2020 Live Events

Live Conversation: Flaherty x Boulder (Session A)

Friday, Aug 14, 2020
6:00 pm - 6:40 pm

A live conversation with Renée Green and Patty Chang moderated by Suneil Sanzgiri.

Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. Green is currently Professor at MIT’s program in art, culture and technology.

Patty Chang is an artist working in performance, video, writing, and installation. Her work has a capacity to explore complex subjects nearly simultaneously, as does life. Born in 1972 in San Leandro, CA, Chang received her BA from the University of California, San Diego, in 1994. Her work received a 2003 award from the Rockefeller Foundation and a 2012 Creative Capital award. In 2014, Chang was a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow.

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker working to understand how systems of oppression are informed and reinforced by trauma, history, and memory. His work spans experimental video, animations, essays, and installations, and contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relation to structural violence. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017. His work has been screened at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally.


All event times are Mountain Time.

Live Conversation: Flaherty x Boulder (Session B)

Friday, Aug 14, 2020
7:00 pm - 7:40 pm

A live conversation with Joanna Priestley and Mary Filippo moderated by Devon Narine-Singh.

Joanna Priestley has directed, animated, and produced 31 films. Her work maintains a high level of porosity between serious exploration of boundaries and intuitive whimsy, and she is dedicated to experimentation in technique, theme, and content. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Film Institute, MacDowell Colony, Fundación Valparaíso and Creative Capital.

Mary Filippo studied filmmaking at the University of Rhode Island and at the Art Institute of Chicago. Filippo lived in New York City for many years and made the majority of her early films there. Often self-reflective and richly discursive, Filippo's work explores the formal periphery of documentary strategies and the intersection of the personal and political.

Devon Narine-Singh is a filmmaker and curator. His works have screened at Microscope Gallery, UltraCinema, The New School and The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. He has presented screenings and presentations at NYU Cinema Studies, UnionDocs, The Film-Makers Coop, and Maysles Cinema. He has a BFA in Filmmaking from SUNY Purchase. He is currently pursuing his MA in Screen Studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College.  


All event times are Mountain Time.

Live Conversation: Flaherty x Boulder (Session C)

Saturday, Aug 15, 2020
10:00 am - 10:40 am

A live conversation with Portia Cobb and Ngozi Onwurah moderated by Devon Narine-Singh.

Portia Cobb is a video artist and producer of short experimental documentary whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Through her continuing documentation of urban and rural communities in America and West Africa, she draws upon memory and history "as a means of confronting forced movement and forgetting." She is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Black British filmmaker Ngozi Onwurah consistently challenges the limits of narrative and ethnographic media by insisting that the body is the central landscape of an anti-imperialist cinematic discourse. An accomplished director with several episodes of the top British TV drama series "Heartbeat" to her credit, Onwurah also wrote and directed the prize-winning feature "Welcome II the Terrordome." Onwurah’s films have won prizes at the Berlin Film Festival, Germany; Melbourne Film Festival, Australia; Toronto Film Festival, Canada; and at NBPC, USA.

Devon Narine-Singh is a filmmaker and curator. His works have screened at Microscope Gallery, UltraCinema, The New School and The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. He has presented screenings and presentations at NYU Cinema Studies, UnionDocs, The Film-Makers Coop, and Maysles Cinema. He has a BFA in Filmmaking from SUNY Purchase. He is currently pursuing his MA in Screen Studies at Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema at Brooklyn College.  


All event times are Mountain Time.

Live Conversation: Flaherty x Boulder (Session D)

Saturday, Aug 15, 2020
11:00 am - 11:40 am

A live conversation with Deborah Stratman and Mounira Al Solh moderated by Suneil Sanzgiri.

