LEF is delighted to join the Film Study Center at Harvard University in announcing that Jessica Hankey has been selected as the 2025-26 recipient of the FSC-LEF Fellowship. Filmed on US cross-country trains, Hankey’s film in progress, SUNSET LIMITED, moves through changing American landscapes and social environments where strangers connect across cultural, economic, and technological divides–until their station is called. And where passengers collaborate in front of and behind the camera as boundaries erode inside the train.

Jessica Hankey is a Cambridge-based filmmaker whose projects use improvisation and performance with non-professional actors to consider how we interact with broader power structures. Being in relation with others, intimacy, and formal experimentation animate this work. Hankey attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow. She has exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, Vox Populi, and Bowdoin College. Her films have screened at Anthology Film Archives, Slamdance, and the Atlanta Film Festival, and have been reviewed in Artforum, Glasstire, and the Chart. She co-edited the anthology Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance (MIT Press 2023) and is the publisher of Orbis Editions, an artist-run small press.

The FSC-LEF Fellowship is awarded annually to one Boston-area nonfiction filmmaker not currently affiliated with Harvard. The filmmaker receives a $15,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in Harvard FSC work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities.

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Attending the seminar will be three LEF New England Flaherty Fellows: Morgan Hulquist, Matteo Moretti, and Sasha Tycko. (Read more about the fellows below). Since 2009, LEF has partnered with the Flaherty to support the participation of New England-based nonfiction filmmakers at the Flaherty Film Seminar each year.

The Flaherty fellowship program runs concurrently alongside the Flaherty Seminar while offering additional programming – workshops, screenings, discussions, artist lunches, and artist talks – designed to provide more in-depth engagement with the Seminar program.

Morgan Hulquist is an emerging documentary filmmaker based in Portland, Maine whose work explores latent place-based stories. She is currently directing and producing INVADERS, a lyrical portrait of citizen scientists who spend their free time scouring Maine’s coastline for marine invasive species, now in production.

From 2022 to 2025, Morgan was Associate Producer at Multitude Films, the independent production company dedicated to transformative culture change through nonfiction storytelling, where she participated in the company’s Producer Apprenticeship program — dedicated to mentoring the next generation of documentary producers. Her credits include Life After(Sundance 2025/Independent Lens), Power (Sundance 2024/Netflix), Queer Futures (CPH: DOX 2023/Criterion Channel), How We Get Free (SFFILM 2023/Max) and Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power (Tribeca 2022/Peacock), as well as Kristine Stolakis’s forthcoming animated documentary alive!, now in post-production. She worked in communications at Chicken & Egg Films, a nonprofit supporting women and gender-expansive documentary filmmakers, 2017–2021 and is also a freelance archival producer and documentary communications specialist.

Originally from San Diego, Morgan is a member of the Maine Palestine Film Collective and an organizer of the Maine Palestine Film Festival.

Matteo Moretti is a Greek-Italian-American filmmaker and cinematographer specializing in documentary and narrative work that explores the intersection of culture, environment, and people. He’s drawn to stories that preserve living traditions, often capturing the quiet beauty and complexity of people and places worldwide.

Sasha Tycko is an anthropologist, photographer, and filmmaker and a PhD candidate at Emory University. Her current work focuses on the Atlanta forest at the center of the conflict over “Cop City,” where she integrates ethnographic research and a visual art practice to explore how the contested landscape—once the site of a city prison farm and antebellum plantation—motivates new articulations of history, nature, and ethics. Through this work, she has produced two films, Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest (2023, 40 min.) and Atlanta Forest Garden: Four Days of Work (co-produced with Marion Lary, 2023, 12 min.) and a photography exhibition, Ways of the Atlanta Forest (2025, Institute 193). Her writing and photographs have been published in n+1, Jewish Currents, Trans Studies Quarterly, Mergoat Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essay “Not One Tree” (co-authored with Grace Glass, 2023, n+1) was awarded the Krause Essay Prize. She received her BA at the University of Chicago.

