2009 Featured Flaherty Filmmakers
KASIM ABID is a cameraman, director and producer of Iraqi origin. He holds a Diploma in Arts (Theatre/Cinema Section) from the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad and an MA from the Moscow Film Institute VGIK, and lives in London since 1982. He worked as a cameraman on many documentary filmsfor Channel 4, the BBC and other British satellite TV stations. For five years he worked as the head of Documentary Programming at the Arab channel MBC, and as the head of the camera department at ANN. He produced and directed Amid the Alien Corn (1991) which was screened to great reviews on Britain’s Channel 4, Naji al-Ali – an Artist with Vision (1999), and Surda Check Point (2005) which conveys the rhythm of life at the Israeli Army check point at Surda in Palestine. His latest film Life After the Fall is about a Baghdad family and the massive changes in their lives, since the fall of Saddam’s regime in 2003. Abid also teaches documentary film and TV production in the United Kingdom, Jordan, Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria and Palestine. In 2003, in co-operation with his colleagues, Abid founded an Independent Film and TV College in Baghdad (IFTVC), where he conducts media training for young Iraqi film-makers. Under his guidance students produced elevens short documentary films, with several of them being awarded prizes at international film festivals. In March of 2005, Abid was awarded the Award for Excellence in Arts by Britain’s (The Muslim News newspaper).
KAMAL ALJAFARI is a filmmaker and visual artist who graduated from Academy of Media Arts in Cologne in Germany. His films include the short Visit Iraq (2003) and the award-winning The Roof (2006), a quiet, personal testament to the history and daily oppression of Palestinians living in Israel. The Roof had won the Best International Video Award at “The Images Festival” in Toronto, as well as the "Best Soundtrack” award at the FID Marseille festival in France and it was shown at many international festivals. He is currently completing his new film Port of Memory which explores the semi-ruins of the city of Jaffa and the Palestinian community that remains there through the city’s use as stageset for Middle Eastern battlefronts in American action films and Israeli films of the 1970s and ‘80s. Aljafari is the recipient of the Visual Art Prize of the City of Cologne in 2004, a Stiftung Kunstfonds Germany Artist Fellowship in 2005, and a Sundance Documentary Fund Grant in 2007. He is the Benjamin White Whitney Scholar and Radcliffe-Harvard Film Study Center Fellow in 2009-2010.
OMAR AMIRALAY was born in Damascus in 1944 and headed to Paris in 1965 to pursue studies in drama and theater at the Théâtre des Nation. Gradually he began to lean towards cinema and enrolled at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, or IDHEC (now known as FEMIS) in 1967. When the 1968 student revolt erupted, he joined the hordes of protestors, and began to film. His fate was sealed; he never returned to the IDHEC and instead began to make documentary films. He returned to Damascus eager to instigate a new documentary cinema. His first three films, ‘Film-Muhawalah ‘An Sadd al-Furat’ (‘Film-Essay on the Euphrates Dam’, 1970), al-Hayat al-Yaomiyyah fi Qarya Suriyya (Everyday Life in a Syrian Village, 1974), and al-Dajaj (The Chickens’, 1977) were essays on the government's failure to provide basic amenities to the poor. Amiralay's new approach to documentary filmmaking gradually became recognized in the Arab world and Europe. Subsequent films include An Thawra’ (‘About a Revolution’, 1978), Lebanon ‘Masa ’ibu Qawm ‘Inda Qawm Fouad’ (‘The Misfortunes of Some’, 1982). Ra’ihat al-Janna’ (‘A Scent of Paradise’, 1982); ‘A l'attention de Madame le Premier Ministre Bénazir Bhutto’ (‘For the Attention of Madame the Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’, 1989-1994); ‘Rajol al-Hitha’ al-Thahabi’ (‘The Man with the Golden Soles’, 2000), and ‘Tufan Fi Balad el-Ba‘th’ (‘A Flood in Baath Country’, 2003). His cinema has become canon for generations of documentary filmmakers in the Arab world. The most recent edition of the Cinéma du Réel festival at Paris' Centre Pompidou dedicated a hommage to his work in March 2006.
LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR and LISA BARBASH’S work seeks to conjugate Keats’ and Dewey’s sense of art’s negative capability with William James’ radically empirical engagement with the immediate flux of life. Working in Montana since 2001, they have deployed different stylistic registers in film, video, and photography to evoke at once the attractions and the ambivalence of the pastoral by juxtaposing monumental and mythological Western landscapes with multiple tracks of subjective synchronous sound. The feature-length
Sweetgrass was completed in February 2009. Eight related video works, Hell Roaring Creek, Coom Biddy, Into-the-jug (“Geworfen”), Turned at the Pass, Breakfast, Daybreak on the Bed Ground, Bedding Down, and The High Trail, will be forthcoming in 2010. Earlier versions of Hell Roaring Creek, Fine and Coarse, and The High Trail were exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York City in 2007, and Into-the-jug ("Geworfen"), and Turned at the Pass at the Amie and Tony James Gallery, also in New York, in 2008. Four related photographs by Castaing-Taylor, "Sheep Wreck," "Bull Moose Crossing," "Dawn Mist I," and "Dawn Mist II" were also exhibited at the James Gallery in 2008. Previous film and video works of theirs include Made in USA (1990), a film about sweatshops and child labor in the Los Angeles garment industry, and In and Out of Africa (1992), an ethnographic video about authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the transnational African art market. Their written publications include “Visualizing Theory” (Taylor, ed., Routledge, 1994), “Cross-Cultural Filmmaking” (California, 1997), “Transcultural Cinema, a collection of essays by the filmmaker David MacDougall” (Taylor ed., Princeton, 1998), and “The Cinema of Robert Gardner” (Berg, 2008). Taylor was the founding editor of the American Anthropological Association’s journal Visual Anthropology Review (1991–94).
