Doors 7:00p
Program 7:30p
Tickets $12

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re delighted to kick off our workshop The Magical Image: Special Effects as Documentary Method with a special screening and conversation featuring workshop lead, the brilliant filmmaker Carl Elsaesser!

Working between experimental film, essay, and archival practice, Carl Elsaesser creates films that blur the boundaries between memory, history, and fiction. Blending found materials, personal archives, and carefully constructed cinematic gestures, his work asks how images continue to shape the stories we tell about ourselves and others long after the moments they depict have passed.

The evening brings together two recent films—Home When You Return (2022) and How to Run a Trotline (2024)—alongside The Lost Image Archives #4: Julie (2026), presented in three parts throughout the program. Moving between domestic spaces, vanished histories, amateur cinema, and fleeting encounters, these works invite us into a cinema where metaphor, ritual, and transformation become ways of approaching documentary. Rather than treating images as fixed records of reality, Elsaesser’s films open them up as living, unstable forms through which memory and meaning continue to shift.

Following the screening, Carl Elsaesser will be joined in conversation by filmmaker Alena Lodkina. Come through!

Program

USA, 2024, 18mins

 “Stretching and blurring the boundaries of video essay, experimental film and home movie, traces of a 1950s homemade melodrama by amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin intermingle with a mournful homage to the author’s grandmother and her vacated home. A powerful mélange of cinematic and domestic spaces, past and present.” – Kevin B Lee

USA, 2022, 30mins

“Despite the didactic promise of its title, Carl Elsaesser’s new film will not teach you how to complete this obscure action. The phrase itself, at once ridiculous and noble, is pleasure enough, and its tone fits perfectly on a work that walks a thin, dandyish path down the border of farce and elegy. Another pleasure: it isn’t about anything, though it’s of quite a lot. Of fathers (who might teach one how to run a trotline, or sit on a porch, or disappear); of other films (particularly a pair by adopted fathers Michael Snow and William E. Jones); of at least two kinds of cruising; of the winter in Maine and the streets in New York and the many kinds of light to be found in and around both (ranging from snowy diffusion to snare-hit clarity). But one needn’t know these films or Maine or New York, not any more than one need know what a trotline is, to be hooked by the ongoing oddness of Elsaesser’s rhythms, which move gently, languidly toward new raptures of illumination.” – Phil Coldiron

USA, 2026, 18min

Bios

Carl Elsaesser is an experimental filmmaker whose work blends genres and materials to critically investigate the overarching presence of history without losing sight of individual experiences of human connection. He is interested in framing a film practice through ritualistic and slow processes—thinking with a project as something akin to skin or clothing, worn throughout his day as he teaches class, walks through the city or countryside late at night, or calls a friend across the world.His films have screened widely at festivals and institutions including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, Cinema du Réel, European Media Art Festival, the National Gallery of Art, and the Criterion Channel.He has been honored with grants and residencies including a 2026 Creative Capital Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Minnesota State Arts Board grant, a MacDowell Fellowship, and residencies at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Hewnoaks, and Squeaky Wheel Media Center. His work has been featured in publications such as LA Review of Books, Millennium Film Journal, and FilmExplorer.

Alena Lodkina is a Russian-born Australian filmmaker. She has made fiction and documentary short films that have played at festivals around the world. Her debut feature film STRANGE COLOURS was produced through the Biennale College Cinema and premiered at Venice Film Festival 2017, toured the festival circuit and had a cinematic release across Australia. PETROL, her second feature as writer/director, premiered at Locarno Film Festival and in the inaugural competition at Melbourne International Film Festival in 2022. The New Yorker named it a stand-out at New Directors/ New Films Festival 2023 and it was released in cinemas in Australia. She was a MacDowell Fellow in fall/winter 2023-2024. Her non-fiction and fiction writing has appeared in Senses of Cinema, 4:3 Journal, Meanjin, Fireflies, HEAT Journal, The Stinging Fly and One-Way Street. TWICE OVER is her third feature film.