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LEF is delighted to join the Harvard Film Study Center in announcing that Riccardo Giacconi has been selected as the 2024-25 recipient of the Film Study Center-LEF Foundation Fellowship. Giacconi’s film in progress, Affidavit, follows a 30-year-old radio producer as she records voices and sounds in a small rural village, summoning the distant memory of a violent act that the local community still grapples with. Through her microphones, the radio producer facilitates a sort of séance, where the past is brought to the surface through conversations and by listening to soundscapes at various crime scenes as if searching for phantom radiation that still resonates in the air. The film aims to evoke the practice of radio-making in the form of a portrait within a portrait.

Riccardo Giacconi is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher. He studied fine arts at IUAV University in Venice and received a PhD from Leiden University. His work has been exhibited in various festivals and venues, including the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Visions du Réel and FID Marseille, where he won the Grand Prix of the International Competition in 2015. His most recent film, Giganti Rosse, premiered at the Torino Film Festival, where it was awarded Best Italian Documentary in 2023. He co-founded the collective listening festival Helicotrema and the audio storytelling studio Botafuego. Giacconi is Professor of the Practice at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston.

The FSC-LEF Fellowship is awarded annually to one Boston-area nonfiction filmmaker not currently affiliated with Harvard. The filmmaker receives a $10,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in Harvard FSC work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities.

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Maxime Cavajani is a multimedia artist working across experimental video, photography, drawing, sculpture, performance, and installation. Their practice investigates the space and time that is in between queer bodies, questioning the “seen” and the “legible”. Thinking through mnemonic functions, their work uses the slippages in between image and imaging, sculpture and forming, performance and gesture, sound, and noise to challenge modes of address. Rather than locating what is in motion, their work reverberates through bits, blurs, traces, and reflections. In doing so, the artist asks the public to question their own mnemonic system through themes of desire, violence, death, loss, and love.

Pauline Shongov is a filmmaker whose work explores oral, historical, affective, and haptic senses of place as well as local and diasporic forms of community belonging, particularly in the Balkans. Her latest film Couple More Shovels for a Few More Levs (2023) premiered at the German International Ethnographic Film Festival and was selected for the Visions du Reel Film Market and Ji.hlava New Visions Market. Her practice-based work has been supported by the Harvard Film Study Center, Sensory Ethnography Lab, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and the Cornell Council of the Arts. She is a PhD candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University, where she is a Presidential Scholar. She is also the co-founder of the curatorial research initiative Off-site. Currently, she is co-directing/co-producing Borá: a film that follows foragers, treasure hunters, foresters, and clairvoyants on their journeys through a mountain that unearth a cryptic landscape ripe with fables, legends, and apparitions.

See the full list of Flaherty fellows on the Flaherty website.

Learn more about the fellowship on our website.

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LEF joins the Harvard Film Study Center in announcing that Milton Guillén has been selected as the 2023–24 recipient of the Film Study Center-LEF Foundation Fellowship with his project “My Skin and I.”

The FSC-LEF Fellowship, open to Boston-area nonfiction directors who are not currently affiliated with Harvard, aims to foster connections between Harvard filmmakers and those in the surrounding filmmaker community.

One filmmaker per academic year receives a $10,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in the Harvard FSC community through work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities. Fellowship applications are accepted in the January round of the LEF Moving Image Fund Production and Post-production grant cycle and the final recipient of the FSC-LEF Fellowship is selected by the Film Study Center.

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Cam/a.c. Howard (they/them) is a writer, ‘zinemaker, and multidisciplinary artist, and the program coordinator at the Points North Institute in Maine, USA. Their work focuses on queer coming of age, community care, nature, music, and the future. a.c. has made short films, interactive workbooks, comics, podcasts, and fiction & nonfiction zines. Their writing has appeared in The Bollard, Oroboro, and their newsletter The Deal. They are currently working on an essay about Brian Eno, and a comic about trans-masculine lesbian identity. Cam studied radio and podcast production at the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, and documentary filmmaking at the Rochester Institute of Technology. They live on Wabanaki land with their leopard gecko, Nero.