JUAN MANUEL ECHAVARRIA was born in Medellín, Colombia in 1947. He resides in Bogotá. A writer before becoming an artist, he published two novels, La gran catarata (Bogotá: Editorial Arco, 1981) and Moros en la costa (Bogota: Ancora Editores, 1991). His first solo exhibition was in New York in1998. In 1999, his work was included in Arte y violencia en Colombia desde 1948 at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota. In 2000, he showed in the Korean Kwangju Biennial. His work also appeared in Cantos cuentos colombianos (two-part exhibition 2004 and 2005), Daros Latin America, Zurich. In 2006 Echavarria’s work was included in ARS 06 – Sense of the Real at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland and in The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. In 2007 his work appeared in The Disappeared/Los Desaparecidos at El Museo del Barrio, New York, I Encuentro entre dos Mares at the Valencia Bienal, Valencia, Spain and Viva la Muerte: Art and Death in Latin America at Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria. Recent solo exhibitions include Public Manifestations of Creative Dissent at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, 2007; Juan Manuel Echavarria: Death and the River, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York, 2008; and Monumentos, Galería Sextante, Bogotá, Colombia, 2008. His video Bocas de Ceniza /Mouths of Ash was included in the 2005 Venice Biennale.
JEANNE C. FINLEY
is a media artist who works in experimental and documentary forms including film, video, photography, installation, internet, and site specific public works. Her work has been exhibited in international institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and the George Pompidou Center. She has been the recipient of many grants including a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship (Yugoslavia), Creative Capital Foundation, Cal Arts/Alpert Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the Phelan Award. Since 1989 she has worked in collaboration with John Muse on many installation and video projects including Flatland (2007), Clockwork (2006), and Catapult (2005). Finley’s film and video credits include: Lost (2006), Loss Prevention (2000), O Night Without Objects, a Trilogy (1998), A.R.M. Around Moscow (1993), Involuntary Conversion (1991), and Nomads at the 25 Door (1991). Finley is a Professor of Media Studies at the California College of the Arts and currently lives in San Francisco with her husband, daughter and son. Her gallery work is represented by the Patricia Sweetow Gallery and her films are distributed by Video Data Bank, Women Make Movies and Electronic Arts Intermix.
SUSANNA HELKE
is a documentary filmmaker, university lecturer and film theorist based in Helsinki, Finland and San Francisco. Her films, co-directed with Virpi Suutari, play with the borders of documentary and fiction, observational and reenacted documentary, and are directed in the Flahertian tradition of documentaire joué. Presently she’s working on a semi-documentary fiction film on young refugee boys living in the outskirts of Helsinki. Her films explore the transcendence found in everyday moments in the lives of ordinary people – a family living in the desolate wasteland of Northern Russian, young and idle men up to no good in a remote region of Finland or Somali refugee children arguing with their Finnish friends about Allah, Jesus and the resurrection of a mouse. Her films have been featured in various international documentary film festivals and have received several awards, including the nomination for the European Film Academy Arte award for Best Documentary, as well as the Best Scandinavian Documentary Award in the Nordisk Panorama Festival, the Best Documentary Award in the Milano Festival Internazionale, and the Best Documentary Film award in the Finnish Academy Awards. Susanna received her doctorate from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki and her dissertation was published with the title “A Trace of Nanook: Cinematic Methods Intertwining Documentary and Fictional Styles” in the Spring of 2006. She is currently affiliated with the UC Santa Cruz Film Program as a visiting filmmaker and scholar.
AMAR KANWAR, born 1964, lives and works in New Delhi. Emerging from the Indian sub continent, Amar Kanwar's films are complex, contemporary narratives that connect intimate personal spheres of existence to larger social political processes. Linking legends and ritual objects to new symbols and public events, Kanwar's work finds a contextual relationship with diverse audiences as it maps a journey of exploration revealing our relationship with the politics of power, violence, sexuality and justice. Amar Kanwar is the recipient of the 1st Edvard Munch Award for Contemporary Art from Norway; an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts, Maine College of Art, USA; the MacArthur Fellowship in India; Golden Gate Award, San Francisco International Film Festival; Golden Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival; Golden Orange, Antalya International Film Festival; First Prize, Torino International Film Festival, Italy; Jury’s Award, Film South Asia, Nepal; Grand Prix at EnviroFilm, Slovak Republic; Golden Tree at the 1st National Environment and Wildlife Film Festival, Delhi. His films are screened in several local and international film festivals as well as in museums like the Stediljk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Museum in Oslo, Norway. He has also participated in Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007), Kassel, Germany.
