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Dec 13, 2024 at 10:00 am – Dec 15, 2024 at 5:00 pm

Film as Terrain: Centering Landscape in the Essay Film

With Dónal Foreman, Sanaz Sohrabi, Simon Liu and Nate Lavey

Join us for a three-day workshop led by acclaimed filmmaker Dónal Foreman to explore essay filmmaking, with a particular emphasis on the primary role that landscape played in the essay form.

Together, we will explore ways to approach landscape as a protagonist rather than as a mere backdrop, investigating how location itself can evoke meaning and emotion. We will discuss how framing, timing, and positioning influence our relationship with place, shaping our understanding of and attention to what we film, and he will demonstrate how we can reveal the “layers” of a place — its histories, transformations, and conflicting perspectives — and translate these layers into a compelling visual language. We’ll also dive into non-linear methodologies for structuring a project, allowing research, writing, filming, and editing to become fluid, iterative processes that develop in tandem.

In this intensive workshop, Foreman will share insights from his award-winning essay film The Image You Missed and his current work-in-progress, Broken Land. Through excerpts from his personal notebooks, film outlines, and raw footage, he’ll guide us through his creative process, shedding light on how he harnesses “wandering” — both through physical landscapes and the vast expanse of archival spaces — as a method of exploration and discovery.

On Friday, Foreman will draw on diverse references – the films of the Lumiéres, Chantal Akerman, Straub & Huillet; the writings of Deleuze, John Berger and Erika Balsom – to sketch out a few diverse, potential paths of experimenting with cinema, landscape and history through essayistic forms. He will look at how his parallel practice as a writer-director of fiction drama has informed, and increasingly converged and intermingled, with his experimental work.

Whether you’re at the start of a new project or deep in the editing phase, this workshop will offer practical tools, fresh perspectives, and a supportive environment for filmmakers, media artists, scholars, and creatives who are eager to explore the intersections of landscape, memory, and experimental cinema. Seats are limited. This workshop requires in-person participation, with proof of vaccination required for attendance. For questions, please reach out to [email protected].

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).

$350 early bird registration ends on December 6, 2024.

$400 regular registration.

The deposit is non-refundable. Should you need to cancel, you’ll receive half of your registration fee back until December 6. After December 6, the fee is non-refundable.

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 December 6, 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, Dec 13

10:00am – 10:30am Welcome & intros 

10:30am – 12:30pm Intro session with lead instructor

12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Simon Liu

4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with LEAD additional exercises / discussion

Saturday, Dec 14

10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references, case studies

10:30am – 12:30pm Session with Sanaz Sohrabi (Zoom)

12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch

2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Nate Lavey

4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with LEAD, additional exercises / discussion

Sunday, Dec 15

10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.

10:30am – 1pm Participant Work-in-progress with lead instructor

1:30pm – 2:00pm Wrap Up Discussion 

Each day follows this general structure, with some minor variations and substitutions:

10:00a

Warm up, inspiring references, case study, eye training.

10:30a

Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique

11:45a

Discussion

12:30p

Share / Discussion / Exercise

1:00p

Lunch (on your own)

2:00p

Presentation by guest speaker + individual work-in-progress critique

3:15p

Discussion

4:00p

Workshop Exercise + Critique

5:00p

Wrap Up

Bios

Dónal Foreman is an Irish filmmaker living in New York City. He has been making films since he was 11 years old and has since written, directed, edited, and co-produced three feature films and dozens of shorts spanning fiction, documentary, and experimental forms.

Sanaz Sohrabi (1988. Tehran) is a researcher of visual culture, and artist-filmmaker. Sohrabi works with essay film and installation as her means of research to explore the shifting and migratory paths between still and moving images, situating a singular image in a continuum of historical relations and archival temporalities. Recent exhibitions and festival participations: Berlinale, International Film Festival Rotterdam, IndieLisboa, Valdivia International Film Festival Chile, Sheffield Doc/Fest, DocLisboa, Open City Doc Fest, Ljubljana Biennial 2023, SAVVY Contemporary and VOX Centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal. Sohrabi is an Assistant Professor in the department of Communication Studies at Concordia University.

Nate Lavey is an experimental filmmaker and photographer with a background in documentary and video journalism. He has a longstanding interest in political militancy, landscape and the avant-garde. His latest short VERY GENTLE WORK (2024) premiered at Quinzaine des Cinéastes de Cannes.

Simon Liu (b. Hong Kong, 1987) is an artist filmmaker whose practice centers on the rapidly evolving psychological and sociopolitical landscapes of his homeland of Hong Kong through material abstraction, speculative history, and subversion of documentary cinema practices via short films, multi-channel video installations, mixed media prints, and 16mm projection performances. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Biennial 2024, Museum of Modern Art, MOCA Los Angeles, The Shed, PICA, Tai Kwun Contemporary, “Dreamlands: Expanded”, and the M+ Museum. His films have screened at festivals globally including the Toronto, New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, BFI London, Edinburgh, Jeonju, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals alongside the Sundance Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, CPH:DOX, Cinéma du Réel, and the Media City Film Festival. The M+ Museum and MoMA recently acquired Liu’s Quadruple 16mm Projection Highview, along with other recent works, for their Permanent Collections. He is currently editing his first feature film, Staffordshire Hoard.

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Tickets

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2024.12.13 Early Bird Registration
Early Bird Registration
$ 350.00
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Details

Start
Dec 13, 2024 at 10:00 am
End
Dec 15, 2024 at 5:00 pm
Cost
$350.00
Program:

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