2023 Flaherty NYC

MAKA
Many Eyed Vessel

November 17–19

Programmed by
Emily Abi-Kheirs | Ha’aheo Auwae-Dekker
Isabel Rojas | Raven Two Feathers

Schedule

Programs

Encountering Edges

Wednesday, Nov 15, 1–2:30 pm
Online

Programmer Introduction + Narrative Practice with Poh Lin Lee (Narrative Imaginings). Available to MAKA registrants and 2022 Seminar Participants

Opening Night: Nowhere Near

Miko Revereza, 2023; 95 min
Friday, Nov 17, 5 pm
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street

With Nowhere Near — the culmination of several years of shooting, editing, relocation, and reflection — acclaimed experimental filmmaker Miko Revereza forges a personal and profound portrait of immigration, disillusionment, and the elusiveness of home.

The film will be preceded by a screening of New Red Order’s Endless Land Acknowledgement.
The program will be followed by a discussion with Miko Reverenza and the series programmers.

Mini Seminar
Sat & Sun, Nov 18 & 19
DCTV, 87 Lafayette Street

The weekend will take the form of a seminar hosted at DCTV.
Offerings will include film programs, multi-media exhibitions, discussions, and social gatherings. Film programs will be followed by hour-long seminar-style discussions.

Film Program 1: Offerings for the Seen & Unseen

Saturday, Nov 17, 5 pm
DCTV

How are the images of the unseen made visible? How does the visible communicate with the invisible? We have lit the incense left at the altar. The smoke pillows in the air. Did my breath move its direction or did something unseen touch it? This program arose from wanting to understand how the spiritual and ancestral made themselves present or disappear from our lives.These films offer one bridge to our collective experience of envisioning our different realities and spaces, and how pieces of the world are made visible/invisible. The past, the present, and the future collide into one: the path to envisioning.

Film Program 2: The Tongue is an Island

Sunday, Nov 19, 11 am
DCTV

In Ōlelo Hawaiʻi, one hānau means the sands of my birth, this is the place one would call your homeland. Amidst our understanding of place, The Tongue is an Island emerges from an innate need to grasp where we come from and how we fit into the places we call home. These films offer a glimpse into the expansive understanding of what it means to inhabit a space. Are we rooted to “home”? Shipwrecked to a dislocated sense of identity? How do we find our “birth sands” and turn them into glass?

Film Program 3:
Conjuros Y Ofrendas Para Un Futuro Contingente

Sunday, Nov 19, 3:00 pm
DCTV

Exhibition: Remembering Our Futures, Now

Remembering our futures, now is a multimedia exhibition bringing together artists from various tribal nations through a plains medicine wheel inspired movement through the exhibition space. We explore all forms of time in the exhibition space and concurrent emotions revolving around the effects of colonization and re-indigenization. The at times conflicting emotions around reckoning with colonization, with the current tools at our disposal, is all brought into one space. In doing so, we honor all parts of ourselves and the internal process it will take to deal with our current transitional period in history. With offerings by Meagan Byrne (Cree, Metis), Jeremy Dutcher (Wolastoqiyik), Dan Taulapapa McMullin* (Samoa), and Demian DinéYazhi´(Diné).

Note: there are many different interpretations of the medicine wheel, with correlating animal, plant, and aspects of humanity (spirit, mental, physical, emotional), orientation of the wheel, and even color, changing depending on who you talk to.  Here are two different versions to reference.

Registration

Full program registration is $75. FNYC Season 25 registration includes:

• Access to all online events and in-person programming including four in-person film programs (including Opening Night), all discussions, and all online offerings. 

• An invitation to our opening night dinner at House of Joy.

• Access to the exhibition Remembering Our Futures, Now at DCTV November 18–19 

• Coffee, drinks, and snacks throughout the weekend at DCTV (PLEASE NOTE: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner will not be provided unless otherwise noted.) 

Weekend only registration is $60 and includes all programs except opening night.

