Submissions for the Filmmaking Seminar are now open

Filmmaking Seminar
 

This seminar, designed in collaboration with UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art and highlighting the recipients of the newly established UNDO Fellowship alongside filmmakers in the Festival selection, will explore radical filmmaking practices and the expanding languages of documentary cinema. Four open conversations, each led by a different scholar or critical writer, will engage the work of 10 artists presented at Doclisboa’19. Each session will focus on a discrete question of representation: of historical liberation movements; of absences and exclusions in the archive; of appropriated text, images, and culture; and of the physical, sensual processes of an embedded existence. Sessions will be recorded and included in a podcast produced by UnionDocs. On the 2nd of October, after the Press Conference of the festival, the guest filmmakers will be announced.

22 OUT (tue) / from 10.30 to 13.00, Culturgest – Sala 4
• Erika Balsom / Éric Baudelaire

23 OUT (wed) / from 10.30 to 13.00, Culturgest – Sala 4
• Dani and Sheilah ReStack / Steve Reinke

24 OUT (thu) / from 10.30 to 13.00, Culturgest – Sala 4
• James N. Kienitz Wilkins / Matthew Shen Goodman

25 OUT (fri) / from 10.30 to 13.00, Culturgest – Sala 4
• Nzingha Kendall / Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

_

Price (4 sessions):

General public – €30

Holders of the Gerador card – €20

Apordoc members and unaccredited students – €15

Accreditation holders – free, subject to a selection process

Maximum number of participants: 30
Subject to a selection process.

To submit, please fill the online form available here. Submissions open until the 16th of October 2019. International submissions welcome!

If you have any questions, please write to programme@doclisboa.org

_

ABOUT THE SESSIONS

Languages of liberation

Erika Balsom, Éric Baudelaire

Scholar Erika Balsom and filmmaker Éric Baudelaire propose to explore how the revolutionary languages of the 1960s and 1970s—languages of documentary filmmaking, artistic expression and political action alike—resonate today. How have the energies of this moment persisted and mutated? How can they provide a resource for thinking through the urgencies of the present, for the future? In a moment when hope for political transformation feels increasingly necessary, what forms and acts can best respond to the need to re-imagine reality?

————————–

Embedded existence

Steve Reinke, Dani ReStack, Sheilah ReStack

Essayist and artist Steve Reinke joins collaborative artists Dani and Sheilah ReStack to think through a queered phenomenological discourse of documentary practice that asks what an artist does with the world? Building from Restack’s “feral domesticity”, Reinke expands into an exploration of how “feral subjectivity”—hybridized approach to filmmaking, one that mode-shifts between approaches—opens up a new set of possibilities for representing the endlessly complex plenitude of being in the world, and reinscribes that representation with the physical, sensual processes of an embedded existence. 

————————–

Shape shifts

Matthew Shen Goodman, James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Writer and editor Matthew Shen Goodman and filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins ask what is the value of appropriation today? While the term has become shorthand for a singular kind of cultural misappropriation, creative adoption in film, art and writing has also been a radical gesture of critique and a means of drawing attention to conditions of production. By tracing a genealogy inside and outside of film and rethinking the potential of such acts, they hope to develop a discourse around appropriation that will enliven it as a tool for artists, activists, and anyone else considering the politics of claiming something as one’s own.

————————–

Archive repair

Nzingha Kendall, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

Film scholar and programmer Nzingha Kendall and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich propose to explore alternative narrative-making grounded in radical black intellectual production, responding to what Saidiya Hartman refers to as “silence in the archive”. They ask how can black storytellers work in the realm of reality when traditional records of reality historically rendered black subjecthood invisible? How might the transparency imposed on minoritized subjects be resisted by employing gaps and fragments to achieve strategic opacity? By interrogating film form and genre, they seek to extend possibilities for moving images to resuscitate embodied, spiritual, and coded understandings of black experiences.

————————–

ABOUT THE UNDO FELLOWS

Dani ReStack, Sheilah ReStack

“Dani and Sheilah ReStack have embarked on an artistic relationship that is formally and emotionally adjacent to their domestic lives, a quotidian zone they share with their young daughter Rose. Both artists have established careers on their own. Neither Dani’ video work or Sheilah’s multimedia performance and installation work could exactly prepare us for the force of the women’s collaborative efforts.” Michael Sicinski (Cinema Scope, 2017).

Éric Baudelaire

Éric Baudelaire (1973, Salt Lake City) lives and works in Paris, France. After training as a social scientist, Baudelaire established himself as a visual artist often focussed on social and historical research. Since 2010, he has devoted himself more seriously to filmmaking. His feature films include Also Known As Jihadi (2017), Letters to Max (2014), The Ugly One (2013) and The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011).

Erika Balsom

Lecturer in film studies at King’s College London. She is the author of After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation and Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art, as well as the co-editor of Documentary Across Disciplines. She contributes to magazines such as Artforum and Frieze, and has published in scholarly journals including Cinema Journal and Grey Room. In 2018, she was awarded a Leverhulme Prize and the Kovács Essay Award.

James N. Kienitz Wilkins

Filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn. His work has premiered at international film festivals including Berlin, TIFF, Locarno, Rotterdam, NYFF, CPH:DOX, BAMcinemaFest and New Directors/New Films. In 2017, he was included in the Whitney Biennial and a retrospective of his work was showcased at RIDM (Montréal). He has had solo exhibitions at Gasworks (London), Spike Island (Bristol, UK) and Kunsthalle Winterthur (Switzerland).

Matthew Shen Goodman 

Matthew Shen Goodman is a writer and a senior editor at Triple Canopy.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich

Her work is about the private lives and worlds of black women. Her practice is rooted in archival research and field research, which then gets translated through a writing process, and then finally a filmmaking process that includes narrative, documentary and experimental film techniques. This means working closely with archives that until recently did not preserve or respect black voices and thinking about how to represent histories that have been neglected.

Nzingha Kendall

Film scholar and programmer. Her work focuses on moving images by black women from across the diaspora. She has a PhD in American Studies and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. 

Steve Reinke

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his monologue-based video essays. He is the author of two books, co-edited four anthologies, and has written dozens of essays, mostly on artists’ film. He is a professor of art theory and practice at the Northwestern University. His work is represented by the Isabella Bortolozzi gallery, Berlin.