August 08, 2018–August 11, 2018

Documentary Media and Historical Transformations at Visible Evidence XXV

Throughout the seminar series, we have explored the relationship between documentary and major historical transformations—colonialism, human rights, neoliberalism—examining how documentaries both reveal and shape sociopolitical change. For the final Sawyer Seminar event, we bring the questions posed by this series to the documentary scholars and artists at the 25^th annual Visible Evidence conference, hosted on the Indiana University campus in Bloomington, Indiana. The Visible Evidence community is an international collection of scholars and practitioners engaged in research and debates on historical and contemporary documentary practice and nonfiction media culture. The panels, screenings, and plenary session supported by the Sawyer Seminar represent the current debates and the state of the arts in nonfiction media.

Speakers

Charles Fairbanks

Assistant Professor of Media Arts, Antioch College

Charles Fairbanks is a filmmaker, photographer, wrestler, and Assistant Professor of Media Arts at Antioch College. His studies include a BA in Art and STS (Science, Technology & Society) from Stanford University, an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan, Werner Herzog’s first Rogue Film School, and the Sound-Image-Culture master class in Brussels, Belgium. Fluent in Spanish and French, he has worked as translator (Festival Filmer à Tout Prix), as programmer and producer (Courtisane Festival), as amateur pro wrestler (Mexico City), and as visiting professor of VideoArte (at Tuxtla’s UNICACH, in Chiapas, Mexico). In 2012 he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, a prestigious award for those who have “demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.” He is also the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Ohio Arts Council, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. The Modern Jungle, Fairbanks’s first feature-length documentary, is a story of globalization filtered through the fever dream of a Mexican shaman, and an intimate portrait of Zoque culture, commodity fetish, and the predicament of documentary.

Adam Diller

PhD student in Film and Media Arts at Temple University

Adam Diller explores the aesthetics of human and non-human environments through a practice informed by phonography, sensory ethnography, landscape film, and experimental narrative film. He has exhibited and performed in venues and festivals such as Prvi Kadar, New York Independent Documentary Festival, London International Documentary Festival, Kasseler Dok Fest, Aesthetica Film Festival, Wolff Humanities Forum, Concordia University Film Festival, Hamburg Short Film Festival, Iowa City Documentary Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, Light Industries. He is currently a PhD student in Film and Media Arts at Temple University.

Anal Shah

Filmmaker, Photographer, and Assistant Professor, Department of Visual & Media Arts, Grand Valley State University

Anal Shah is an Indian filmmaker and photographer. As someone who straddles multiple cultures between his academic pursuit and creative practice, Anal’s work explores identity, migration, and other things that are usually “lost in translation.” His most recent work is an immersive documentary portrait of Kalarippayattu, a lesser known South Indian martial art where the body, when put to ‘practice’ becomes a site for cultural representation, social power and spiritual ascension. His films have shown at venues such as the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival, Shadow Film Festival-Amsterdam, PDX Film Festival and The Poetic Research Bureau in Los Angles to name a few. Anal Shah is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University’s School of Communications, where he teaches film production.

Daniel Mann

Filmmaker and Ph.D. candidate, Media and Communications Department, Goldsmiths College, UK

Daniel Mann is a Ph.D. candidate at the Media and Communications Department at Goldsmiths College, UK, where he is currently leading seminars in both Media Archaeology and Digital Culture. He conducts his research within the Centre for Research Architecture, where he is a member of the Forensic Architecture project. Mann is also a filmmaker. Low Tide, his latest feature film, premiered at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival and received the Best First Feature award at the Haifa International Film Festival. Other of his films and videos were screened internationally at venues such as Rotterdam Film Festival, IDFA, and the Tel Aviv Centre for Contemporary Art.

Jill Daniels

Senior Lecturer, Arts & Digital Industries, University of East London

Jill Daniels is an award-winning filmmaker. She has been making documentary films since1989. My Private Life II (2015) won Best Experimental Film at Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2017. Her film practice focuses on memory, place and subjectivities in experimental documentary films. She is co-editor of Truth, Dare or Promise: art and documentary revisited (2013), and is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Media Practice. She teaches film practice and theory at the University of East London. She has presented papers and films at many editions of Visible Evidence. Her website is http://www.jilldanielsfilms.com.

Jonathan Olshefski

Filmmaker and Associate Professor, Department of Radio, TV, and Film, Rowan University

Jonathan Olshefski is an artist and documentary filmmaker. In 2017 he was named as one of 25 New Faces in Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine and mentioned in the New York Times as one of “The 9 New Directors You Need to Watch.” His debut feature documentary, QUEST, premiered in competition at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and went on to be selected for over 75 festivals internationally. Olshefski strives to tell intimate and nuanced stories that honor his subjects’ complexity by employing a production process that emphasizes collaboration, dialogue, and relationship to amplify their voices and reflect their points of view in an artful way. He has an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University and is an Associate Professor at Rowan University where he teaches in the department of Radio, TV, and Film. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two sons.