We are now single tickets to all the screenings! Purchase tickets to the Opening Night screening at Metrograph, for tickets to the remaining programs, please click the link above!

Programmers

Artists

Azucena Losana

Born and raised in Mexico City, Azucena Losana lives and works in Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Losana holds a Multimedia Arts Degree from the National Arts University in Argentina, the Diploma of Audiovisual Preservation and Restoration (DIPRA) from the Film Archive and the National Image of Argentina (CINAIN), and Claudio Caldini’s experimental film workshop. She? works in experimental film, installation, and video.

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1972, Santiago Muñoz is a film and video maker. The uncontrived, observational style of her art aligns it with the sensibility of documentary film while also blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. Despite its ostensible simplicity, her work stems from intensive research, observation, and documentation, and she is deeply concerned with the tension between the documentarian’s desire for truth and the artist’s aesthetic concerns. For her, the camera as a tool that can both reveal and fabricate reality.

She completed her BA in humanities at the University of Chicago in 1993 and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997.

Christopher Makoto Yogi

Christopher Makoto Yogi is a filmmaker from Honolulu, Hawai‘i whose films include the features I Was A Simple Man (2021), August At Akiko’s (2018). His work is currently available to stream on the Criterion Channel.

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos

Colectivo Los Ingrávidos is a Mexican film collective founded in 2012 to dismantle the commercial and corporate audiovisual grammar and its embedded ideology. The collective is inspired by the historical avant-gardes and their commitment to using both form and content against alienating realities. Their methods combine digital and analog mediums, interventions on archival materials, agitprop, mythology, social protests, and documentary poetry. Their radical experimentations on documentary and cinematographic devices produce images, both visual and auditory that are political possibilities in their own right.

Colectivo Silencio 

Fernando Vilchez Rodríguez, Lady Vinces Cruz, Carla Amaro Carreño, César Vargas Pérez, Mayra Villavicencio Príncipe, Walther Maradiegue Montaño, Ana Karina Barandiaran Urday, Martín López Sono, Veronica Ferrari Gálvez, Náyarith Gastulo Ladines, Luis Tirado Ordoñez, Christian Fernando Ñeco Bornaz

Colectivo Silencio is a group of young artists and activists who live and work in different cities in Peru. Their work arose from discussions on political cinema, enriched by the identity and territorial diversity of each other.

Colectivo Yi, Hagamos Lumbre

Carolina María Vázquez García, Casandra Casasola, Cela Cruz Ramírez, Eleazar García, Elena Pardo, Erick Baeza, Eva Melina Ruiz González, Gloria Martínez Villanueva, Jenny García, Julio López Fernández, Luna Marán, Marco Salaverría, Nereyda Pérez Vázquez, Nicolas Rojas Sánchez, Odin Acosta, Pablo Márquez, Pablo Morales García, Rosalinda Dionisio Sánchez, Selene Galindo

A group of storytellers decided to join the fires to walk together with a feminist approach, a community perspective, and the aim of supporting processes of defense of the territory. The paths of Yi Hagamos Lumbre are not in a straight line, nor are they paved—it is the time to open the gap, learn to plow the land and cultivate our ears as windows, to build memory and new horizons.

Its headquarters are in the beautiful community of Guelatao de Juárez. From this Zapotec land the space for conversation, creation and dissent is opened. The kitchen, dialogue, and walks are spaces that lead the collaborators to creative activities. The important thing is the walk, the enjoyment, the discovery—we are not the same as at the beginning of the trip.

The creation of image, sound, and text allow us to re-think ourselves, remember, and dream of possible futures. Meetings, meals, and campfires, are often the starting point for new conversations. This creative, multidisciplinary, mutant, temporary, and diverse community has over 24 years of experience in film and audiovisual production with a social impact. The collaborators arrive, walk, sow, harvest, undertake other paths. Some will return with the new spring, others will continue to feed the conversation.

