travel structure the way we construct a film, and how does filming shape the way we travel? How can the camera register what is no longer there? What kinds of narratives emerge when we relinquish mastery over location and embrace the unexpected? How might the travelogue become a space for reimagining relationships between land, history, and the moving image?
Across the weekend, Martinod and guests will share methods for working with landscape as archive, failure as a generative process, and travel as an act of participatory worldmaking. Argentine film collective Antes Muerto Cine will present and discuss their unique approach to integrating chaos and mistakes into their work. Tiffany Sia will critically unpack the thorny colonial history of the travelogue, and look to the future of the form. Participants will also be invited to share their own travel-based projects—whether rooted in distant journeys or the overlooked terrains of the everyday—in the context of a group feedback session. Together, we will explore the travelogue as an open form, and against romantic notions of the wandering auteur or the confessional diarist, we embrace failure, drift, and the incomplete as methodology.
No prior filmmaking experience is required—just a curiosity for movement, memory, and the unstable boundaries between document and dream.
Details
Open to everyone, though the workshop setting is best suited for filmmakers, film producers, journalists, curators and media artists.
Give us an idea of who you are and why you are coming. When you register you will be asked for a short statement of interest that should briefly describe your experience and a film project (it would be great if you have a project in progress that you would present to the group during the work-in-progress critique sessions), plus a bio. There’s a spot for a link to a work sample (and CV, which would also be nice, but is not required).
$295 early bird registration ends on June 17, 2026.
$350 regular registration.
The deposit is non-refundable. Should you need to cancel, you’ll receive half of your registration fee back until June 17. After June 17, the fee is non-refundable.
No animation software is required for participation in this workshop.
In order to keep costs down, this workshop is a BYOL, i.e. bring your own laptop. Students must be fully proficient using and operating their computers.
To register for a workshop, students must pay in full via card, check, or cash . After the early bird registration deadline of June 17, course fees are not refundable or transferable and any withdrawals or deadlines will result in the full cost of the class being forfeit. There will be no exceptions. To withdraw from a course please email info-at-uniondocs.org.
In the event that a workshop does not receive sufficient enrollment, it may be canceled. Students will be notified at least 48 hours prior to the start of a cancelled workshop and will be refunded within 5 business days. If we reschedule a workshop to another date, students are also entitled to a full refund. UnionDocs reserves the right to change instructors without prior notification, and to change class location and meeting times by up to an hour with 48 hours prior notice.
Please note: Participants are accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis.
Schedule
Friday, June 26th
10:00am – 10:30am Welcome & intros
10:30am – 12:30pm Intro session with Jean-Jacques Martinod
12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch
2:00pm – 4:00pm Remote session with Antes Muerto Cine
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Jean-Jacques additional exercises / discussion
Saturday, June 27th
10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references, case studies
10:30am – 12:30pm Creative session OR work-in-progress with Jean-Jacques
12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch
2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Khalik Allah
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Jean-Jacques, additional exercises / discussion
Sunday, June 28th
10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.
10:30am – 12:30pm Session with Tiffany Sia
12:30am – 2:00pm Wrap Up
Each day follows this general structure, with some minor variations and substitutions:
Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.
Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique
Share / Discussion / Exercise
Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique
Workshop Exercise + Critique
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.
Tiffany Sia (b. Hong Kong) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer based in New York whose work examines how images and material culture shape power, governance, and imagined geographies. Her practice traces the apparatus underwriting film/video, attending to what remains unseen or illegible within the visual record. Author of On and Off-Screen Imaginaries (Primary Information, 2024), her films have screened at TIFF, MoMA Doc Fortnight, and the New York Film Festival. She has held solo exhibitions at Artists Space, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, and Mudam Luxembourg. Overt Listening, her first feature film and a forthcoming body of work, will be presented at Kunsthalle Wien (Fall 2026) and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (Spring 2027).
Antes Muerto Cine is a film collective based in Buenos Aires, dedicated to the production of documentary and experimental cinema. We met in a riot in the public university, recording images and sounds to shake and discuss the reality we inhabit.
Since then, we seek that our practice dialogue with past and future experiences to noticeably rescue the absurd and everyday beauty that is shipwrecked in chaos. We like movies that are alive, those that are made with care in the privacy or in the street, those that are invented drawing conclusions on the fly, those that play.Because we believe that films are also their mode of production, we understand friendship as a creative policy. Our projects were part of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight, Mar del Plata International Film Fest, Ji.Hlava DIFF, FID Marseille, Márgenes Cine, DocLisboa, Visions Du Réel, BAFICI, RIDM, É tudo verdade, FICUNAM, Cinélatino Rencontres de Toulouse, New Horizons IFF, Festifreak, Transcinema, DOCBSAS, SEMINCI, FIDOCS, Open City, Frontera Sur among other festivals. And they have received support for its realization from Berlinale Talents, Buenos Aires Youth Art Biennial, BoliviaLAB, AcampaDOC, Labex, Migrant Film Festival, INCAA – National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Cultural Patronage of BsAs and National University of the Arts.
Khalik Allah is a New York-based photographer and filmmaker who practices Camera Ministry with an eye as open as his heart. The resulting work has been described as “street opera” and noted for its beautifully visceral humanity. After a number of short films that reflect relationships between formed through portraiture, Allah advanced his artistry with the feature Field Niggas (2015), shot at nighttime on the corder of Harlem’s 125th St. and Lexington Avenue. This corner also served as thesis for his first photography book Souls Against the Concrete, published by University of Texas Press in 2017. Allah continued with Black Mother (2018), an ecstatic expression of reverence and realities across Jamaica. This award winning fil has been seen in festivals, museums and schools around the world; further released in the UK and the US through distributors Dogwoof and Grasshopper Film. Allah’s films are available on the Criterion Channel. Khalik is currently at work on his second photo book from 125th and Lexington.
