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Saturday, Jun 6 - 7:30pm A Brooklyn Barrio: Living Los Sures Hangouts in Los Sures, dominoes a free outdoor screening, and afterparty/screening at UnionDocs.
How can the physical spaces of a neighborhood help build local relationships among neighbors? How do you gain a deeper understanding of a place? You hang out! That’s what documentary filmmaker Diego Echeverria did when he made Los Sures. Diego spent a lot of time on the streets of the Southside of Williamsburg, a neighborhood that had been called one of the worst ghettos in America; meeting people, being seen, building trust, hanging out. UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art has been hanging out on the Southside for many years. By obsessively exploring every aspect of Los Sures and documenting the longstanding Latino community as they fight displacement and survive the growth machine, they’ve produced a multi-faceted production of their own called Living Los Sures. Using the original film and this impressive body of new work as points of departure, we have organized a pop-up school of local experiences including talks, tours, installations, interviews, artist interventions, music and play across the barrio of Los Sures. Come for a roaming celebration of street life and neighborhood space and expand your view of how the past pervades the present.
Monday, Jun 8 - 7:30pm Documentary Block Part I Part of the Northside Film Festival! Filmmakers present for screening.
Bob Spells Backwards, Josh Polon and Ryan Maxey, 2 minutes Bob demonstrates his strange compulsion to spell every word he hears backwards. Stella Walsh, Rob Lucas, 15 minutes The tragic story of Stella Walsh, the greatest female athlete in the world, her murder, and the gender controversy that followed. Time, Theodore Collatos, 7 minutes Conversations oscillate between family, politics and sexuality in an voyeuristic contemplation of prison. Terms of Intimacy, Melissa Langer, 9 minutes A glimpse into the emerging industry of professional cuddling and the lives of the clients that use this service. This is Not the End (New York Premiere), Hilary Campbell, 7 minutes The Campbell Family as they are now. Comic Book Heaven, E.J. McLeavey-Fisher, 12 minutes Comic Book Heaven is a short documentary follows 81-year-old Joe Leisner, owner of Comic Book Heaven in Sunnyside, Queens, NY, as he cantankerously assesses the status of his business, the comic book industry, and his future.
Tuesday, Jun 9 - 7:30pm Shorts Block III Part of the Northside Film Festival. Directors present for screening.
Daniel, Amanda Ring, 3 minutes "And the visions of my mind terrify me." Mujer, Sofia Canales, 10 minutes Three Latinas of different generations take pleasure in helping each other bathe, dress up, and cook dinner. Eye in Tuna Care, John Walter Lustig, 5 minutes Eye in Tuna Care is a work of shameless plagiarism; filmmaker John W. Lustig stole the idea from a character in a dream. Didn't even bother to change the title. In the film, a dentist's expertise is put to the test when an unusual patient seeks his help. Rhythm of a City, Julie Gratz, 3 minutes An invitation into the heart of New York City through the atmospheric art of BUA. With the music of DJ Qbert and Dana Leong, escape into moments in the streets that are filled with artistic expression from hip hop culture of a vibrant metropolis. Directed and arranged by Julie Gratz and animated by KALEIDA. Alvaro (World Premiere), Alexandra Lazarowich, 13 minutes A meditation on memory and perseverance, ÁLVARO follows 75 year-old South Williamsburg, Brooklyn resident Álvaro Brandon on his daily route to feed 40 stray cats living in the abandoned lots of his neighborhood. Palm Rot, Ryan Gillis, 8 minutes Investigating a mysterious explosion in the Florida Everglades, an old crop-duster discovers a lone crate that survived the wreckage. And it ruins his day. It Hit Upon a Roof, Teymour Ghaderi, 4 minutes A house in a village, where only an old woman and a child live, the rain falls and starts dripping from the ceiling. The child tries to do something about the drips. Tick Tock (Brooklyn Premiere), Zeynep Kocak, 10 minutes The beautiful thing is not the goal you achieve; it is the road that takes you there with hope! Ham Over Rice, 4 minutes, Ying Liu Houyi saves the world but loses his immortality. N6-4Q Born Free, Sasha Gransjean, 12 minutes Short film series exploring themes of biology and technology through documentary and fiction.
Wednesday, Jun 10 - 7:30pm Documentary Block II Part of the Northside Film Festival. Filmmakers present for the screening.
