Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

You’re invited to UnionDocs’ Summer Lab Pitch Bingo Night. Come through to catch a sneak peek from our brilliant Summer Doc Lab artists as they take a moment to practice their project pitches with a supportive audience. Here you will have plenty of time to mingle and meet in the wider UNDO community.
Folks often ask what exactly goes on in these labs at UNDO? Here’s your chance to find out what’s going on inside. Each artist and project was selected from an incredibly competitive pool of applicants and are coming to the program from places around the world like Nigeria, UK, France, Lithuania, Portugal, Ecuador, Romania, and some from very nearby like from our own borough of Queens.
After weeks of deep focus and work, we’re inviting you to meet and celebrate this incredible group for how far they’ve come.
Pitching a doc is usually a scary, competitive business, but does it have to be? To make things extra fun, we decided to turn the tables just a little: Grab a bingo card at the bar to engage in a friendly competition with fellow audience members. We’ll see who can listen along keenly enough to circle their way to Bingo stardom and win some grand prizes!
Come on out to learn about this work while it’s in early phases of development. These folks are looking for supporters, team members and more, so it may be the start of a beautiful collaboration.
Doors open at 7:30, show starts ~8:00 with celebratory festivities to follow!

Program Duration: 80 mins

Meet the Summer Lab!

Tobi Akinde
(he/him)

Born in Abeokuta, Tobi studied Law and German at the University of Ibadan. His short documentary and video work premiered and exhibited at the IRepresent Documentary Film Festival and Museum Brot & Kunst, Germany, respectively. His most recent documentary work as a cinematographer and leading character, Coconut Head Generation (2023), won the Jury Grand Prix at Cinema du Reel (2023) and has screened at Film at Lincoln Center, MoMA, BlackStar Film Festival, and Arles Photo Festival.

Jessica Bishopp
(she/her)

Jessica Bishopp is fascinated by subcultures, myth and our connection to place. She was selected from over 3,000 applications to represent the UK as a documentary director at Berlinale Talents 2020. Her latest documentary short ‘Puffling’, a coming-of-age story about two young Icelandic women and the puffins they rescue, funded by Rooftop Films and Field of Vision, had its World Premiere at SXSW 2023 and won the Oscar-Qualifying Jury Award for Documentary at Aspen Shortsfest.

Ruoyun Chen
(she/her)

Ruoyun Chen is an independent filmmaker. She is a fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. She did her Master of Science and PhD at Cornell University, majoring in System Engineering. Her most recent short sci-fi film “珊瑚 Eve, Eve” (2022) has been showcased and nominated in various international film festivals. Ruoyun is currently working on a feature-length documentary titled “We Swim Among Oceans,” which delves into the lives of young Chinese poets in diaspora.

Nadia Ghanem
(she/her)

Nadia Ghanem, Egyptian filmmaker, had her short “Three Disappearances And A Song” showcased at Cairo Int’l Film Fest, Images Fest Canada, and Cinema Árabe Feminino Brazil. It won Best Short at Gabes Cinema Fen Tunisia and audience/Jury awards at Manassat Film Fest Egypt. Now, she’s developing her first feature “Looking for Spiderman,” backed by grants from A Kiss in the Desert, Rawiyat film collective, and Two Stories Production, part of Studio Seen program. Nadia pursues her studies at la fémis.

Elena Kairytė
(she/her)

Elena Kairytė is a film director, writer and cinematographer based in Lithuania, completed her master’s degree in documentary filmmaking. With her films she mostly explores the documentary forms and its possibilities within the trans-disciplinary field. Her works, which blend her signature quirky sense of humor and a search for beauty in the moments of everyday life, have been competing at prestigious film festivals all around Europe. Elena’s debut feature film premiered at Hot Docs ’23.

Ana Mariz
(she/her)

Ana has studied cinema, with a focus on cinematography in ESTC (Lisbon), FAMU (Prague) and ESCAC (Barcelona) with the support of Gulbenkian Foundation and Erasmus + Program. She directed the short-documentary “Vigil” (2016) and the shor fiction-film “Matilde Looks Back” (2021), and is now preparing a documentary feature film: “All the Roses” . Besides her work as a director (not only in cinema but also in the visual arts and music), Ana works as a director of photography.

Argyro Nicolaou
(she/her)

Argyro Nicolaou is a filmmaker and researcher based in New York. Her work deals with the representation of history, displacement, and intergenerational memory in post-conflict, postcolonial societies, like her home country of Cyprus. She is currently working on Unsettled, her first documentary feature, and Excavators, a feature fiction script in development, which was awarded the Connecting Cottbus Award at the 2023 Karlovy Vary IFF Industry Section.

Gabriel Páez
(he/him)

Gabriel is an Ecuadorian filmmaker deeply passionate about memory and identity research. His journey through fiction, non-fiction, shorts, serials, and feature lengths, reflects a commitment to diverse narratives. Winner of several awards and recognitions globally, including Best Ecuadorian Documentary Award (Colibrí Award 2020), Best Documentary Feature (Festival de Las Alturas – Argentina 2019) for “Sacachún” 2018, and Best Ibero-American Documentary for “Maura” 2023 at the 18Shorts México.

Tudor Platon
(he/him)

Tudor Platon is a Romanian documentary director. He made his debut with House of Dolls which premiered in 2020 in Sarajevo Film Festival and was selected for Transylvania IFF, Zagreb Dox, Astra IFF, and Biografilm FF. His second film, An Almost Perfect Family, continues an extensive series of very personal works related to his own family.

He also works as a director of photography for fiction and documentary films, some of which having premiered at Festival de Cannes, Locarno or Toronto.

Oana Tenter
(she/her)

Oana Tenter is a Romanian documentary-maker and graduate of UCSC’s MFA in Social Documentation, where she studied on a Fulbright scholarship. Oana’s short The Pastor’s Women (2019), screened at Open City Docs London and at the UN Conference on Statelessness in the Hague. Her visual work has been displayed at PSNY, at IAS Santa Cruz, in the NYT while her writing can be found in The Guardian, The Evening Standard, Internazionale. She is working on her first feature, Yesterday Ended Last Night.

Denali Tiller
(she/her)

Denali Tiller is an award-winning documentary director and producer dedicated to collaborative, compassionate and human-centered storytelling. Her work has been seen on PBS/Independent Lens, Hulu, Nat Geo, Netflix, Lifetime and at film festivals around the world. Denali is also a painter and sculptor and lives and works in Queens, NY.

Yifei “Yash” Zhang
(he/they)

Yifei “Yash” Zhang, a filmmaker and multi-disciplianry artist originally from Tengzhou, China, is currently basing in London, pursuing a Creative Documentary Master of Fine Arts at University College London. Their cinematic storytelling delves into topics of queerness, fluidity, mental health, post-humanism, and trauma-healings.