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Friday, Jul 31 - 7:30pm Tomorrow We Disappear Q&A with director Adam Weber
At first glance, the Kathputli Colony looks like any other Indian slum. Flies swarm its putrid canals. Children climb on drooping electrical wires. Construction cranes and an ever-expanding metro line loom on the horizon. But Kathputli is a place of fading traditions. For half a century 2,800 artist families have called its narrow alleyways home; there are jugglers and acrobats, puppeteers and painters, folk singers and magicians, many of whom are well-respected artists in India and abroad. In 2009 the New Delhi government sold Kathputli to developers for a fraction of its worth. The land is to be bulldozed to make room for the city’s first-ever skyscraper, The Raheja Phoenix. Tomorrow We Disappear, directed by Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber, follows three of Kathputli’s most-talented performers as they wrangle with the reality of their approaching eviction. The story begins with the fate of thousands of marginalized performers in Delhi, India. The film chronicles a turning point in the lives of these performers, with the hopes of anticipating what’s to come in India’s future and preserving what’s being left behind.
Friday, Sep 4 - 7:30pm Kiss Me, Gentlemen – In Pursuit of Realness With Chelsea Knight, Jess Wilcox, & Minou Norouzi.
Our bodies belong to others; parents first, then lovers. A mother’s body belongs to her child. We are subjected to education systems; consumer desires demand to be satisfied through contracts of labor. Our bodies belong to institutions; institutions for criminals, the sick, and the insane; institutions in the end too, for all of us, via the medical, care, and funerary systems. When we agree to participate in films, our bodies belong to the filmmaker. A contractual agreement places the image, sound – and by metaphorical extension – the body, in the ownership of the filmmaker. Its care is entangled with the politics of filmic history and filmic experience. The filmmaker’s own body is also invested, navigating space, time, and the ‘contaminated projections’ of their own ideologies. As we watch carefully, or repeatedly, our knowledge may be ruptured, our feelings disturbed. In one way or another all the films in this program deal with the mechanisms and technologies of entrapment: the destitute body, the incarcerated body, the body as a self-replicating system, bodies of soldiers performing military rituals, Greek mythology made contemporary through performative acts of defiance. Strategies in the pursuit of ‘realness’ range from injecting humor; others incite horror, follow a performative impulse, or straddle precariously on the ethical tightrope of representation. All point powerfully towards the condition of embodied subjects that have become specular, schizoid, internally disjointed.
Saturday, Sep 5 - 7:30pm MADE AT KUVA – Moving Image from Helsinki Curated by Caspar Strake
When thinking of Finnish culture, moving image arts in particular, one should avoid thinking of melancholia, or silence, or darkness, or the forest, and definitely not of ultra-dry humor. Everything else is very much preferred. Despite any undeniable pre-conceptions of Finnish moving image art, this program invites viewers to discover a Finnish cultural identity that defined itself in-between the prevalent set of century-old clichés, situated among such large topics as narrativity, affect, and the sublime. These aspects reverberate in this collection of such contrasting films as a documentary of blind people in a ultra-gentrified Helsinki neighborhood (Anu Pennanen) and performative interventions in a traditional cultural rituals (Pilvi Takala). The commonality amongst the films of this program is the place of the program's production: Kuva is the short form of “Kuvataideakatemia,” the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Since 2012 I have taught the moving image as part of the Academy's Time and Space Arts program - an employment that made me move from New York to the miraculous, wonderful Helsinki. This program is a small part of a larger research project and screening series at Kuva. The selected work shown here spans over the past three decades, and includes work by artists who have studied at and/or graduated from the academy, such as internationally-recognized alumni Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Salla Tykkää. This concept offers a rare look at the very first works by some of Finland’s most sophisticated moving image artists. It is especially attractive to a foreign audience to study the creative origins of Ahtila and Tykkää, and to recognize their (and others') early emerging artistic signatures.