Chloe Zimmerman (she/her) is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and educator engaging with ecologies, documentary poetics, collaborative learning, and making across disciplines. She currently teaches film, writing, and fungi-based workshops at RISD, MassArt, and Brown University. She is the curator of an upcoming film and poetry series called ESSAI. Chloe was a UnionDocs Collaborative Fellow and recently completed an MFA at Brown University.

Enrique Rivera (he/him) is a Puerto Rican filmmaker born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He uses his passion for research-driven documentary and archival preservation to highlight and empower stories from BIPOC and marginalized communities. While elevating nuanced and inclusionary perspectives, his practice revisits conversations surrounding decolonization, abolition, and our relationships with land and agriculture. His documentary work on legal institutions, belief systems, trafficking, and cultural icons has appeared on Netflix, HBO Max, National Geographic, CNN, and The Atlantic. Most recently he was the producer of the HBO Max documentary series Menudo: Forever Young. He is a graduate of Emerson College.

Stephen Wardell is an American filmmaker whose experimental narratives move fluidly between fiction, documentary, and essay. Their playful films investigate systems of power and explore the contemporary forces that construct queer identity. Recent screenings include: Visions du Réel, L’Alternativa Independent Film Fest Barcelona, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. From the Midwest, currently they live in Boston, MA.

See the full list of Flaherty fellows on the Flaherty website.

Learn more about the fellowship on our website.

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LEF’s Moving Image Fund is now accepting letters of inquiry for projects in Production and Post-production.

A maximum of seven (7) grants of $15,000 each will be awarded to projects in the Production phase, and a maximum of four (4) grants of $25,000 each will be awarded to projects in the Post-production phase during LEF’s major grants review. Please note that in order to be eligible for Post-production support, the project for which you are applying must have received previous LEF support.

Learn more about guidelines and eligibility by reading the full announcement. Letters of Inquiry can completed through LEF’s Submittable.

Submitting a MIF letter of inquiry is also an opportunity to express interest in being considered for the Harvard FSC-LEF Fellowship, an opportunity for Boston-area filmmakers to receive a jointly-funded $10,000 grant, access to FSC’s pool of production and post-production equipment, and participation in the Harvard FSC community through work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities. Find out more about this opportunity on our website.

To learn more about these upcoming opportunities, LEF staff will be hosting a virtual info session on Zoom from 1:00 – 2:00pm ET on Monday, December 5. Register for the info session here.

An Update to MIF Applications

This year, in a continued effort to standardize the application process for filmmakers who may be applying to multiple funds, LEF has used the latest Nonfiction Core Application as a template to update the Moving Image Fund LOI and Full Application forms. The LEF letter of inquiry form now includes an additional 2022 question drawn from the updated Nonfiction Core Application and clarifying language about existing LEF questions. The MIF full application will further reflect updated and added questions, for which you can get an initial sense by visiting the Nonfiction Core Application website.

Our hope is that any updates and additional questions in our forms will provide the opportunity for applicants to expand upon their approaches to access, accountability, and community care in their projects.

Announcing LEF’s Fall Grant Cycle

LEF is excited to announce that our grant cycle to support projects in Pre-production and Early Development, which historically included a deadline in mid-June and a decision in late July, is shifting to slightly later in the year.

The next grant cycle will have a deadline on August 7, 2023 with a decision in early October. Mark your calendars!

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The LEF Foundation has awarded 11 Moving Image Fund grants totaling $205,000 in support of feature-length documentary works by New England-based filmmakers.

The LEF Moving Image Fund invests in feature-length documentary films that demonstrate excellence in technique, strong storytelling ability, and originality of artistic vision and voice. The most recent round of awards includes seven grants of $15,000 to projects at the Production stage and four grants of $25,000 to projects at the Post-production stage. 

