Doors 7:00p
Show 7:30p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

UnionDocs is thrilled to invite you to a night celebrating the incredible artists supported by our Fiscal Sponsorship program! Come through and tune into a special showcase of work with the following artists in attendance: Bernardo Ruiz, Helena Kincaid-Nalladurai & Daniel Nalladurai, Jess Shane, Ruoyen Chen, Kyuri Jeon, David Osit, Joseph Stankus, Ashley Connor, Katherine Heiserman, Elana Meyers,  Meg Vatterott, Mitra Kaboli, Aaron Edwards, Adam Seth Golfer, Ester Casey, Kaelyn Lynch, Brian Becker, Andree Ljutica and Simon Liu!

Their work traverses extraordinary terrain — from the fragile myths of American masculinity to the lives of Chinese poets navigating migration and political divides, and the enduring influence of childhood encounters with poetry. These projects move through New York’s housing system and across its five boroughs by bus, unearth the buried histories of sanitation workers’ strikes, and reimagine a beloved American play as an intimate act of collective listening. They explore the politics of time through jet lag and colonial histories, chart Hong Kong’s shifting landscape through experimental moving images, and imagine a visitor from the future guiding immigrant families to safety in Queens. Elsewhere, they trace the improbable political resurrection of Jeremy Corbyn, follow families through the small rituals of everyday life, and find unlikely defenders of truth in the volunteer editors of Wikipedia. They journey along the militarized US–Mexico border and the volcanic slopes of Sicily, reckon with illness, memory, and the changing bonds between loved ones, and follow a group of Swedish rappers chasing music, friendship, and the possibility of making it.

This is a free community event. Come through and toast these pioneering artists and their budding projects!

All of the presenting artists in this program received a 2026 Support for Artists grant, administered through UnionDocs’ fiscal sponsorship program and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature

Program

People’s Republic of Letter by Ruoyun Chen

Across China, the United States, and Australia, five Chinese millennial poets come of age from their twenties into their thirties as lockdowns, migration, and political divides reshape their lives. As the dream of a borderless world fades, they turn to poetry to sustain connection, navigate loss, and find new ways to belong.

What’s Inside the Moon by Jess Shane

Kenneth Koch’s book Wishes, Lies and Dreams changed how kids learn about poetry. More than half a century after its publication, Jess Shane tracks down Koch’s students to ask what it meant for their lives.

Changing City by Helena Kincaid-Nalladurai & Daniel Nalladurai

Changing City is a three-part portrait of New York’s housing system, told by the New Yorkers caught inside it.

T_T_T_T: travel_time_translation_through by Kyuri Jeon

T_T_T_T: travel_time_translation_through is a hybrid experimental nonfiction film and drawing project that uses jet lag as a temporal-political framework. Beginning with Korea’s colonial history of standardized time, the work follows the ways temporal dislocation moves across bodies, languages, migration, and historical memory. Rather than treating time as linear or universal, T_T_T_T asks: What time is it now, and for whom?

Splits in Two by Simon Liu

Expanding my artistic preoccupation of dynamically depicting my homeland of Hong Kong’s rapid cultural evolution through experimental documentaries, alternative darkroom film practices, and distinctive uses of projection technique, Borrowed Time is an immersive moving image exhibition depicting the city’s rapid political shifts of recent years whilst investigating my ancestral relationship to the land. Through interactive technology, attempts to modernize avant-garde film language, and idiosyncratic approaches to editing and sound design, this mixed media projection and sound installation, in conjunction with a series of live expanded cinema presentations, aims to subjectively catalogue the city’s mutation into an uncertain future.

The Low Season by Bernardo Ruiz

A woman from the future arrives in present day Queens, New York in order to lead immigrant families to safety as bounty hunters prey on them.

Man on the Left by David Osit

Man on the Left follows the meteoric rise, the unbelievable fall, and the present-day improbable resurrection of Jeremy Corbyn – one of the most beloved and reviled left-wing politicians in the Western Hemisphere,

It Goes That Quick by Joseph Stankus

A trip to the grocery store. A drive to work. The planting of a tree. These are a few of the “trivial” events that make up IT GOES THAT QUICK – a hybrid documentary that follows two families over the course of eight years. Set against the drab highways and nondescript suburbs of the American Northeast, the film begins as two filmmakers set out to capture the everyday lives of their own family members by casting them in their own short films. But as the years progress and the lines between fact and fiction blur, what starts as a humorous documentation of normalcy soon transforms into a poetic meditation on the act of filmmaking, the passage of time, and the simple tasks and chores that end up defining our lives.