Friday, Sep 11 - 7:30pm The River of Life Cinema on the Edge with Yang Pingdao
Yang Pingdao is one of China’s most exciting emerging filmmakers. His astonishingly creative camera eye brings unexpected beauty to his new feature length film. Using an innovative structure, based on the distinctive texture of family memory through space and time, Yang invents something poised delicately between fiction and documentary to capture crystallized moments in his family history, to recreate in cinematic form its emotional weight and variety, woven around the life and death of his grandmother, and the birth of his child. In order to combine extended family chronicle, implicit national history, and intimate soul-bearing autobiography, Yang employs gentle formal experimentation to invent new cinematic pathways.
Saturday, Sep 12 - 7:30pm Spark Cinema on the Edge with Andrew J. Nathan
Probably China’s most important unofficial historian-filmmaker, Hu Jie documents with his camera episodes that Chinese official history, for now, ignores. Spark was an underground magazine published in 1960 by four young intellectuals who wanted to expose the devastating famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a horrendous period of national suffering that is still unmentioned in China’s history textbooks today. This is filmmaking as urgent historical investigation: with a shoestring budget Hu combines years of research, and a knack for getting people to talk without fear about the most taboo subjects in China’s recent past. His alternative oral history approach knits together courageous and frequently moving interviews with the magazine’s surviving editor, supporters, and readers, who were ready to sacrifice themselves to alert their countrymen to unprecedented disaster.
Saturday, Sep 12 - 7:30pm STRATUM 1: THE VISITORS Cinema on the Edge
Poet and filmmaker Cong Feng started to film a documentary about whole-scale urban demolition in the Beijing suburb of Tongzhou, but discovered that the extraordinary rapidity of change and the furious power of China’s history of destruction required something more experimental, more essay-like. From hallucinatory (are they perhaps utopian? despairing?) images of a bulldozer seeming to conjure up a building from its rubble, we follow two characters wandering through debris, telling stories of childhood trauma (featuring canine, not human loyalty during a horrific episode from the Cultural Revolution). Cong, like a visual paleo-geologist, unearths surreal, chilling images of otherworldly beauty emanating from the buried strata of this collapsing world, whose history threatens to be suffocated by layers of experience, of loss, of unremembered suffering.
Sunday, Sep 13 - 7:30pm I Want to be a People’s Representative Cinema on the Edge
Can a documentary camera be a tool for democracy in China? Jia Zhitan certainly thinks so, and wields his camera like an anti-bureaucratic weapon. Jia, a member of Caochangdi’s influential Villagers Documentary Project (organizer Wu Wenguang has been training local villagers to use digital video cameras to record their participation in ultra-local politics), wants to run to be a delegate to the National People’s Congress. He wins the first round, but is deemed unqualified by officials for reasons they keep to themselves. As the irrepressibly scrappy and stubborn Jia seeks explanations and redress from ever higher levels of authority, he records their interactions scenes that would play as entertaining satiric comedy if they weren’t so frustratingly real.
Sunday, Sep 13 - 7:30pm Satiated Village Cinema on the Edge with Zou Xueping
Zou Xueping’s took her first documentary The Hungry Village (part of Caochangdi Workstation’s Folk Memory Project) — made up of first-person testimony about the effects of the Great Famine of 1960 (see Hu Jie’s Spark for another view) on her home village in Shandong — back home to show her subjects. They unanimously disapproved. Frustrated and full of doubt, Zou then made this second documentary discussing the villagers’ reactions to her first. This wonderful, searching, self-reflexive film questions the necessity and usefulness of truth-telling via cinema, when it brings pain and even shame upon neighbours and family. Zou’s 9-year-old niece emerges as its star, a girl who can balance competing exigencies of truth and love with a wisdom beyond her years.
Friday, Sep 18 - 7:30pm Memories of the Future US National Premiere presented by Cinema Tropical.