This year’s selected films represent a chorus of perspectives questioning how best to celebrate, conserve, and connect with the past and present while forging ahead into an unwritten future. 

“It’s moving to see the diversity of work being made by independent documentary filmmakers in the region,” said Lyda Kuth, Executive Director. “This year we saw themes of legacy, community, and transformation dealt with through a range of films, some of which address environmentalism, disability, public education, and even wastewater treatment.”

Production

• COSMIC CODA (dir./prod. Mary-Jane Doherty)
• Kaksori! (dir. Shirley Kim-Ryu, Eben Portnoy; prod. Kim-Ryu, Portnoy, Marcela Santibañez)
• King Luck (dir. Emily Graham-Handley; prod. Graham-Handley, Tom Donahue)
• My Disability Roadmap (dir. Dan Habib, Samuel Habib; prod. Dan Habib)
• Requiem for a River (dir. Mary Patierno; prod. Patierno, Hugo Pérez)
• The Source of Life (Te Puna Ora) (dir. Virginie Tetoofa; prod. Kiran Jandu, Riham Ezzaldeen, Ciara Lacy)
• Untitled Wastewater Documentary (dir. Kaitlyn Schwalje, Alex Wolf Lewis; prod. Rebecca Stern, Justin Levy)

Post-production

• Adam’s Apple (dir. Amy Jenkins)
• Cairo, IL Project (working title) (dir. Lisa Marie Malloy, JP Sniadecki, Ray Whitaker; prod. Karin Chien, Wynne Hannan)
• Israelism (dir. Eric Axelman, Sam Eilertsen; prod. Axelman, Daniel Chalfen)
• School District (dir. Leigh Morfoot, Jason Morfoot; prod. Leigh Morfoot)

At LEF’s January 2022 deadline for Production and Post-production, 67 eligible letters of inquiry were evaluated by a group of three New England-based filmmakers serving as peer readers, in addition to LEF staff. 

“This opportunity for local filmmakers to engage with the work being made by their colleagues is both inspiring and builds a sense of community that LEF looks to play a role in creating,” said Kuth.

Of these initial inquiries, 28 projects that most aligned with LEF’s funding criteria were invited by LEF staff to submit a full application, including 17 finalists in Production and 11 finalists in Post-production. All 28 full applications were then evaluated by a peer review panel made up of filmmakers and professionals from across the U.S. who represent a diversity of perspectives on documentary. Peer reviewers remain anonymous and change at every round. While LEF has typically convened each year’s Moving Image Fund panelists for an in-person review meeting each May, LEF hosted an all-virtual panel review process for a third consecutive year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“We were honored to learn about every project shared with LEF during this spring grant cycle, and to invite feedback from a group of thoughtful and talented peer reviewers at both the letter of inquiry stage and the full application stage,” said LEF Program Director Gen Carmel. “We will make that feedback available for applicants to hear by phone, and we hope that all of the filmmakers who applied might take advantage of this opportunity to receive in-kind support for their works-in-progress, regardless of the grant decision.”  

In addition to this group of grantees, LEF also awarded $47,500 to 12 projects in Early Development and Pre-production earlier in the fiscal year. In total, LEF will be distributing $252,500 in funding to documentary productions over the course of its 2021-22 fiscal year. 

Earlier today, LEF joined the Harvard Film Study Center in announcing that Amy Jenkins has been selected as the 2022-23 recipient of the Film Study Center-LEF Foundation Fellowship with her project “Adam’s Apple.” The FSC-LEF Fellowship, open to Boston-area nonfiction directors who are not currently affiliated with Harvard, aims to foster connections between Harvard filmmakers and those in the surrounding filmmaker community. One filmmaker per academic year receives a $10,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in the Harvard FSC community through work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities. Fellowship applications are accepted in the January round of the LEF Moving Image Fund Production and Post-production grant cycle and the final recipient of the FSC-LEF Fellowship is selected by the Film Study Center. See the full announcement here.

