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

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re delighted to kick off our workshop Tell Don’t Show: Adventures in First-Person Filmmaking with a special screening and conversation with workshop lead, the brilliant essay filmmaker Charlie Shackleton!

In Camera Test (King Cadbury), a routine camera test spirals into an investigation of a mysterious mid-century Cadbury’s commercial, preserved in Shackleton’s family mythology despite there being no evidence that it ever existed. A documentary readymade about memory, family lore, and chocolate biscuits, the film offers a compact introduction to Shackleton’s singular first-person approach.

Winner of the NEXT Innovator Award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, Zodiac Killer Project begins with another unrealized object: the true crime documentary Shackleton tried and failed to make. Narrating the abandoned project beat by beat over vacant Bay Area landscapes, stylized re-enactments, and fragments of contemporary true crime, Shackleton conjures the film that might have been while dismantling the genre’s familiar tricks and conventions along the way. Dryly funny, formally inventive, and sharply critical, the film turns creative frustration itself into a method.

Following the screening, Charlie Shackleton will be joined in conversation by filmmaker David Osit.

Come through!

Program

Camera Test (King Cadbury) by Charlie Shackleton

 UK / 2024 / 7min

A documentary readymade about family lore and chocolate biscuits.

Zodiac Killer Project by Charlie Shackleton

 US/UK / 2025 / 92min

Having tried and failed to make a true crime documentary, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton tells the story of what might have been.

Program Duration: 99 mins

Bios

Charlie Shackleton is a nonfiction filmmaker working across film, television, radio, and immersive media. He is one third of the London-based production outfit Loop. His latest film Zodiac Killer Project premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the NEXT Innovator Award.

David Osit is a three-time Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary film director, editor and composer. He is the director of PREDATORS (2025) which premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The film was named one of the best films of the year by the New York Times and Indiewire, and was released in theaters across the US and UK in Fall 2025 before premiering on Paramount+ worldwide in December 2025. His film MAYOR (2020) was released in over 80 cinemas across the US, was a New York Times Critic’s Pick, played at hundreds of film festivals worldwide, broadcast on POV, and won an Emmy for Outstanding Political + Government Documentary. His film THANK YOU FOR PLAYING (2015) premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, also broadcast on POV, and was nominated for three Emmys, winning for Outstanding Arts + Culture Documentary. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.