US National Premiere, presented by Cinema Tropical. Memories of the Future, Rodrigo Reyes, 2009-2012, 70 minutes A woman writes increasingly passionate love letters without answer. Her passion and frustration are interwoven with a sense of impending doom, a vision of the coming Mexican apocalypse. A single personal tragedy mirrors the struggle of an entire country trying, in the midst of increasing chaos, to find itself. Winner of the LCI AWARD at the 2012 FICUNAM Film Festival. Following the screening, there will be discussion between Cinema Tropical's Carlos Gutierrez and director Rodrigo Reyes. Following the discussion will be a birthday party at UnionDocs for Gutierrez and open to all attendees. A note from the director: I shot this film on a shoestring over several months on the road, living in the back of a minivan. Memories is a catalogue of my concerns and struggles, a deliberate digging into shadows of the Mexican soul, a mad universe of visceral images and characters on the edge of reality. This is the film’s first public screening in the US. I feel anxious and confused by the context. On the one hand, this work was my very own film school, raw and incredibly painful. On the other, I don’t ever want to see it again because I may find that I have not strayed too far from its universe.
Friday, Sep 18 - 7:30pm Peephole Cinema Presents: Kinetoscopic Records Programmed by Dan Streible (NYU / Orphan Film Symposium)
UnionDocs invites you to the opening reception of Kinetoscopic Records, presented by Peephole Cinema and programmed by Dan Streible (NYU / Orphan Film Symposium) on Friday, September 18 from 5pm - 7pm. Peephole Cinema exhibitions showcase contemporary media artists while also evoking the proto- and early cinema experiences of the peep show. This UnionDocs program, Kinetoscopic Records, invites a collision of the old and new, the earliest movies and born-digital works. The ten pieces replicate qualities of the earliest film shows, an incongruous variety of kinetic, flickery, silent pictures in motion, each less than a minute long. This program’s inspiration is the recent rebirth of one of the first motion pictures ever made, Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894 (aka Fred Ott’s Sneeze). Although its copyrighted images appeared in print in 1894, the Sneeze was not seen in motion until reanimated on 16mm film in 1953. However, only now has the entire recording been reproduced. The new Library of Congress version reveals The Sneeze to be nearly twice as long as presumed, with Mr. Ott sneezing twice in one unedited take. This is its premier public run.
Friday, Sep 25 - 7:30pm Cowbird Presents: Unheard Voices With Jonathan Harris, Dawn J. Fraser, and Rodrigo Jardon.
Even in this age of social media, we still learn most of what we know through predominantly white male filters and pundits, experts and academics, politicians and editorialists. We don't often hear directly from people like a bread baker from La Unión Xaltepec community in Nochistlán, Mexico, the only one of her family to stay behind and not leave for work in the United States. Nor do we hear stories from a father who started his own hair salon in Harlem, recounting the day his son became old enough to take over the business.Those are just two of the people you'll hear from in Cowbird's new Unheard Voices digital storytelling collection. Cowbird's Unheard Voices recently funded two storytellers to amplify the voices and experiences of those excluded from traditional media outlets. Inspired by the acclaimed Cowbird/National Geographic collaboration that gave a platform to residents of the Pine Ridge Reservation, Unheard Voices launched this spring and will premiere its first two collections of stories at UnionDocs on September 25th. Writer and storyteller Dawn Fraser will share the experiences of the stylists, patrons and community members who congregate in barbershops and natural hair salons in New York City. Photographer Rodrigo Jardón will share the voices and images of the Mixteca Alta, an indigenous region in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, which has been profoundly changed by immigration. Afterward, they'll be joined by Cowbird Founder Jonathan Harris and panelists, Kayla Epstein, Nadia Reiman and Sarah Kate Kramer, for a discussion and Q&A about their projects and the future of community storytelling.
Saturday, Sep 26 - 7:30pm ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL PRESENTS With filmmakers Brett Story & Katarzyna Plazinska.
AAFF will curate a film program at UnionDocs consisting of nine new non-fiction films. All works presented, that were screened at the 53rd edition of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, originate from Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Canada and the US. The filmmakers behind the works are Kevin Jerome Everson, Mike Hoolboom, Brett Story, Bruno Varela, John Skoog, Pablo Lobato, Katarzyna Plazinska, Richard Wiebe and Helmut Völter.icons, ephemeral forms, sleight of hand, the circulation of regulated, and a refuge from Soviet invasion
Sunday, Oct 11 - 7:30pm STAND BY FOR TAPE BACK-UP SHOW ADDED BY POPULAR DEMAND Limited Run. Live Performance with Ross Sutherland. NYC Premiere.