The next Moving Image Fund grant deadline is Friday, June 3, 2022 for New England-based directors and producers seeking Pre-production and Early Development support for feature-length documentaries. Please check LEF’s website for details regarding LEF Moving Image Fund guidelines and eligibility. For more information on the Foundation or its funded projects, please contact Program Officer Matthew LaPaglia at matthew@lef-foundation.org.

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The LEF Foundation has awarded 10 Moving Image Fund grants totaling $190,000 in support of feature-length documentary works by New England-based filmmakers.

The LEF Moving Image Fund invests in feature-length documentary films that demonstrate excellence in technique, strong storytelling ability, and originality of artistic vision and voice. The most recent round of awards includes six grants of $15,000 to projects at the Production stage, and four grants of $25,000 to projects at the Post-production stage.

“Considering the increased challenges that independent filmmakers continue to face in 2021,” said LEF Executive Director Lyda Kuth, “we are unwavering in our commitment to the Moving Image Fund, as a longstanding and unique regional grant program for New England-based filmmakers, which offers early and ongoing funding for feature documentaries through a peer review evaluation process. ”

At LEF’s January 2021 deadline for Production and Post-production, 72 eligible letters of inquiry were evaluated by a group of three New England-based filmmakers serving as peer readers, in addition to LEF staff. Of these initial inquiries, 30 projects that most aligned with LEF’s funding criteria were invited by LEF staff to submit a full application, including 22 finalists in Production and 8 finalists in Post-production. All 30 full applications were then evaluated by a peer review panel made up of filmmakers and professionals from across the U.S. who represent a diversity of perspectives on documentary. Peer reviewers remain anonymous, and change at every round. While LEF typically convenes each year’s Moving Image Fund panelists for an in-person review meeting each May, LEF altered its plans for a second consecutive year due to the COVID-19 pandemic by convening an all-virtual panel review process.

About the most recent round of Production and Post-production grants awarded, LEF Program Officer Gen Carmel shared, “The projects supported at this stage represent only a glimpse of the visionary filmmakers and artists who live and work in New England, working across archival, experimental, hybrid, observational, personal, and political filmmaking traditions in documentary film. While not all applicants were able to be supported, we were honored to learn about every project shared with LEF, and to invite feedback from a group of thoughtful and talented peer reviewers, which we will make available for applicants to hear by phone. We hope that all of the filmmakers

who applied at this stage will continue to stay in touch with LEF as not only a potential funder, but also a resource for information and encouragement, to make the filmmaking process a little less isolating through these difficult times.”

In addition to this group of grantees, LEF also awarded $50,000 to 12 projects in Early Development and Pre-production earlier in the fiscal year. In total, LEF will be distributing $240,000 in funding to documentary productions over the course of its 2021 fiscal year.

Additionally, earlier today, LEF joined the Harvard Film Study Center in announcing that Khary Saeed Jones has been selected as the 2021-22 recipient of the Film Study Center-LEF Foundation Fellowship with his project “Night Fight”. The FSC-LEF Fellowship, open to Boston-area nonfiction directors who are not currently affiliated with Harvard, aims to foster connections between Harvard filmmakers and those in the surrounding filmmaker community. One filmmaker per academic year receives a $10,000 grant (jointly funded by FSC and LEF Foundation), access to FSC production and post-production equipment, and the opportunity to participate in the Harvard FSC community through work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and other activities. Fellowship applications are accepted in the January round of the LEF Moving Image Fund Production and Post-production grant cycle and the final recipient of the FSC-LEF Fellowship is selected by the Film Study Center. See the full announcement here.

See the full MIF announcement.

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The 2017 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar took place from June 17-23 at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. Since 2009, LEF New England has supported an annual fellowship program for four New England-based artists working in non-fiction film/video to attend the seminar. This year’s LEF New England Fellows included Sarah Bliss, Allison Cekala, Madsen Minax, and Darian Stansbury.