Deborah Stratman is an artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Much of her work points to the relationships between physical environments and human struggles for power and control that play out on the land.  Recent projects have addressed faith, freedom, levitation, expansionism, surveillance and sinkholes. She is the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, an Alpert Award and grants from Creative Capital, Graham Foundation, Harpo Foundation and the Wexner Center. Stratman teaches in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Mounira Al Solh studied painting at the Lebanese University, Beirut, and Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. She was also a Research Resident at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam in 2007 and 2008. She is a visual artist embracing inter alia video and video installations, painting and drawing, embroidery, and performative gestures. Irony and self-reflectivity are central strategies for her work, which explores feminist issues, tracks patterns of micro-history, is socially engaged, and can be political and escapist all at once. Al Solh lives and works between Lebanon and the Netherlands.

Suneil Sanzgiri is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker working to understand how systems of oppression are informed and reinforced by trauma, history, and memory. His work spans experimental video, animations, essays, and installations, and contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture and diaspora in relation to structural violence. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Masters of Science in Art, Culture and Technology in 2017. His work has been screened at festivals and galleries nationally and internationally.


All event times are Mountain Time.

Live Conversation: Performing Representation

Saturday, Aug 15, 2020
1:00 pm - 1:40 pm

A live conversation with MDF2020 Artists for problematizing documentary narrativity for diasporic/indigenous subjects, for challenging representation, and for considering performance as document. 

Topics include: diaspora, indigeneity, race, gender, performance, representation, hybridity, fiction. 

Moderator - Reece Auguiste, Associate Professor (Critical Media Practices), University of Colorado Boulder

Suggested Watch List: There's Just Something About Death That Makes Us Dance: the revival, The Horse, At Home But Not at Home, Revolution from Afar, Bell Tower of False Creek, Inundada, Her Type, TAPE, Cat Secrets, HOMAGE TO SUMMER, Becoming, The Remandee, Nibi Walk, Songs That Never End 

All event times are Mountain Time.

Live Conversation: Politics of Form

Saturday, Aug 15, 2020
2:00 pm - 2:40 pm

A live conversation with MDF2020 Artists exploring documentary form as an act of resistance.

Topics include: formalism, politics, aesthetics, derive, resistance, radical film, aesthetics.

Moderator - Luiza Parvu, Lecturer (Critical Media Practices), University of Colorado Boulder

Suggested Watch List: one sea, 10 seas, Accession, Monumental, Take It Down, Caiman, Unless You're Living It, No Garden Beyond, Clara, Umbilical, Plant Talk

All event times are Mountain Time.

Live Conversation: Ethnographic Reading

Saturday, Aug 15, 2020
3:00 pm - 3:40 pm

A live conversation with MDF2020 Artists for exploring how culture is embedded, reproduced, documented, and described by documentary art. 

Topics include: ethnography, art, document/documented, culture, interpretation, reproduction, observation. 

Moderator - Craig Campbell, Ethnographic Terminalia Collective

Suggested Watch List: Civilians, Scenes From a Transient Home, Processes (Lucifer Disturbance), A Dilo, Arho-The Afar Salt Trade of Northeastern Ethiopia, A Love Letter ot the North, Lifting the Green Screen, In Harmony, A Sense of Belonging, Panama Queen, Forest Language, Uriah Plays the Alien, Talamanca, Swika and Its Home, Migrant Mothers of Syria

All event times are Mountain Time.

Live Conversation: Challenging History

Saturday, Aug 15, 2020
4:00 pm - 4:40 pm

A live conversation with MDF2020 Artists for investigating how documentaries challenge dominant historical narratives with memory and the archive. 

Topics include: history, archive, narrative, memory, material, time, the personal. 

Moderator - Emilie Upczak, Instructor (Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts), University of Colorado Boulder

Suggested Watch List: Home In E Major, The Gifts of Time, Holding Hands with Ilse, Evidence of the Evidence, The Previous Page, VHS Diaries, On the Road & other Places, Even In Paradise, Life on the Mississippi, On the Domestication of Sheep, Dear Opportunity, Komas Punkt (The Third Point), mesa reservoir plainsong, Mum's The Word

All event times are Mountain Time.

Jury Awards Happy Hour

Saturday, Aug 15, 2020
5:30 pm - 6:30 pm

Join us for an informal happy hour via Zoom as we present our Jury Awards for Best Documentary, Best Short Documentary, Emerging Artist, and Documentary Arts.

All event times are Mountain Time.