After a hard-drive crash and a near-death experience, Ross Sutherland found himself house-bound with only one thing for company: an old videotape that once belonged to his granddad. Over the months that followed, Ross memorized every second of the tape. Slowly, he learned how to manipulate the images into telling the story of his life. The videotape allowed Ross to open a dialogue with his late grandfather, and eventually helped him confront the illness that had nearly ended his life. The true story of one man’s journey into synchronicity and madness.
Saturday, Oct 17 - 7:30pm American Pictures by Jacob Holdt With photographer Jacob Holdt
"The show reveals the psychological costs of racism on both the black and the white mind. Yet it is not only a "show" about the victims of racism, but also an experiment in oppression. The technique of the show is to incessantly bombard the audience with a one-sided view from the position of the black underclass, a view in sharp contrast to the Horato Alger myth. There is no opportunity for rationalization or justification. A form of oppression ensues which gradually breaks down the defenses of the audience. It effectively creates a momentary role reversal letting the astonished students actually experience the emotions black people often suffer in everyday white society. This opens the way for whites to begin to identify with and understand black reactions." - Jacob Holdt
Saturday, Oct 24 - 7:30pm Elephant’s Dream With Kristof Bilsen. Double feature with The Iron Ministry. Debut of UnionDocs Surround Sound System.
After a lengthy and devastating civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the capital city of Kinshasa is rebuilding. Through the eyes of three civil workers struggling to reconstruct the foundation of the city’s public services, we witness a tale of national transformation— at a snail’s pace. Driven by desperate ambition, postal worker Henriette faces a system defined by stagnation, even as she rises through its ranks. With ramshackle equipment, a firefighter is forced to watch as everything he helped build burns to the ground. Meanwhile, optimistic railway worker Simon stands guard over an unused rail-station—unsure of what he is protecting. Their stories allow director Kristof Bilsen to offer a rare look at the DRC, filled with poetry and absurdity that is brimming with compassionate insight. - Eli Horwatt (HotDocs) Elephant’s Dream takes us beyond the usual reports of the Congo, to provide poetic and compassionate insight into a country in transition, as seen through the microcosm of three state-owned institutions and its public sector workers in the third largest city in Africa, Kinshasa, a railway station, the central post office and the only existing fire station.
Saturday, Oct 24 - 7:30pm The Iron Ministry With J. P. Sniadecki. Part of double feature with Elephant's Dream. Debut of UnionDocs Surround Sound System.
Filmed over three years on China’s railways, THE IRON MINISTRY traces the vast interiors of a country on the move: flesh and metal, clangs and squeals, light and dark, language and gesture. Scores of rail journeys come together into one, capturing the thrills and anxieties of social and technological transformation. THE IRON MINISTRY immerses audiences in fleeting relationships and uneasy encounters between humans and machines on what will soon be the world's largest railway network.
Sunday, Nov 1 - 7:30pm Speculation Nation With Sabine Gruffat, Bill Brown, Paige Sarlin, Elin Gran, Luis Moreno-Caballud and Rebecca Amato. NYC Premiere.
The global financial crisis that began in 2007 battered Spain. Over a quarter of the population lost their jobs, and hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes. The constitutional guarantee for housing that has been a cornerstone of Spain following the death of Francisco Franco has been shaken by a combination of greedy real estate speculators, predatory banks, corrupt public officials, and a global financial catastrophe. In this impressionistic documentary film, Sabine Gruffat and Bill Brown travel across Spain to explore the consequences of the housing crisis. What they find are Spanish citizens, inspired by the politics of The 15M Movement and Occupy Wall Street, who are mobilizing, collectivizing, and fighting for the right for a decent place to live. Along the way, the filmmakers visit young mothers and their families squatting in failed condo developments; intentional communities of mountain cave dwellers; protest campsites that have sprung up in front of bank branches; and empty apartment buildings transformed into experiments in utopian living. The film examines the ideologies that separate housing from home, and real estate speculation from speculations about a better way to live.

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