We have learned by tealling stories like the feature documentary Uncle Yim, 2019 (selected in Ambulante, BBC REEL); Rooster Powder, 2021; The Revolt, 2022; The end of the first times, 2024; Through Tola, 2023; Cicadas, 2024; Tuyuku (Ahuehuete), 2019 (Ojo Award for Mexican Documentary Short Film at the 18th FICM), and Ñuu kanda (People in Motion), 2020. They have produced content for the BBC, Lila Downs, Estemam, Sara Curruchic, Andrés Calamaro and have participated in projects with Itinerant Audiovisual Camp, Here Cinema, Agenda Guelatao, Cine Too, Bechi Loi.

Dan Taulapapa McMullin

Dan Taulapapa McMullin is an artist and poet from Sāmoa i Sasa’e (American Samoa). Their artist book The Healer’s Wound: A Queer Theirstory of Polynesia (2022) was published by Pu’uhonua Society and Tropic Editions of Honolulu in the Hawai’i Triennial, with a second edition publishing in 2024. They are currently working on a novel.

Demian DinéYazhi´

Demian DinéYazhi’(Diné) is a transdisciplinary artist who uses social interventions to interrupt colonial power structures. Their blog Heterogeneoushomosexual contemplates “Radical Indigenous Queer Feminist Art” and how a marginalized body navigates and resists assimilation. DinéYazhi’s practice includes curation, zine production, public interactions, as well as writing and poetry. DinéYazhi’ graduated with a BFA in Intermedia Arts from PNCA in 2014 and is the founder of Radical Indigenous Survivance & Empowerment (R.I.S.E.) an activist initiative for education and preservation of Indigenous art and culture. They grew up in Gallup, New Mexico, and is currently based in Portland, Oregon.

Ha’aheo Auwae-Dekker 

Haʻaheo Auwae-Dekker (they/them) is a proud Kanaka ʻŌiwi artist, filmmaker, and storyteller from Waimea on Moku O Keawe, the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. As a storyteller, Haʻaheo is driven to create art that amplifies voices through embracing vulnerability — their work has shown them the power of Indigenous storytelling. They were a Flaherty Film Seminar Curatorial Fellow in 2022.

João Vieira Torres 

João Vieira Torres is a French-Brazilian artist/filmmaker born in Recife, Brazil. He lives and works between France and Brazil. He obtained a Master degree in Photography and Video Art from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, followed by a post-graduate residency at Le Fresnoy-Studio National des Arts Contemporains (2010-12) and continued his research in the PHD program Document et Art Contemporain at the École Superieur Européenne de l’Image. 

Vieira Torres uses various forms of artistic expression: photography, cinema, video art, and performance. One of the main axes of their work is the issue of “foreignness” and forms of instability and perspectives breaking points that originate it. He has shown his work at: Venice Biennale College (IT) / DocLisboa (PT) / New York Film Festival (US) / Kinoforum São Paulo (BR) / CentrePompidou(FR) / Palais de Tokyo (FR) / Edinburgh International Film Festival (UK) / Art of the Real Lincoln Center (US) / Ann Arbor Film Fest (US) / FIDMarseille(FR) / Olhar de Cinema (BR) / Rencontres Int. du Documentaire de Montréal (CA) / Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin (FR/DE) / Museu da Imagem e do som de São Paulo (BR) / Anthology Film Archives(US) / MIS São Paulo (BR) / LABoral (ESP) / IndieLisboa(PT) / Tampere Short Film Fest (FI) / Uniondocs New York (US) / Vilnius CAC(LT).

Jeremy Dutcher

Jeremy Dutcher is a Two-Spirit song carrier, composer, activist, and ethnomusicologist from Tobique First Nation in Eastern Canada. He gained international acclaim for his album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, which earned him the 2018 Polaris Music Prize and Indigenous Music Album of the Year at the 2019 JUNO Awards. His musical style blends the songs of his community with neoclassical, jazz, and pop influences, and has led him to collaborate with such iconic artists as Beverly Glenn Copeland and Yo-Yo Ma. Dutcher’s work has taken him to the world’s great concert halls, NPR’s Tiny Desk, and the judges’ table of Canada’s Drag Race.

