Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

Join UnionDocs to kick off a three day workshop Contested Realities: From Field Work to Form with a screening and discussion around borderlands and how to navigate research and hybrid forms in the documentary world. The screening will feature four experimental documentary shorts that turn research into poetic interrogations of land and borders, community and resistance.

Under foot & Overstory follows local environmentalists and a park’s changing boundary in Iowa City, Iowa. terrestrial sea is a poetic picture of the journey through the US/Mexico borderlands. 100 Partially Obscured Views/100 Vistas Parcialmente Oscurecidas resists imperialist policy designed to dissect and obstruct the movement and culture of the interconnected community of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. COMPLEX tells the stories of immigrants and refugees in detention in Eloy, Arizona as the COVID pandemic began to impact incarcerated populations.

Together, the evening’s program will prompt us to think critically about the process of doing research on contested territories, or competing narratives and histories, and transforming that research into art that transcends the boundaries of traditional documentary.

Join us for a rare insight into the experience and work of four filmmakers committed to making creative decisions that center the lives of people implicated in their projects. And don’t miss out on the rest of our workshop, as Cathy Lee Crane continues to guide us through a reimagination of research and project development.

Program

Under foot & Overstory by Jason Livingston

34:30, 2005

“On the 200th anniversary of Simon Bolivar’s liberation journey across Colombia, Bicentenario reflects on the far-reaching consequences of the liberator’s legacy, a legacy kept alive through a wide range of intentional and unintentional rituals of remembrance. Summoning Bolivar’s spirit in the exact landscapes that witnessed the battles, Bicentenario reveals the contemporary social rituals that perpetuate the ongoing violence residing deep within the social and political unconscious. Two hundred years after his campaign, Simon Bolivar’s spirit has become a mix of political mysticism, unquestioned doctrine, and enigma—or perhaps a curse that has fixed itself in the collective imaginary of an entire continent. It is this curse that Bicentenario seeks to invoke, and perhaps exorcise.”

terrestrial sea by Cathy Lee Crane

15 mins, 2023

During a poetic meditation on water in the US/Mexico borderlands where actors traverse the Rio Grande by canoe and cross into the Sonoran desert as members of the 1851 Bartlett survey team, they are confronted with social actors from the present-day.

100 Partially Obscured Views/100 Vistas Parcialmente Oscurecidas by Nicole Antebi

17:50 mins, 2023

I was raised in the borderlands of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. In the years since I graduated from high school in 1993, I watched the two cities, that once shared the same name and continue to share a community, become increasingly dissected by federal political, social, economic, and environmental policies designed to obstruct the movement of people, culture, and the river with two names.

El Paso and Juárez share history, share people, share each other’s gaze, their differences are constructed by imperialist treaties and policies, and obstructions that insist on their difference.

COMPLEX by David Taylor

13 mins, 2021

COMPLEX (2021) depicts the vast system of privately operated prisons that incarcerate migrants and refugees under contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States. Narrated entirely by refugees who were in detention as the COVID pandemic began to impact prison populations, this short documentary centers on the La Palma Correctional Facility located in Eloy, Arizona. In 2019 the average daily population in ICE custody reached a record 50000 with upwards of 70% incarcerated in for-profit facilities. As of 2025 the number has climbed to nearly 60,000. Functioning as a component within a larger survey project, the video suggests the pervasiveness of the border security industrial complex in the American geography, the commodification of human displacement, and the insinuation of corporate interests into regimes of border surveillance and control.

Program Duration: 80 mins

Bios

Cathy Lee Crane’s speculative histories involve extensive research in the archive and on location field work. Various discoveries have led to development strategies for production, collaboration, and ultimately the form of a completed project’s dissemination (single channels, installation, on-line interludes). These projects include: critical biography (Pasolini’s Last Words which will be presented at NYU Casa de Italiana on 11/10/25 alongside a new installation iteration of that research Pasolini : Durations with John Di Stefano from 11/3-11/13; prisons (research and cinematography for Farocki’s Prison Images); and the borderlands multi-platform work Drawing the Line which includes Crossing Columbus (2020), terrestrial sea (2023), and Border Dwellers (2025). This most recent and ongoing side of Cathy’s work in the borderlands explores it as an historical space, a place and a line of inquiry and is a preoccupation that all the guest lecturers share. Since 2017, Cathy has been working in various borderland areas, particularly in New Mexico and Arizona, while considering various historical, cultural and scientific perspectives on the subject. This subject has driven Cathy to consider the limitless ways in which particular sets of images can be produced, combined and reorganized to circulate in different ways in varying circumstances on different platforms, and how this might redefine the images(s) for different audiences.

Jason Livingston is a media artist and filmmaker, film programmer, and writer. His award-winning work has screened widely, including Sheffield, Camden, Rotterdam, Anthology, the Austrian Museum, and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Under Foot & Overstory is distributed by the CFMDC, and Lake Affect is available through EAI’s Experimental Television Center collection. Awarded residencies include the Millay Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has received project support from funders such as the New York State Council on the Arts and the Simons Foundation.

David Taylor’s artwork examines place, territory, history and politics. Exhibited widely, his projects reveal how borders can function not only as spatial demarcations, but also as an amplifying device particularly attuned to changing geo-political, environmental and social conditions. Recent exhibition venues include the Boise Art Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, MFA Houston, Museo de las Artes Universidad de Guadalajara and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Taylor’s work can be found in numerous collections including the Library of Congress, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins Museum. The Guardian, Places Journal, Gizmodo and Arquine have recently featured his projects. In 2019 Taylor was awarded a residency at Proyecto Siqueiros: La Tallera in Cuernavaca, Mexico and an Arizona Commission on the Arts Research and Development Grant. For his work on migrant detention, Taylor is a nominee for a 2025 Rocky Mountain Southwest Emmy and he has an upcoming solo exhibition at Museo de Arte de Sonora in the fall of 2026.

David Taylor is a member of the Photography, Video and Imaging faculty in the University of Arizona School of Art and a faculty affiliate with the U of A Center for Latin American Studies.

Nicole Antebi is an animator and moving image artist whose work explores the intersection of storytelling, place, and belief. Her practice is rooted in a deep curiosity about how different cultures-past and present-assign personhood, memory and mysticism to the land. Through animation, Nicole investigates place-based animism and the ways in which landscapes become vessels for knowledge, spirituality, and hope, especially for times of crisis.

Driven by a desire to expand the language of storytelling, Nicole uses animation as a tool to bridge the seen and unseen-to animate histories, rituals and relationships that are often invisible or intangible. Her work invites viewers to consider how a place holds power, emotion, and ancestral presence.

From a young age, Nicole became acutely aware of the inequities facing Mexicans, Mexican-Americans and Fronteriza/o/x/s who reside in the borderlands of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad, Juárez, the region where she came of age. In the years since she graduated from high school in 1993, following the signing of NAFTA, Nicole watched the two cities, that once shared the same name and continue to share the same community, become increasingly dissected by federal political, social, economic, and environmental policies designed to obstruct the movement of people, culture, and the river with two names.

Nicole is an assistant professor of Animation at The University of Arizona and Co-director of The Wonder Studio at Biosphere II.