Green Card, Pilar Rico and David Whitmer, 8 minutes A film about a song and its author, Mohammad Rahman, a convenience store owner from Bangladesh living in Brooklyn, who writes song lyrics about the immigrant experience. El Porvenir, Josh Chertoff, Alfredo Alcantara, 14 mintues El Porvenir is an inside look at the world of Mexican cockfighting, where men and roosters meet at the intersection of life, death, and sport. Sandorkraut, Emily Lobsenz, 12 minutes An intimate portrait of Sandor Katz, America's foremost home fermentation revivalist. Cada Noche: Every Night (World Premiere), Ian Phillips, 8 minutes Sazon Perez Restaurant in Brooklyn serves over five-hundred customers, daily. Not including the men who line up outside...every night. Nelly’s, Danya Abt and Samantha Richardson, 12 minutes Nelly's is a portrait of Nelly's, a family-owned flower shop in the Southside of Williamsburg. Sandwiched between elevated tracks and congested streets, we watch as this tiny oasis brings the local population together in ritual, memory and celebration. Through customer portraits, candid interviews with the store's owner Nelly, and observational footage captured inside and outside the shop, this nontraditional documentary considers our varied relationship with plants and flowers and how these living things are use to redefine our ever-changing urban landscapes. As we watch the seasons turn, subtle changes are observed in the store and the surrounding neighborhood.
Wednesday, Jun 10 - 7:30pm The Winds that Scatter (World Premiere) Part of the Northside Film Festival. With director Christopher Bell
Ahmad is a refugee from Syria living in the U.S. who hopes to start his own taxi service. After losing a menial job at a gas station, he attempts to navigate the American economy with optimism. Soon, however, reality sets in and he finds consistent work to be scarce. Creeping hopelessness begins to take a toll on his relationships, faith and sense of self, his dream slipping quickly from his grasp.
Friday, Jun 12 - 7:30pm Kingdom of Shadows NYC Premiere. With Bernardo Ruiz & Katia Maguire.
Kingdom of Shadows, Bernardo Ruiz, 2015, 74 minutes Bernardo Ruiz takes an unflinching look at the hard choices and destructive consequences of the U.S.-Mexico “drug war,” weaving together the stories of a U.S. drug enforcement agent on the border, an activist nun in violence- scarred Monterrey, Mexico, and a former Texas smuggler, to reveal the human side of an often misunderstood conflict that has resulted in a growing human-rights crisis that only recently has made international headlines. Presented by Participant Media in association with Boiling Pot and Quiet Pictures. “Many documentaries have chronicled the drug war in the U.S. and Mexico, but few have humanized it as poignantly as Kingdom of Shadows... [It] is more observant than crusading...rooted in first-rate journalism.” — Slackerwood | March 21, 2015 “‘Kingdom of Shadows’, produced through Participant, stands out for its measured look at deep structure." — IDA | March 27, 2015 South by Southwest, March 2015, World Premiere Full Frame Documentary Festival, April 2015 Ambulante, April 28-29, 2015, Mexico Special Preview Amnesty International Mexico, May 7, 2015, Mexico Special Preview
Sunday, Jun 14 - 7:30pm Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask Co-presented by Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask explores for the first time on film the pre-eminent theorist of the anti-colonial movements of this century. Fanon's two major works, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, were pioneering studies of the psychological impact of racism on both colonized and colonizer. Jean-Paul Sartre recognized Fanon as the figure "through whose voice the Third World finds and speaks for itself." This innovative film biography restores Fanon to his rightful place at the center of contemporary discussions around post-colonial identity. Isaac Julien, the celebrated black British director of such provocative films as Looking for Langston and Young Soul Rebels, integrates the facts of Fanon's brief but remarkably eventful life with his long and tortuous inner journey. Julien elegantly weaves together interviews with family members and friends, documentary footage, readings from Fanon's work and dramatizations of crucial moments in Fanon's life. Cultural critics Stuart Hall and Françoise Verges position Fanon's work in his own time and draw out its implications for our own.
Friday, Jun 19 - 7:30pm Magic Lantern Presents: Masses and Swarms Curated by Seth Watter.