Lívia Perez

Filmmaker and Ph.D. candidate in Meios e Processos Audiovisuais (ECAUSP)

Lívia Perez is Ph.D. candidate in Meios e Processos Audiovisuais (ECAUSP) with a Master’s degree in Multimeios from the University of Campinas and one-year experience in Cinema and Audiovisual at University of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle). She is researcher of the Laboratory of Audiovisual Investigation and Critique (LAICA), member of the Research Group on Representation: Imaginary and Technology (RITe) at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and member of the editorial board of the magazine MOVIMENTO. She is also filmmaker and has directed the documentary feature Lampiao, Lighting up the Brazilian Press, premiered at the It’s All True – International Documentary Film Festival; the short film Who Killed Eloá?, awarded as Best Short Film at the ATLANTIDOC (Uruguay), Best Short Documentary at the GENII Awards (AWMSOCAL), 10+ Favourite Audience at 27o International Sao Paulo Short Film Festival and also exhibited in many festivals as HOTDOCS (Canada), Cinélatino (France), IDFA (Netherlands). In 2015 she had her first feature project selected to the Iberoamerican Development Course for Film Projects (IBERMEDIA / Fundación Carolina).

Louise Archambault Greaves

Filmmaker, Special Guest for Visible Evidence XXV

In 1959, Louise Archambault married William Greaves (October 8, 1926 – August 25, 2014), a documentary filmmaker and a pioneer of African-American filmmaking. He produced more than two hundred documentary films, and wrote and directed more than half of these. Greaves garnered many accolades for his work, including four Emmy nominations. She was a frequent collaborator on his projects, including Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 (2005) and The Deep North (1990). She was also the producer for his documentary, Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey (2001).

Michelle Citron

Digital and Film Artist

Michelle Citron is an award-winning digital and film artist whose work includes the interactive narratives Cocktails & Appetizers, Mixed Greens, and As American As Apple Pie (collected at queerfeast.com) and the films Daughter Rite, Parthenogenesis, What You Take For Granted…, Leftovers, and Lives:Visible. She is the author of the award-winning book, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions. Her work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art/Chicago, as well as the New Directors, Berlin, London, Edinburgh, Oberhausen, OutFest, and NYMIX film festivals. Her films and interactive narratives are distributed worldwide and are in the permanent collections of over two hundred universities and museums. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts Filmmaking Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Media Grant, and three Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowships – for digital arts, filmmaking, and screenwriting. She’s holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Wisconsin.

Raquel Valadares de Campos

Filmmaker and Entrepreneur, Anima Lucis Production Company

Raquel Valadares de Campos is a Brazilian filmmaker and entrepreneur at Anima Lucis Production Company, having created and directed the documentaries Family Recipes (2016, 13×26’), Old Man’s Cars (2014, 70’) and Bollywood Embodied, the people want cinema (2007, 26’). As a film researcher enrolled in Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora’s Film MFA program, Raquel studies Lúcia Murat’s documentaries. Since graduating from Universidade Federal Fluminense Film School in 2008, Raquel also freelances as assistant director, story hunter and project consultant, having joined various film and television productions.

Rick Prelinger

Filmmaker and Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, filmmaker and educator. His collection of 60,000 ephemeral films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now 7,000 films) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 21 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives and issues relating to archival access and regeneration. With Megan Shaw Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library in 2004. He is currently Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Sergei Loznitsa

Filmmaker, Plenary Speaker for Visible Evidence XXV

Born in Belarus, Loznitsa studied engineering and mathematics as a young man. From 1987 through 1991, he was employed as a scientist at the Institute of Cybernetics. During that time, Sergei developed a strong interest in cinematography, and in 1997, he graduated from the Russian State Institute of Cinematography (Moscow) with a major in movie production and direction. In 2001 Sergei immigrated with his family to Germany. Since then, his documentary and fiction films have been awarded 32 prizes at festivals all over the world and have been nominated for 26 others, including festival prizes at Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Leipzig, Oberhausen, Paris, Madrid, Toronto, Jerusalem, St. Petersburg, as well as the Russian National Film awards “Nika” and “Laurel.” Most recently, Loznitsa won Best Director in “Un Certain Regard” at Cannes Film Festival for Donbass (2017). His most recent documentaries, The Event and Austerlitz, have won awards at Ann Arbor, Seville, Traverse City, and Vilnius.