Dirty Days in Fun City by Katherine Heiserman

Using archival footage, Dirty Days in Fun City unearths two sanitation worker strikes and their little-known connection to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Through its exploration of labor and waste, the film examines what and who society deems valuable or disposable.

Rabbit Hole by Meg Vatterott

Amid a confusing and divisive internet, a collection of unlikely heroes maintain the last good place online: Wikipedia. Their mission – free access to knowledge – faces unwavering challenges as misleading AI, disinformation and rising authoritarianism erode the concept of fact. As greedy corporations and oppressive governments use information as a weapon, regular people find power in this community-driven encyclopedia.

Ride Along by Mitra Kaboli

Ride Along is a series of five place-based audio documentaries that follow a specific bus route in each borough of New York City.

Our Town by Aaron Edwards

Pulling from traditions of radio drama, installation and live theater, Aaron Edwards’ production of Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town presents one of the most enduring pieces of modern American theater through a hybrid of live actors, pre-recorded performances, foley and sound design — all experienced in the audience’s headphones. The production is a love letter to audio, a deepening of the call to imagination in Wilder’s minimalist text and a ritual of close, communal listening.

Magic Valley by Adam Seth Golfer

Along the US/Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas, the militarization of the riverlands is having devastating effects on one of the most biodiverse ecologies on earth. Overheard conversations about wildlife migration, surveillance, the movement of people and climate change swirl together, asking who and what is permitted to move across a landscape whose borders have been imposed by man, not nature.

Outside of the Mind by Ester Casey

‘Outside of the Mind’ is a film and video installation taking its name from the Latin roots of the word ‘dementia’. A scientific and poetic chronicle of the breakdown of the brain, body and heart, the observations of a daughter are paired with a continually transforming image of her mother, as a girl in the Philippines, a brilliant chemist in Chicago, and a passionate naturalist throughout. A reflection on love, humor, loss, and ultimately a transformation that expands connection with each other, the self, and the outside world.

Hen House by Kaelyn Lynch

Dianna Cowern was an MIT-educated physicist and YouTube star with over 3 million followers to her Physics Girl channel. Then she came down with a mysterious illness that left her immobile in bed in a dark room 24 hours a day, unable to even communicate with her husband except through rudimentary hand signals. This film follows Dianna’s multi-year journey through the medical system, her fight for a cure, and the ongoing grappling between maintaining hope and finding a place of acceptance.

Yeah I Love To Laugh by Brian Becker

Yeah I Love to Laugh is a verité film about a group of Swedish rappers and best friends creating music, partying, exploring an archipelago, going to a farm, tracking out in the studio, staying up until sunrise, and trying to make it.

Rare Animals by Andree Ljutica

Rare Animals follows one man’s harvest from frozen vine to Brooklyn bar — tracing a year on the slopes of Europe’s most active volcano, where the ancient labor of natural winemaking collides with drought, volcanic eruption and the steady encroachment of venture capital on a disappearing way of life.

All of the presenting artists in this program received a 2026 Support for Artists grant, administered through UnionDocs’ fiscal sponsorship program and made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with support from the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature

Bios

Ruoyun Chen is an independent filmmaker and curator. A former fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab. Her work has been showcased at film festivals and art galleries. Chen is currently directing her first feature-length documentary, People’s Republic of Letters. The film has been selected to UnionDocs Production Lab, and IDFA Forum 2024, FIRST Documentary Lab 2025 and supported by NYFA, NYSCA and Asian Women Giving Circle. Chen is also developing an immersive interactive sound installation, Day 41, supported by LMCC.

Jess Shane is an audio producer, artist and educator from Toronto. Her award-winning audio documentary work has played at conferences and festivals internationally, including New Orleans Film Festival, Prismatic Ground, True/False, and Open City Documentary Festival. Jess’ podcast Shocking Heartbreaking Transformative from Radiotopia Presents was lauded as one of the best of 2024 by the New York Times. She is a graduate of the IMA MFA program at Hunter College.