Moving images have had a special fondness for masses and swarms: human, animal, cellular, chemical, granular.It is known that crowd scenes in the cinema produce a rhythmic, poetic, photogenic effect when there is a real, actively thinking crowd involved. The reason is that the cinema can pick this cadence up better than the human eye and by other means; it can record this fundamental rhythm and its harmonics.—Jean Epstein From the earliest Lumière actualities to the contemporary disaster film, cinema has given apt expression to masses and what they seemingly do best: massing. This program presents a survey of crowds, masses, and swarms in their many and varied manifestations: from the elemental to the complex, and from the archaic to the contemporary. Though often hidden beneath a veneer of solidity, masses and swarms are the very stuff of life. Gathering and dispersing, contracting and expanding, are the formal figures most proper to them. They exist at the level of particles and parades, demonstrations and desktop icons, spermatozoa and shopping mallers. Even the grain of film, the noise of video, the pixilation of a buffering stream—they, too, with their swirling and spreading, justly merit the name of “crowd.” Wherever division, multiplicity, and movement co-exist, masses and swarms are sure to follow: on the street, in the density of a throng; in the depths of the body, cell against cell.
Saturday, Jun 20 - 7:30pm Shorts after the Flaherty Seminar 2015 With guest filmmakers from the Flaherty Seminar, Arthur Jafa & Juan Manuel Sepulveda.
Cinema that makes the subtlest of presences perceptible.The title “The Scent of Places” suggests the ways cinema makes the subtlest of presences perceptible. It brings lost or forgotten events into present awareness. It gives form to unbidden feelings. It invents stories more truthful than fact. It detects patterns—emotional, social, and political. It sharpens perception so that we can see and hear, smell and feel more clearly. Filmmakers from the Arab world are some of the most adept at these creative strategies. Living in the Arab world in recent decades, with its barrage of external and internal pressures, demands filmmakers and artists to come up with smart and subtle ways to express forces, histories, and experiences that lie under the radar. The goal of the program is to focus not on the works’ geographic, social, and political context, but on their aesthetic qualities: the scents of places that they make present. So the program brings Arab artists together with other international filmmakers who share creative strategies with them. The program also diminishes large-scale politics to focus on more intimate and playful gestures. The richest and strangest scents—those of ordinary life—float through these works. They discover patterns in the chaos of the world. They fabulate, or invent fictions that become true. They engage in psychodynamics, teasing people into expressive acts. They crackle like Geiger counters in the presence of invisible forces. With rhythm and performance they shake up the world and squeeze it for its juice.
Sunday, Jun 21 - 7:30pm Concerning Violence: Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense Co-presented by Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Concerning Violence (2014) is both an archive-driven documentary covering the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, as well as an exploration into the mechanisms of decolonization through text from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon’s landmark book, written over 50 years ago, is still a major tool for understanding and illuminating the neocolonialism happening today, as well as the violence and reactions against it. In the middle of the Cold War, radical Swedish filmmakers set out to capture the anti-imperialist liberation movements in Africa first hand. With their 16mm footage, found in the Swedish Television archives, filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson create[s] a visual narrative from Africa - images of the pursuit of freedom, the Cold War and Sweden. Swedish filmmakers, with their sense of solidarity with anti-imperial and socialist struggles around the world at the time, created images and stories which still resonate today, and can change and deepen our impression of the globalized world we live in.
Saturday, Jun 27 - 7:30pm Documentary Fundamentals Financing With Tracie Holder, Sarah Meister, David Koh, and Chai Vasarhelyi.
This session will address the eternal question: how to finance your doc? What are the pros and cons of different fundraising models (grants, equity investment, pre-sales, crowdsourcing)? We will also have veteran independent film accountant Fred Siegel to talk about tax ramifications and planning around financing as well as investor relations. Budgeting, how to find and successfully apply for grants, tips and tools for crowdfunding and other approaches to getting funded will be discussed in addition for this can’t-miss session.
Sunday, Jun 28 - 7:30pm Documentary Fundamentals Graphics, Music, and Transmedia Campaigns With Adnaan Wasey, Kina Pickett, J. Ralph and Chai Vasarhelyi.
How can title design and graphics be effectively utilized in documentary? What about my approach to music? What is transmedia and why should documentary filmmakers pay attention to it? This session will dig in to graphics and music issues that come together during post production. We will also explore broad strokes of how to plan and execute transmedia campaigns.
Friday, Jul 10 - 7:30pm Field Visits for Chelsea Manning With Lance Wakeling and Karl McCool.
This first-person travelogue maps the surrounding areas where former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was imprisoned before her trial for releasing classified documents to Wikileaks. In an attempt to piece together disparate landscapes and events into a larger narrative, this essay film tracks Manning's places of detention from Kuwait to Virginia, Kansas, and Maryland. Following in the footsteps of Adachi's theory of landscape and the peripatetic tradition of road movies, Field Visits for Chelsea Manning reflects a landscape of mass-detention, endless war, whistleblowers, and America's unresolved history of race.

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