DOC TALK: Collaboration, Community, and Formally Adventurous Documentary with Christopher Allen, April 8
DOC STUDIES PRESENTS:
Union Docs: Collaboration, Community, and Formally Adventurous Documentary
Monday, Apr 8 at 1 PM
Kellen Auditorium, Ground Floor, 66 Fifth Avenue
UnionDocs: Collaboration, Community, and Formally Adventurous Documentary
Screening and Conversation with CHRISTOPHER ALLEN, Founder and Executive Artistic Director
“Brave cinema can only exist in brave space, and UnionDocs is just that.”
– Brett Story, filmmaker
By providing an infrastructure for collaboration and risk-taking, UnionDocs expands what’s possible within the art and practice of nonfiction filmmaking.” As a leading institution for innovative documentary, UnionDocs provides a much needed opportunity for vibrant storytelling, visual experimentation, journalism, politics, activism and poetry to intersect. Allen will present collaborative productions of UnionDocs including Documenting Mythologies, Living Los Sures, Just to Get By, and Say Something Bunny!, works which span film, video, audio, performance and interactive forms of documentary.
Living Los Sures
“One of the most comprehensive, incredible and in-depth interactive projects that we at the film society have ever seen.” –New York Film Festival
“A massive mixed-media project that defies easy categorization.” – IndieWire
“It’s enough to make fans of the Up series salivate.” – Brooklyn Magazine
Produced over 5 years by 60 artists at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art, LIVING LOS SURES is an expansive project about the Southside of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Known by its long-term Latino residents as Los Sures, the neighborhood was one of the poorest in New York City in the late 70s and early 80s. In fact, it had been called the worst ghetto in America. Today, it is the site of a battle between local identity and luxury lifestyle. With the restoration of LOS SURES, a brilliant work of cinéma vérité filmmaking as a starting point, the project has developed into a collection of 40 SHORT FILMS, the interactive documentary 89 STEPS , and the cinematic people’s history SHOT BY SHOT, demonstrating new possibilities for collaboration between an arts institution and its surrounding community to collect memories and share local culture.
Christopher Cekay Allen is the founder and Executive Artistic Director of UnionDocs, a Center for Documentary Art in Brooklyn. He produces and directs documentary media projects and programs multi-disciplinary events. The collaborative productions he has initiated, including Living Los Sures, Just to Get By, Documenting Mythologies, Capitol of Punk and Yellow Arrow, have united creative efforts of hundreds of artists, documentarians and communities. In 2014 and 2016, Brooklyn Magazine named him one of the most influential people in Brooklyn culture. Christopher has served on the juries of film festivals such as RIDM (Montreal) and Doc Lisboa, and on funding panels such as NYSCA and LEF. He collaborates on live performances such as Say Something Bunny! with artist A.S.M. Kobayashi.
Join us for this screening and Q&A, hosted and moderated by Amir Husak, Director of Documentary Studies and Assistant Professor in the School of Media Studies.
Presented by the Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies
School of Media Studies
The New School
DOC TALK LOGO designed by Laura Salaberry
https://newschooldocstudies.wordpress.com/
http://www.newschool.edu/public-engagement/documentary-media-graduate-certificate/