Daniel Nalladurai and Helena Kincaid-Nalladurai are documentary filmmakers and co-founders of Sixty First Productions, a production company based in Queens, New York. Their films focus on working people, affordability, and social justice, telling stories that often go overlooked. Daniel, born and raised in Queens, began his career as a camera operator and editor before moving behind the camera; on their most recent documentary, The Cost of Living, he served as cinematographer, co-director, and editor. Helena spent several years in the art department for film and TV and now serves as producer, co-director, and audio recordist on their projects. Their work has been featured at the Queens World Film Festival and nominated for Best Documentary Cinematography. They live in Flushing, Queens with their son, where they continue to tell the stories of the city they call home.

Kyuri Jeon is a South Korean artist and filmmaker based in New York. Jeon works with video, essay, drawing, and installation to explore time, vision, and its implications for the future. Through the lens of intersectionality, she questions ongoing transnational discussions about identity, feminism, decolonization, and cultural translation. Jeon’s work has been featured internationally at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin; MassArt Art Museum, Boston; Mimosa House, London; Konsthall C, Stockholm; Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Glasgow; Festival Film Dokumenter, Yogyakarta; Women Make Waves, Taipei; and DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Seoul. She is an award winner in the Asian Shorts Competition at the Seoul International Women’s Film Festival, a recipient of the Contemporary Visual Art Award from the AHL-T&W Foundation, and a 2025 MacDowell Fellow. Jeon holds BFA from Korea National University of Arts and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and Seoul National University.

Simon Liu (b. 1987, Hong Kong) is an artist filmmaker whose practice catalogues the rapidly evolving psychogeography of his homeland of Hong Kong through material abstraction, speculative history, and subversion of documentary cinema practices via short films, multi-channel video installations, 16mm expanded cinema projections, and audiovisual performances. His installations and performances have been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Biennial 2024, MoMA, MOCA LA, M+ Museum, Carpenter Center, and Moderna Museet. His films have screened at festivals globally including the Toronto, New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, BFI London, Edinburgh, Jeonju, Melbourne, San Francisco, and Hong Kong International Film Festivals alongside the Sundance Film Festival, ND/NF, Cinéma du Réel, TIDF, and CPH:DOX. Profiles of his practice have featured in Hyperallergic, Art in America, Art Asia Pacific, Cinemascope, BOMB Magazine, and the New York Times. He is an educator at Cooper Union, NYU, and Pratt Institute and is currently in Post-Production on his first feature film Staffordshire Hoard.

Bernardo Ruiz is a three-time Emmy®-nominated director and producer. His films were the subject of a mid-career retrospective in November 2025.

David Osit is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning director and editor. His most recent film PREDATORS premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival where it was acquired by distribution by MTV Documentary Films and Paramount+, was released across the US and UK in 2025, and was named one of the best films of the year by The New York Times and The Guardian. His film MAYOR won a Peabody and Emmy Award, was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and holds a 100% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. David directed, produced, edited, filmed, and composed THANK YOU FOR PLAYING, which was broadcast on POV in 2016 and was nominated for three Emmy awards, winning for Outstanding Arts & Culture Documentary.

Joe Stankus is a Brooklyn based writer/director whose shorts have screened at festivals including The New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and Doc NYC. His work has been featured on The Criterion Channel and online at Short of the Week, Le Cinema Club, NoBudge and as Vimeo Staff Picks. Joe is an alumnus of the New York Film Festival Artist Academy and The Gotham Fiction Filmmaking labs. This is his first feature film.

Ashley Connor is a New York based Director of Photography. Nominated for a 2019 Independent Spirit Award for Josephine Decker’s MADELINE’S MADELINE, she has leant her unique breadth of a style to a genre-spanning list of features and television shows, most recently in Tim Robinson’s HBO series THE CHAIR COMPANY and Olivia Newman’s REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES starring Sally Field. She has also shot and directed music videos for artists including Angel Olsen, Sharon Van Etten and Sleater Kinney.

Katie Heiserman is a filmmaker and public historian passionate about preserving and publicizing overlooked histories. In her media-making practice, she uses archival material to examine collective memory and urban histories of resistance.

Elana Meyers is a documentary filmmaker/editor from New York City drawn to political stories overlooked by mainstream media. Her work spotlights personal narratives to convey how societal structures intersect with human experience. Together, they co-directed SURVIVAL WITHOUT RENT(2025), which was supported by Chicken & Egg Films, American Documentary, New York State Council on the Arts, and Untitled Filmmakers Org. It premiered at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in competition, was awarded Best Short Documentary at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and screened at several other festivals, including DOC NYC, Jihlava IDFF, Rooftop Films, and more. As a co-directing team, they were 2025-2026 BRIClab Film + TV Residents, during which they developed their next project, DIRTY DAYS IN FUN CITY. The project has also received support from the Brooklyn Arts Council, NYSCA, and the Lepage Center.

