UnionDocs is delighted to join hands with Open City Documentary Festival as a part of ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES, a UnionDocs Break 🌀ut, co-curated with programmer Cíntia Gil, that hopes to make room for bravely sharing and responding to challenging documentary art, invites a diverse audience into a monthly series of film programs and study groups, and brings those voices to the stage of a public dialogue.

We’re thrilled to come together for a Study Group Session, a kind of grassroots book club, but for documentary art! We’ll stream cutting edge, powerful and poetic features and shorts, pulling out trenchant examples from deep in the archive or resonant works from recent years. It’s all about sparking discussion and deeper investigation, through reading, listening and responding in small, self-organized groups that together form a larger collective experience.

You will get access to the FILM PROGRAM around which this Study Group is structured through our Member’s Site. a few days in advance. 

Sign up and stay tuned in your inbox for further instructions.

This program is presented with generous support from the AMPAS (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) FilmWatch program and from Hamilton College. It precedes and informs a duo of programs that will center around the new book-length collection: William Greaves Filmmaking as Mission, edited by Scott MacDonald and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, from Columbia University Press.

FILM PROGRAM

The first piece of the ANDRE TRILOGY, this film – or a lo-fi fragment from an unnamed video production – seems to explore the codes and roles involved in a filmed interview; a playful short-circuit between the act of reading and the act of telling, breaking continuity and crossing the boundaries of subject, story, enunciation. A man is multiple men, a lived experience is a dream, an interview is a performance, playing with our place as viewers, with our own assumptions.

Built from the footage found on an old BetaSP found on a VCR recorder bought on Ebay, Tester is one of several experiments of the filmmaker with monologue and narration. In contrast with the precise and obsessive verbal construction, the film eludes control over what could constitute a center or a subject to it, and rather plays with the asymmetry between what is perceived and how meaning is shaped, and the intersection between private and public.

BIOS

James N. Kienitz Wilkins is a filmmaker and artist. His films and videos have screened widely at international film festivals including Berlin, Toronto, New York, Locarno, Rotterdam, CPH:DOX, BAMcinemaFest, New Directors/New Films, and beyond. In 2017, he was included in the Whitney Biennial and a retrospective of his work was showcased at RIDM (Montréal). Solo exhibitions include Gasworks (London), Spike Island (Bristol, UK) and Kunsthalle Winterthur (Switzerland).

Morgan Quaintance is a London-based artist and writer. His moving image work has been shown and exhibited widely at festivals and institutions including: MOMA, New York; Mcevoy Foundaton for the Arts, San Francisco; Konsthall C, Sweden; David Dale, Glasgow; European Media Art Festival, Germany; Alchemy Film and Arts Festival, Scotland; Images Festival, Toronto; International Film Festival Rotterdam; and Third Horizon Film Festival, Miami. He is the recipient of the 2022 ARTE Award at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg. Over the past ten years, his critically incisive writings on contemporary art, aesthetics and their socio-political contexts, have featured in publications including Art Monthly, the Wire, and the Guardian, and helped shape the landscape of discourse and debate in the UK.