“Story itself has become part of the problem: there is an overemphasis on story—or at least the way stories have come to be told in the documentary films…by naming the problem, we are calling filmmakers, programmers, critics, and scholars into a conversation about why and how we must challenge this hegemonic norm that too clearly serves to perpetuate the market while actively changing very little.”

– Introduction, World Records Volume 5: Beyond Story

Born out of their joint manifesto, first published in 2018, writers Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow extend their call to action to move “Beyond Story” in the latest volume of World Records. Celebrate its launch by joining us in the UnionDocs backyard for the opening event of the Summer in the UNDO LEAN-TO or tune in from afar online!

Editors Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow will walk us through the Volume. We’ll traverse a breadth of ideas from contributors like Sam Green and Brett Story dissecting what’s wrong with “story”, to Paige Sarlin, Jem Cohen and Sindhu Thirumalaisamy inquiring whether stories are found or imposed to Cecilia Aldarondo, Samara Chadwick, Luke Robinson and Joshua Glick uncovering the role of gatekeepers in encouraging these dominant modes of narrative.

Tune in to get a sense of what’s inside the volume and hear some of the ideas we brewed up at an UNDO Study Group that took place exploring the volume with this year’s Sheffield Doc Fest!

If you plan to tune in online, get a reminder to stream, or get a ticket to join IRL in the backyard.

Alexandra Juhasz is Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies at CUNY Brooklyn College. She is the author of AIDS TV (1995), Women of Vision (2001), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, co-edited with Jesse Lerner (2005), and Learning from YouTube (2011). Dr. Juhasz is also the producer of the fake documentary feature films The Watermelon Woman (1997) and The Owls (2010), as well as many real documentaries.

Alisa Lebow is Professor of Screen Media at University of Sussex. She has published widely on first person film and questions of ‘the political’ in documentary, also innovating in the area of practice-led research, with her award-winning interactive meta-documentary, Filming Revolution, about filmmaking in Egypt since the 2011 revolution (Stanford University Press, 2018 http://filmingrevolution.supdigital.org/). Her books include A Companion to Contemporary Documentary (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), The Cinema of Me (Wallflower, 2012) and First Person Jewish (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Her films include For the Record: The World Tribunal on Iraq (2007), Treyf (1998) and Outlaw (1994).

Jason Faux is the editor of World Records.

Brett Story is a filmmaker and writer based out of Toronto. She is the director of the films The Prison in Twelve Landscapes and The Hottest August, and author of the book Prison Land: Mapping Carceral Power Across Neoliberal America. She is Assistant Professor of Image Arts at Ryerson University and her work has received support from the Sundance Institute and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Paige Sarlin is is an artist, filmmaker, scholar political activist and Assistant Professor of Media at the University of Buffalo Her feature-length documentary film, The Last Slide Projector, premiered at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2007 and she is completing a book-length manuscript entitled Interview-Work: The Genealogy of a Media Form.

Sindhu Thirumalaisamy is an artist and filmmaker. Her work centers (un)common spaces and the possibilities for speech and action with/in them. Thirumalaisamy is a Core artist-in-residence at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, and has been a participant of the Flaherty Seminar Fellowship, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Whitney Independent Study program.

Cecilia Aldarondo is a documentary director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora who works at the intersection of poetics and politics. Her feature documentaries Memories of a Penitent Heart (2016) and Landfall (2020) premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and were co-produced by the award-winning PBS series POV. Landfall’s many awards include the 2020 DOC NYC Film Festival Viewfinders Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary, as well as Cinema Eye and Spirit Award nominations. Among Aldarondo’s fellowships and honors include the Guggenheim, a two-time MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the 2021 New America Fellowship, and Women at Sundance 2017. In 2019 she was named to DOC NYC’s 40 Under 40 list and is one of 2015’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. She teaches at Williams College.

Samara Chadwick is a filmmaker and film curator. Her first feature documentary, 1999, premiered in 2018 at Visions du réel and Hot Docs, and has since played festivals worldwide with broadcast and theatrical releases in Canada and Switzerland. As an independent curator, Samara currently programs for the Goethe-Institut and was most recently Senior Programmer for the Points North Institute and the Camden International Film Festival (CIFF). She has programmed films and conferences for the Montreal International Documentary Festival (RIDM), Hot Docs, the Berlin Biennale, and served on juries at Sheffield Doc/Fest (UK), The New Horizons IFF (Poland), Sunny Side of the Doc (France), and FICFA (Canada).

Jem Cohen: Filmmaker/photographer Cohen’s feature-length films include Museum Hours, Counting, Chain, Benjamin Smoke, Instrument, and World Without End (No Reported Incidents). Shorts include Lost Book Found, Little Flags, and Anne Truitt – Working. His films are in the collections of NYC’s Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Jewish Museum, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art, and Melbourne’s Screen Gallery. They have been broadcast by PBS, Arte, and the Sundance Channel. He’s had retrospectives at Harvard Film Archive, London’s Whitechapel Gallery, Indielisboa, BAFICI, Oberhausen, Gijon, and Punto de Vista Film Festivals. His multi-media show with live music, We Have an Anchor, was a main stage production in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave series, and at London’s Barbican. His current show of film with live soundtracks, Gravity Hill Sound+Image, has been presented in Istanbul, Porto, New York City, Nantes, and Knoxville, TN.

Sam Green is a documentary filmmaker. He’s made many movies including, most recently, A Thousand Thoughts, a live cinematic collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. Previous “live documentaries” include The Measure of All Things and The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, featuring the indie rock band Yo La Tengo. Sam’s documentary The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Joshua Glick is the Isabelle Peregrin Professor of English, Film, and Media Studies at Hendrix College and a Fellow at the Open Documentary Lab at MIT. He is the author of Los Angeles Documentary and the Production of Public History (University of California Press, 2018). Dr. Glick is currently writing a new book that examines the contemporary interest in documentary on both the left and right of the political spectrum. In collaboration with Patricia Aufderheide, he is co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Documentary. Dr. Glick also works actively in the public humanities. He served as the Film and Digital Media Curator for the traveling exhibition, Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008. As a Fellow at MIT, he is designing an online curriculum that explores the past and present of disinformation as well as the civic uses of emerging media. 

Luke Robinson is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex.