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

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

How do documentary makers continue to work critically, responsibly, and safely in a rapidly shifting political landscape, and one that is increasingly threatening to those organizing and documenting on the ground?

Presented as part of Fall of Freedom, this conversation brings together filmmakers and collaborators Rachel Lauren Mueller and Laura Poitras, with radio producer and Radiolab creator Jad Abumrad to consider the practical and ethical questions facing political documentary in the United States today. 

Drawing from their experiences across on-the-ground organizing, investigative film, journalism, data, sound, and nonfiction storytelling they’ll discuss how makers navigate access and risk, protect sources and collaborators, safeguard their teams and materials, and think carefully about what it means to document politically sensitive subjects in a moment of heightened scrutiny, using Laura and Rachels’ recent collaboration on the documentary “They’re Here” about ICE’s occupation of Minneapolis, as a starting point. 

We’ll unfold a conversation about the infrastructures at play: technical, ethical, and communal that make rigorous and independent documentary work possible, and think through the practicalities of how we might strengthen them together.

Bios

Rachel Lauren Mueller is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, and cinematographer. Her work combines investigative journalism with an anthropological approach to illuminate the hidden structures shaping power, belief, and identity. Rachel’s award-winning work has been featured in The New York Times, PBS, and Al Jazeera.

Rachel Lauren Mueller creates immersive films that reveal how systems of power operate—and how people resist, adapt, and find meaning within them. Her work has examined abuse cover-ups in juvenile detention centers, white supremacist efforts to reshape small-town communities, the ICE occupation of the Twin Cities, the reimagining of religious rituals for queer people, and more

Laura Poitras is an Oscar and Pulitzer Prize winning filmmaker and journalist.

Her most recent film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion, only the second documentary to win the top prize in the festival’s history. The film was nominated for an Academy Award, won an Independent Spirit Award, and was named best documentary of the year by New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the National Society of Film Critics.

Her film CITIZENFOUR won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with awards from BAFTA, Directors Guild of America, Independent Spirit Awards, Gotham Awards, German Filmpreis, and Cinema Eye Honors, among others. Her journalism exposing the U.S. National Security Agency’s global mass surveillance programs was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and the George Polk Award for National Security reporting.

Her Oscar-nominated film My Country, My Country, the first film in her Post-9/11 Trilogy, documents the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The second film of the trilogy, the Emmy-nominated The Oath, documents Guantanamo Bay Prison and the U.S. “war on terror.”

Jad Abumrad is the creator and former host of Radiolab, a public radio program broadcast on nearly 600 stations across the nation and downloaded more than 12 million times a month as a podcast. Abumrad hosts Everything. Together. Radio on Apple Music Hits. Each episode offers a kaleidoscopic mix of uptempo, electro, dance, funk, hip-hop, experimental noise, soul, and everything in between.