After sharing Allison Cekala’s notes last month, this week on the LEF blog, we share new reflections from Darian Stansbury’s experience at the Seminar.

Darian writes:

I’m still thumbing through and highlighting 53 pages of notes taken over 7 days. Still captioning 118 photos and 16 videos. Still feeling the electricity of 5 nights on the dancefloor, 3 of them barefooted.

Trinh Minh-ha stated in discussion on June 20th, “People bury in order to remember.” I have deeply buried my memories as a Flaherty fellow in my mind and heart of hearts, and will mine them for ages to come. Programmer Nuno Lisboa began his first morning screening by stating that he was “jealous” of those who were attending for the first time. Shortly thereafter, I knew exactly why: I could be taken by surprise only once. Like Frances Flaherty would have wanted, I had very few preconceived notions. I had not spoken to anyone who had attended the seminar before. When the theatre lights were being lowered, I was passing through the “dark partition” (Trinh) into a kino-fire hydrant blast of 40+ films.

Laura Poitras said she “likes to implicate the audience.” I was implicated and stirred to decisively evaluate my own practice. As an artist, I usually have a constellation of rotating projects in mind at various stages of development. During the course of the seminar, I was affirmed in which concepts and themes to continue exploring and experimenting in, as well as the ideas and courses to abandon. I received new ideas of my own; ideas that I experienced more viscerally and emotionally after having my senses heightened and stamina broken down by the sheer volume and weightiness of content.

I admired how each of the filmmakers not only addressed their own implications and biases, but absorbed them into their work. They did not avoid or sidestep the tensions therein as many commercially-focused artists do.

It was a privilege to hear the thoughts of brilliant people from several countries around the world. I wished more of them would have spoken their thoughts in the formal discussions more often. Because of this hesitation, further intimacy occurred outside of the scheduled outline. Some of the most meaningful moments were to and from meals, at happy hour, or in threesome huddles in front of Bill’s Bar. It was no coincidence that after the most heated discussions were the longest nights on the dancefloor in President’s Hall, where we stayed once until dawn.

___________________________________________

I discovered while attending that the fellowship program was once referred to as the grants-in-aid program. While it may not be the case for my colleagues, this title would have been applicable to me. Without this grant from the LEF Foundation to attend, the Flaherty Seminar would have remained on my ‘Someday/Maybe’ list, in direct competition with other practical considerations like: “Should I buy a camera?” or “Should I take a summer course instead?”

In addition, the Flaherty fellowship program was my first ​yes in a political environment that is very much influenced by the other yes’s already on the list. As I overheard it repeated by another participant, “I feel as though I’ve found my film tribe.” Gaining exposure to this tribe of contemporaries who are eager to offer critique on my work is not just encouraging, but crucial to survival. The direction I was so generously and immediately given by other fellows on navigating the world of fundraising, residencies, and grant-writing will be invaluable.

Arriving a day earlier, as the fellows are expected, gave me the opportunity to become acquainted with my surroundings and begin conversations more slowly. I had the privilege of being fully present. The time spent with the fellows prior to the Opening Reception was like a private appetizer before the full excitement of 130 more people being added. Being identified as a fellow was a primary factor to my not becoming lost amongst the crowd. My duties bartending during the evening and happy hour afforded me interactions with participants and staff that were informal and earnest. You get to know people best when you are serving them. The radical access to the featured filmmakers (and participants) throughout the master-class, meals, and in between screenings was counter-cultural. I was free to obtain the information needed, to gain insights on their philosophies and thinking processes, and to challenge areas growth in myself.

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The 2017 Robert Flaherty Film Seminar took place from June 17-23 at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. Since 2009, LEF New England has supported an annual fellowship program for four New England-based artists working in non-fiction film/video to attend the seminar. This year’s LEF New England Fellows included Sarah Bliss, Allison Cekala, Madsen Minax, and Darian Stansbury.