Yulia Lokshina

Filmmaker

Yulia Lokshina is a filmmaker, student of documentary film directing at the University of Television and Film and a research assistant at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft, University of Bonn. She was born in Moscow in 1986 and came to Germany in 1999. After school she studied culture in Passau, was the curator of the “CrankCookieKurzfilmtage” and worked in the fields of film and television. In 2011 she made her first medium-length documentary “At home.” She is a grant winner in the media programme of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. She has directed and was involved in a variety of documentaries and visual art projects, in particular on contemporary life in Russia.

Zeinabu Davis

Independent Filmmaker and Professor of Communication at University of California, San Diego

Zeinabu Davis is an independent filmmaker and Professor of Communication at University of California, San Diego. Her work is passionately concerned with the depiction of women of African descent. Ms. Davis works in narrative, documentary and experimental genres. A selection of her award-winning works includes a drama about a young slave girl for both children and adults, Mother of the River. MOR was funded by ITVS and enjoyed a 4-year run on 76 Public Broadcasting stations and won top awards at four children’s film festivals. She has also completed an award-winning love story set in Afro-Ohio, A Powerful Thang and an experimental narrative exploring the psychospiritual journey of a woman with Cycles. Her dramatic feature film entitled Compensation features two inter-related love stories that offer a view of Black Deaf culture. Compensation had a two-year broadcast run on the Sundance and BlackStarz! Cable Channels. The film was selected for the dramatic competition at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, and was the winner of the Gordon Parks Award for Directing from the Independent Feature Project in 1999. She also frequently writes articles on African American cinema, which have been published in Afterimage, Black Film Review, Cineaste, Wide Angle and Hot Wire. She has also served as a panelist for the Independent Television Service, the Illinois and Ohio Arts Councils and on the editorial committee for the POV series on PBS. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Illinois and Ohio Arts Councils, the American Film Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional films include Trumpetistically Clora Bryant (2005), Co- Motion: Stories of Breastfeeding Women (2008) and Momentum: A Conversation with Black Women on Achieving Grad Degrees (2009). A member of the LA Rebellion herself, Davis holds a BA from Brown University and an MA in African Studies and MFA in film production from UCLA.

Zoe Beloff

Professor in the Departments of Media Studies and Art at Queens College CUNY

Zoe Beloff is an artist and filmmaker. Her work focuses on drawing new time lines between past and present. Her recent films include, Glass House (2014) Two Marxists in Hollywood (2015), A Model Family in a Model Home (2015) and most recently Exile, which premiered in January 2018 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Zoe’s work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings including MoMA, FID Marseilles, the Pompidou Center in Paris and Freud’s Dream Museum in St Petersburg. She has been awarded fellowships from The Graham Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Radcliffe Institute at Harvard and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a Professor in the Departments of Media Studies and Art at Queens College CUNY.

For the full Visible Evidence XXV schedule and a complete list of sponsors, please visit visibleevidence.org. The schedule below is for presentations that are part of the Sawyer Seminar Series. All events were held on the Indiana University campus.

Wednesday, August 8, 10:30-12:15

Screening by Lívia Perez (University of São Paolo), Who Killed Eloá? & Lampiao, Lighting up the Brazilian Press

Wednesday, August 8, 1:15-3:00

Screening: Zoe Beloff (Queen’s College, CUNY), A Model Family in a Model Home & Exile

Wednesday, August 8, 3:30-5:15

Screening: Michelle Citron (Columbia College Chicago), Lives: Visible & Leftovers

Thursday, August 9, 10:30-12:15

Screening: Zeinabu Davis (University of California, San Diego) with D. Andy Rice (Miami University), Spirits of Rebellion: Black Independent Cinema from Los Angeles

Thursday, August 9, 3:30-5:15

Workshop: Louise Archambault Greaves (Special Guest) with a panel chaired by Joan Hawkins (Indiana University), On Bill Greaves

Thursday, August 9, 3:30-5:15

Screening: Jonathan Olshefski (Rowan University), QUEST

Friday, August 10, 8:30-10:15

Screening: Yulia Lokshina (University of Bonn) with Irina Patkanian (Brooklyn College), Three Boats & Days of Youth

Friday, August 10, 10:30-12:15

Screening: Daniel Mann (Goldsmiths College, University of London, Salarium

Screening: Adam Diller (Temple University), SAFSTOR

Friday, August 10, 3:30-5:15

Screening: Jill Daniels (University of East London), Journey to the South & My Private Life II

Friday, August 10, 5:30-7:30

Plenary Session: Sergei Loznitsa (Filmmaker), The Event

Saturday, August 11, 8:30-10:15

Screening: Charles Fairbanks (Antioch College) with Saul Kak (Galeria MUY), The Modern Jungle