You’re invited to UnionDocs’ first ever Summer Doc Lab Salon, it’s a Pitch Bingo Night with plenty of time to mingle and meet folks in the wider UNDO community.

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.

Folks often ask what exactly goes on in these labs at UNDO? Here’s your chance to peek inside. Each artist and project was selected from an incredibly competitive pool of applicants and are coming to the program from around the world from places like Istanbul, Estonia, Mexico, the UK, Peru, Uruguay, Canada, Korea and of course NYC!

After weeks of deep focus and work, we’re inviting you to meet and celebrate these folks for how far they’ve come. This talented group brings us stories from far and wide. From adventurous ice sailing, the murky pasts of British undercover cops, an unfolding family road memoir, a personal and political quest for reproductive justice, an essayistic investigation into the Northeast Blackout of 2003, poetry in service of the apocalypse, and sexual placemaking in Montreal’s central park, we truly have it all!

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…

You can grab a bingo card at the bar to engage in a little 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!

Dorothy Allen-Pickard’s practice is grounded in a deep interest in other people and a will to bring about social and political change. She merges documentary and theatrical techniques.​ Her films have been awarded Best UK Short at Open City, Special Mention at Oberhausen, Grand Prix at Arts Convergence, received Vimeo Staff Picks and screened at festivals including Doc NYC, Ann Arbor, LFF and Sheffield. She received the BFI New Talent Award & worked as director’s assistant on the Netflix series Kaos in 2022.

Niko Darling is a queer Uruguayan photographer, filmmaker and educator who lives in Brooklyn, NY. niko’s work is feminist and queer in nature and investigates subjects such as pervasive gender inequality, the queer female gaze, and the increasing lack of privacy in our everyday lives due to government surveillance. Always with a storyteller’s vantage, niko’s work also reaches to lighter subjects of our shared humanity like her investigative documentary short film about Pisces Women.

Irmak Karasu holds an MFA in Film/ Video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a dual BA in Film/Television and Psychology from Istanbul Bilgi University. She recently completed a two-year fellowship with the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Her films have been shown and awarded at film festivals including the Oberhausen Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival and Helsinki Film Festival. Currently, she is working on her first feature documentary, Kiziltoprak.

Aidan Kaye is a filmmaker, art director, and photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. His work centers around the dystopian elements of technology and the ever-evolving landscape it brings us to while questioning masculinity through interviews and visual contrasts. He has directed and produced an array of award-winning films, which earned praise at film festivals like Berlin Short ’21 (audience award), Peekskill ‘19 (best student film), and SUNY Wide ‘19 (best experimental film).

Bora Lee-Kil writes and makes films, believing that being born to deaf parents made her a natural storyteller. Her film Glittering Hands shows the beautiful world that her deaf parents encounter from the perspective of a daughter who is also a film director. Our Bodies was invited to the Berlinale Talents’ Doc Station at the 2020 Berlin IFF. She received the Gender Champion Award for women leaders worldwide presented by the Dutch government and Korea Disabled Human Rights Award.

Katy Montoya is an independent filmmaker living in Mexico City and historian of modern Syria. She incorporates years of experience working in Lebanon and Jordan with women and refugees as well as my ethnographic research with Syrian filmmakers and organizers into her current work. Most recently, she returned to her original community, her family in the Houston outskirts, to create an intimate cinematic portrait of downward mobility, the suburbs, and aspirationalism.

Erica Nguyen is a Vietnamese American documentary director based in New Mexico. Her background in Cultural Ethnography and Sociolinguistics centers the outsider experience of how our bodies carry genetic memory to heal estrangements from our origins. Collaboration through mutual self study and interdisciplinary modalities are integral to her work, which has taken form through rock climbing and recovery programming. Her growth is enriched by serving Native communities in the field of therapeutic adventure.

Mihkel Oksmann is Estonian documentary filmmaker. He graduated with a Master’s degree from Baltic Film and Media School in 2018 (cum laude). His thesis film ‘A Well-Kept Secret’ was announced the Best Central and Eastern Europe Student Film at Jihlava IDFF. In 2020, he co-directed documentary short “Wedding Officiant” that won the main prize at Oslo Film Festival. His artistic style is a combination of Baltic minimalism, a touch of black humor and good-natured warmth towards his characters.

Caroline Pahl is an Emmy Award-winning Polish-American producer, living and working in Brooklyn. She’s made short things (for VICE News on HBO), long things (HBO’s Year One: A Political Odyssey), artsy things (commissioned a butt ice sculpture, for VICE of course), and newsy things (won an Emmy for breaking news coverage) – all on some of the most perverse deadlines known to humankind. She’s currently freelance producing and directing her first documentary feature on the NYC blackout of 2003.

JAMIE ROSS (1987, Canada) is a visual artist, and filmmaker. In recent films, Radical Faerie elders help young people memorize the chants sung in 20th-century Queer street battles with the police; Pagan men imprisoned in Canadian federal prisons regale their chaplain with stories of intimate encounters with the divine, and in another, the portrait of a sheep farm run by witches is centered on the flow of autumnal viscera and liquids. They are the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship for ’20-’23.

Sofía Velázquez is a Peruvian independent filmmaker, editor and writer based in Lima. Her last film, About Everything There is to Know (2021), was premiered at Mar del Plata Film Festival and obtain a Special Mention of the Jury in the Latin American Competition. She is member of Mercado Central, a Collective that conducts film workshops for woman in prison spaces.