This week, we share some notes and images from Allison Cekala’s experience at the Seminar.

Allison writes:

It is hard for me to try to synthesize my experience this past week at the Flaherty Seminar. It felt like entering an otherworldly, never-ending, immersive world of documentary film, film criticism, and non-stop discussion. It was exhausting and intense, but I have come away with new friendships, connections, and a deeper understanding of cinema.

As one of the 35 fellows this year, I arrived a day before the rest of the participants. We were able to get to know each other, and each others’ work as well as attend a master class by Trihn T. Mihn Ha, a highlight for me. When the rest of the participants arrived we became part of a 175-member community of makers, critics, academics, and film enthusiasts from 22 different countries; a community committed and devoted to not only talking about film, but larger the implications of cinema and documentary, questioning representation, authenticity, performativity, truth, class, race, aesthetics, and a myriad of other concerns both about the world at large and the medium of filmmaking.

As the seminar unfolded, blindly going into each program, we slowly came to recognize each of the ten filmmakers sharing work: Filipa Cesar, Vincent Carelli, Kevin Jerome Everson, Dominic Gagnon, Laura Huertas Millan, Sana na N’Hada, Laura Poitras, Peter Nestler, Trinh Minh-ha, and Eduardo Williams. The Flaherty is a unique experience, not only because we come to each program without preconception, but also, the program is a highly curated sequence, this year by Nuno Lisboa. Different from a film festival, the ways in which the films either compliment or create dissonance are planned to encourage conversation, this year within the theme of “Future Remains”. I was able to see connections to films that were shown at different times of the week and also within the same day. For example, Kevin Jerome Everson’s Tonsler Park employed a similar structure to Dominic Gagnon’s Idea of the North, focusing on long shots of close-up faces, but their affects where distinctively opposed. Idea of the North, depicting a dark view of Inuit people, using appropriated youtube footage, produced some of the most inflammatory and passionate responses on Wednesday evening, (the kind of notorious debate that I had heard rumor of at the Flaherty) while the Kevin Jerome Everson’s generous gaze in Tonsler Park produced a more praiseworthy response.

As a new filmmaker without formal training in film, listening and engaging with the critical discourse that followed each film was most impactful. It felt almost absurd to judge a film without knowing its context and seeing it only once, but often, my opinions about the film would shift as I heard other’s thoughts about the film. I am continuing to unpack comments like “I don’t make films for the subject”, as quoted by Kevin Jerome Everson, or the notion of “speaking nearby”, rather than “speaking for” or “speaking about” another, as quoted by Trihn T. Mihn-ha, whose presence was one of the most meaningful parts of the seminar.

A new book just came out about the Flaherty, “The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema”, written by long-time Flaherty participants Scott MacDonald and Patty Zimmerman. During a fellows lunch, Scott and Patty talked about the history of the seminar and their experience writing the book. It was then that I realized the larger implications of the seminar, in how it has shaped film and the discourse surrounding it and we, the participants, are an integral part of that history. The Flaherty feels as though it is at the forefront of the shifting and changing world of documentary, keeping it honest, current, and continually redefining and pushing the boundaries of the genre.

On the final day of the seminar, Sana na N’Hada (through a translator) said, “It has been an honor to be amongst such an elevated assembly. I am returning to my country with optimism because I have hope in the world.” N’Hada is known for filming his country, Guinea-Bissau, during their war for independence in the 60s and 70s. He had seen unimaginable hardship and suffering, but his powerful films have become an important document in his country’s history. Just as Sana observed during the seminar, it also became clear to me that our group was deeply invested in the betterment of humanity and the proliferation of art and new ideas through the medium of moving image. We all feel that filmmaking is important. Its significance is far-reaching and deeply intertwined with social underpinnings of our society. Attending the Flaherty allowed me to understand this further, transforming me into a more sensitive viewer and maker. It is an experience that I will surely take with me as I move through the world.

Thank you LEF for the opportunity to attend this year’s Flaherty Seminar.

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