Meagan Byrne

Meagan Byrne is an Âpihtawikosisân (Métis, Ontario) game designer born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario. Her designs incorporate narrative, game mechanics, sound and traditional art and are deeply rooted in Indigenous Futurisms, language and Indigenous feminist theory. She uses her games to explore questions of cultural belonging, the Indigenization of media and the future of Indigenous language and culture.

Meagan has received a B.A. of English Literature (2009) from McMaster University and a B.A. of Game Design (2017) from the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. Meagan was the first Digital + Interactive Coordinator at the imagineNATIVE Media Festival and is the current owner/lead designer of Achimostawinan Games, an Indigenous-run and staffed indie game studio.

Miko Revereza

Miko Revereza (b. 1988. Manila, Philippines) is a filmmaker raised in California. DROGA! (2014), DISINTEGRATION 93-96 (2017), No data plan (2018), Distancing (2019) and El Lado Quieto (2021) have widely screened at festivals such as Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, NYFF Projections, IDFA, and Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real. His debut feature film, No Data Plan is recognized with such honors as the Sheffield Doc Fest Art Award and San Diego Asian Film Festival Emerging Filmmaker Award, as well as being listed in BFI Sight & Sound Magazine’s 50 Best Films of 2019, Hyperallergic’s Top 12 Documentary and Experimental Films of 2019 and CNN Philippines Best Filipino Films of 2019. Revereza is listed as Filmmaker Magazine’s 2018 25 New Faces of Independent Cinema, a 2019 Flaherty Seminar featured filmmaker, MFA graduate at Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and recipient of the 2021 Vilcek Prize in Filmmaking.

New Red Order 

Adam Khalil, a member of the Ojibway tribe, is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, whose practice attempts to subvert traditional forms of image-making through humor, relation, and transgression. Khalil is a core contributor to New Red Order and a co-founder of COUSINS Collective. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, Walker Arts Center, Lincoln Center, Tate Modern, HKW, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Toronto Biennial 2019, and Whitney Biennial 2019. Khalil is the recipient of various fellowships and grants, including a 2021 Creative Capital Award, 2021 Herb Alpert Award, Sundance Art of Nonfiction, Jerome Artist Fellowship, Cinereach and the Gates Millennium Scholarship.

Jackson Polys is a multi-disciplinary artist belonging to Tlingit territory, living and working between what are currently called Alaska and New York. He is a core contributor to New Red Order, a public secret society who co-produce video, performance, and installation works that confront desires for indigeneity, settler colonial tendencies, and obstacles to Indigenous growth and agency. His individual and collaborative works have appeared at the Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum, Artists Space, HKW Berlin, Images Festival, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, MIT, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Biennial of Art, Walker Arts Center, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Zack Khalil is a filmmaker and artist from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, currently based in Brooklyn, New York.  His work centers Indigenous narratives in the present—and looks towards the future—through the use of innovative nonfiction forms. He is a core contributor to New Red Order, a public-secret society which calls attraction toward indigeneity into question, yet promotes this desire, and enjoins potential non-Indigenous accomplices to participate in the co-examination and expansion of Indigenous agency. His work has been exhibited at Artists Space, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Lincoln Center, Walker Arts Center, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, New York Film Festival, and the Sundance Film Festival.

Sanaz Azari

Sanaz Azari was born in Isfahan (Iran) in 1981. She grew up and lives in Brussels where, after studying photography, she graduated from the scenography workshop of the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre.

Parallel to her studies, she followed intensive theatre courses for three years according to the Stanislavski method. After working on scenography, urban installations, and exhibitions, she directed her first documentary Salaam Isfahan which won the Audience Award at the Visions du réel festival in Nyon in 2010.

CALL TO ACTION

The programming collective elected to donate a portion of the Series’ production budget to support Native American community organizations working to honor Native people’s right to land, resources, culture, and autonomy. We invite you to take action and consider donating to one or both organizations listed below:

Lenni Lenapexkweyok

General Support for The Flaherty provided by