Oct 10, 2025 at 10:00 am – Oct 12, 2025 at 1:30 pm
Post Militant Cinema:
Documenting in the Wake of Struggle
With Nate Lavey, Ash Goh Hua, Sasha Tycko and Ben Russell
Documenting political movements is a vital—and contested undertaking. Struggles go through cycles of momentum, they crest and recede; energies converge, actions spike, outcomes land unevenly with the mass of organized participants feeling varying degrees of success or failure.
This workshop looks squarely at the complications of this task and its aftermath: how do we represent what came of the struggle, what lessons were learned, how can we communicate them and what happens next?
In this 3-day workshop we’re asking militant filmmakers what happens after the movement has ended. Filmmaker and photographer Nate Lavey will lead this workshop’s inquiry into the challenges that face politically engaged filmmakers, and for those that document political action. Drawing on experience in organizing and in formally adventurous media-making, Nate will guide participants through the preoccupations of much of his work around collective organization, representation of political militancy, and the long tail of political work and how it converges with media and representation.
Accompanied by an exciting lineup of guest filmmakers and artists, workshop participants will be invited to probe questions like: How do militant filmmakers continue to make politically engaged work after a cycle of struggle has ended? What techniques and methods do they employ during periods of reaction and repression? How do they orient themselves toward new struggles and resist falling into the traps of nostalgia, melancholy, and recuperation? How are struggles or the period after struggles represented in film? What are the afterlives of these struggles and how should we consider their legacy?
Alongside Nate, we’ll be joined by Ash Goh Hua, whose work places the relational within the political; Sasha Tycko, with her focus on the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta; and Ben Russell, whose latest feature Direct Action (2024) explores life after a successful ZAD struggle in France.
Alongside these in-depth sessions that focus on particular approaches, participants will be invited to share their own with Nate and the group for constructive feedback and discussion.
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 September 30, 2025.
$400 regular registration.
The deposit is non-refundable. Should you need to cancel, you’ll receive half of your registration fee back until September 30. After September 30 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 September 30, 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, 10th October
10:00am – 10:30am Welcome & intros
10:30am – 12:30pm Intro session with Nate Lavey
12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch
2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Ash Goh Hua
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Nate additional exercises / discussion
Saturday, 11th October
10:00am – 12:30pm Work in Progress feedback session
12:30am – 2:00pm Lunch
2:00pm – 4:00pm Session with Sasha Tycko
4:00pm – 4:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Nate, additional exercises / discussion
Sunday, 12th October
10:00am – 10:30am Warm up, inspiring references.
10:30am – 12:30pm Session with Ben Russell (remote)
12:30am – 1:30pm Wrap Up Discussion with Nate, additional exercises / discussion
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
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 recent short film Very Gentle Work premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight in the Cannes Film Festival in 2024.
Ash Goh Hua is a Singapore born and raised, New York based filmmaker. Utilizing both documentary and narrative forms, Ash tells personal stories that reveal the inherently embodied politics of relation, society and culture. Named one of the 25 New Faces of Film by Filmmaker Magazine in 2022, Ash is a 2024 Berlinale Talent and a 2025 Creative Capital Award recipient.
Sasha Tycko is an anthropologist and filmmaker whose current work focuses on the Atlanta forest at the center of the conflict over “Cop City.” During the two year occupation of the forest, she integrated filmmaking with ethnographic research to explore how the contested landscape—once the site of a city prison farm and antebellum plantation—problematizes American ideas of wilderness. Out of this research, she made the observational film, “Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest” (2023, 40m) and, with Marion Lary, “Atlanta Forest Garden: Four Days of Work” (2023, 12m), which have been screened at university theaters, micro-cinemas, diy venues, communes, mutual aid centers, festivals, public libraries, bookshops, and more. She is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Emory University, where she is a member of the Visual Scholarship Initiative.
Ben Russell is an artist and filmmaker whose work lies at the intersection of ethnography and psychedelia. His films and installations are in direct conversation with the history of the documentary image, providing a time-based inquiry into trance phenomena and evoking the research of Jean Rouch, Maya Deren and Michael Snow, among others. Russell received a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, a FIPRESCI International Critics Prize (IFFR 2009) for his first feature film Let Each One Go Where He May, and was an exhibiting artist in documenta 14. His second feature film, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness (co-directed with Ben Rivers), premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2013. Curatorial projects include Magic Lantern (Providence, USA, 2005-2007), BEN RUSSELL (Chicago, USA, 2009-2011), and Hallucinations (Athens, Greece, 2017).