BERYL KOROT is an internationally exhibited artist and a pioneer, since the early 1970’s, of multiple channel video installation work. She was co-founder and co-editor of Radical Software (1970), the first publication to document artists’ work and ideas concerning video, and in 1976 she co-edited Video Art (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich) with Ira Schneider. She is currently at work on two exhibitions of new video works (2003-2009) to be held in 2010 and 2011 at the Aldrich Museum, in Ridgefield, CT, and at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her most recent video work for music theatre, Three Tales (2002), a collaboration with Steve Reich toured throughout the world and has also been broadcast (IFC) and exhibited at The Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum, and MoMA), and at the ICC Gallery inTokyo. Korot’s early multiple channel installation works, Dachau 1974 (1975) and Text and Commentary (1977) have been widely exhibited at such venues as the Whitney Museum (2001 and 1980), Massachusetts College of Art (1999), and Kolnischer Kunstverein, Koln (1989), amongst others. In 2005, all four channels of Dachau 1974 were streamed to the PBS website dealing with the Holocaust. It is also part of the Kramlich collection in the Tate Modern in London. From 1989 to 1993, Korot worked on the internationally acclaimed multiple channel performance work, The Cave, which she conceived and developed with Reich and which toured to major cities throughout Europe and the US. Between 1980 and 1988 Korot devoted herself to oil painting creating and exhibiting works on hand-woven and traditional linen canvas. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994 as well as numerous grants from NYSCA, the NEA. Most recently, she received an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, 2008.
PAVEL MEDVEDEV
was born in 1963 in Orenburg, Russia. In 1990 he graduated from the Leningrad State Culture Institute named after Krupskaya (Department "Cinema/Photo"). In 1992 he graduated from the Higher School for TV directors (workshop of Sarukhanov). From 1993 – 2000, he worked as a television director in St. Petersburg, and since 2000, he has been working as a film director at the St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studio.
JOHN MUSE is currently the Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Haverford College’s John B. Hurford ’60 Humanities Center. In 2006 he received a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley. His dissertation, The Rhetorical Afterlife of Photographic Evidence, co-chaired by Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman, analyzes Roland Barthes’ numerous writings on photography, an artwork by Roni Horn entitled Another Water (the River Thames, for Example), and an essay by Avital Ronell on the videotaped beating of Rodney King, “TraumaTV: Twelve Steps Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Muse shows how these works use photographs not to establish, to quote Barthes’ famous formulation, “what has been,” but to promulgate a crisis of the evident. His single-channel videotapes and multi-media installations have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. In 2003 New Langton Arts in San Francisco staged a mid-career retrospective of the installation works that he and frequent collaborator Jeanne C. Finley have created. In 2001 Muse and Finley received a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship for their experimental documentary project, Age of Consent. In 1999 they received a Creative Capital Foundation Award. In 1995 they received Artist in Residence fellowships from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. The Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco represents his installation works, and the Video Data Bank distributes his single-channel works.
ABDERRAHMANE SISSAKO, Director of October, The Black and the White, and Rostov-Luanda, was born in Kiffa, Mauritania in 1961. Raised in Mali, his father’s homeland, he returned to Mauritania in 1980. The emotional and financial difficulties of adjustment made him turn to literature and film. A study grant allowed him to attend the Institute of the University of Moscow. Le Jeu (1990), first presented as a graduation assignment, won the prize for best short at the Giornate del Cinema Africano of Perugia in 1991.
PAWEL WOJTASIK, a video artist and filmmaker, born in Lodz, Poland, lived in Tunisia before immigrating to the United States in 1972. He currently resides in New York City. He received his M.F.A. from Yale University in 1996. Wojtasik started making 8 mm films in Poland at age 14. After several years as a painter, he returned to the moving image in 2000. His work often explores the endpoints of our material existence: Dark Sun Squeeze (2003-8), film and installation, examines the workings of a sewage treatment plant; Naked (2005-6) explores the lives of laboratory animals; Landfill (2007) looks at the handling of society’s waste. Wojtasik's work has been shown at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City; Momenta gallery in Brooklyn, Alona Kagan, Sarah Meltzer and Martos galleries in New York, NY; the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain; Michael Janssen Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and Platform China gallery in Beijing, among others. Film festivals include Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany, Images Festival, Toronto, Athens International Film and Video Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and Borderline Video Art Festival, Beijing, China. Pawel Wojtasik has held residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Edward Albee Foundation, Voom HD Lab, and the Outpost (Brooklyn, NY), and was awarded a NYSCA grant in 2006 and two grants from Voom HD Lab Artist Outreach program in New York City.