Meg Vatterott is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. She’s an experienced story producer and field producer with work on documentary series streaming on Hulu, Netflix, Discovery+ and Peacock. She’s worked for award-winning production companies including Fifth Season and Barnicle Brothers. Meg was a 2018 Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting fellow and participated in UnionDocs’ 2020 Research and Development Lab. Rabbit Hole is Meg’s feature directorial debut.

Mitra Kaboli is an award-winning audio producer, sound designer, and multimedia artist. Mitra was one of the original members of the Peabody Finalist podcast, The Heart. Her work has been featured on ESPN’s 30 for 30 Podcasts, the BBC, Making Contact and NY Mag’s Tabloid. In 2022, she hosted and produced the critically acclaimed podcast, Welcome to Provincetown. Currently, Mitra is an adjunct professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and at Hunter College.

Aaron Edwards is an interdisciplinary director, story editor and writer working across text, live theater and narrative audio. His work has appeared in places like BAM, the Brooklyn Public Library the Tribeca Festival and Lincoln Center. He was a 2023 MacDowell Fellow and is the Lead Artist and Show Director for the Audio and Performance Lab at UnionDocs.

Adam Golfer (he/him) is a filmmaker and artist based in New York. He holds an MFA from Hunter College, and works on commissions as a cinematographer. Golfer’s studio practice spans essay films, photography and artist books, and he continues to explore the ambiguous boundaries between personal and collective memory. Between 2025-2026, he directed two film commissions for Art21 about Camille Henrot and the collective “i wanna be with you everywhere.” In 2025, the short film DIVERS (which he DPed), premiered at Visions du Reel and went on to play at TIFF, Camden and DocNYC. He has directed, “A Matter of Opinion,” (2022) and co-directed, “It is a Soul: A Portrait of Hailu Mergia,” with Lorena Alvarado (2021). His monograph “A House Without a Roof” (2016) was shortlisted for the Aperture First Book Award, and his self-published “Kaddish” (2024) was celebrated with talks at Bungee Space, and Bildband in Berlin.

Esy Casey is a Filipino American filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist. Her work has screened in competition at festivals including IDFA, Camden, AIVFF and the Busan International Video Art Festival, and has been distributed nationally on PBS, The Criterion Channel, Kanopy and Ovid. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from organizations including NYSCA, The Ford Foundation, The Flaherty Seminar, The New York Film Festival, MacDowell, Yaddo, The Center for Asian American Media, The Ms. Foundation, The National Gallery of Art and The Princess Grace Foundation USA.

Kaelyn Lynch is a journalist and filmmaker who has worked for publications like Outside Magazine, National Geographic, and Vox. As an incoming graduate student studying Marine Science and Policy, Kaelyn hopes to focus her future work on environmental and wildlife film and translating complex scientific topics to the public to inspire action. As a queer and chronically ill person, she is also passionate about telling stories from historically marginalized and underrepresented communities.

Brian Becker is a New York-based filmmaker who directed and produced Time Bomb Y2K (co-directed with Marley McDonald) which premiered on HBO in December 2023. The film’s lengthy festival run included True/False Film Festival, Hot Docs, Sheffield DocFest, IDFA, Camden International Film Festival, and DocNYC. Brian served as archival producer on Free Chol Soo Lee, MLK/FBI, Spaceship Earth, and The Fourth Estate, and as co-producer on Bobby Kennedy for President. He began his career on the Oscar-winning O.J.: Made in America. Brian is a DocNYC 40 Under 40 recipient, Impact Partners Producing Fellow, Points North Fellow, JFI Fellow, and FOCAL Jane Mercer Researcher of the Year award nominee.

Andree Ljutica is a Montenegrin-American filmmaker and photographer based in New York. His work spans documentary, narrative, and commercial film, marked by a deeply intimate visual language and a commitment to observational rigor. His debut feature documentary Taksi — a formally rigorous film set inside a New York City yellow cab over a single night — is currently in post-production, with festival submissions underway. His commercial and editorial work has appeared in Vogue, Nowness, and beyond, and his films have been recognized by Sundance Labs, Guanajuato IFF, and Palm Springs IFF.