The New School at Sundance Film Festival 2017: When Experimental Storytelling Provokes Social Inquiry
SUNDAY, JANUARY 22, 2017, 12:00–1:30 P.M. MST CINETRANSFORMER, 500 MAIN STREET, PARK CITY, UTAH 84060
Watch the conversation live at newschool.edu/sundance.
This year at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, The New School hosts a conversation exploring forms of storytelling that have far-reaching impact beyond the screen, called “When Experimental Storytelling Provokes Social Inquiry.” Five outstanding faculty members across various fields will share their practices and illustrative examples from their work, inviting attendees to consider the use of experimental techniques to conduct social inquiry and probe how unconventional filmmaking can empower others. Topics will include using lens-based media to bridge art and research, performance and film as ritual, embodied practice, the role of memory in storytelling, issues of privacy and ethical conflicts, and inspiring social action through film. Together we’ll discuss how both creative end products and the act of creation itself can consciously address issues of social justice and inclusion. Get to know the panelists below.
Caveh Zahedi (@cavehzahedi)
Professor of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College
Teaches: Film Production
Personal Work: autobiographical; cinematic memoir
Currently Teaching at The New School: “A Webshow class in which we will make and disseminate a webshow about the making of the webshow. I’m also teaching a ULEC class on Contemporary Independent Cinema in which a different director is invited each week to speak with the students about a recent film they’ve made. My favorite class I’ve ever taught is Personal Documentary because I get to know the students really well and they make the best work I’ve seen in that class.
Should’ve Been Nominated: Fire at Sea, Thank You For Playing, Uncle Kent 2.
Most Excited to See at Sundance: City of Ghosts
Last Movie Watched: The French Connection
Reading/Watching Now: The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir
Favorite Socially-Engaged Film: The Idiots by Lars Von Trier
Current/Next Project: Finishing up Season One of a TV show for BRIC TV called The Show About The Show.
Melanie Crean
Professor of Communication Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design
Teaches: Courses on emerging media, social engagement and visual culture.
Personal Work: Working with video, performance and dissenting technologies to explore how stories can be used as instruments of justice to equitably shift relationships of power and difference.
Currently Teaching at The New School: “In Fall 2016 I taught a collaborative studio called Immersive Documentary with the journalist Dan Archer, focusing on the aesthetics, methodology and ethics related to creating immersive narrative. I also taught a lecture and seminar course called Design for this Century with co-faculty Ed Keller about individual, systemic and global issues of representation and power that creatives should consider when designing for the arc of the coming decades. In Spring 2017 I’m co-teaching an academic elective with co-faculty David Carroll on the political economy of surveillance and privacy. I’ll also be teaching a section of Major Studio for MFA Design and Technology.
Recently Watched: “Moonlight, for many reasons, but in particular for the cinematography, which I thought was stunning. The story was pretty raw emotionally, but the film just glowed, foregrounding the beauty and showing respect for the beauty that emanated from the characters.”
Reading/Watching Now: “I just re-read Animal Farm, which continues to be powerfully relevant, again and again. I also recently finished The City and The City by China Mieville about two cities overlaid on top of one another and the impact on this cross hatching on those who live there.”
Current/Next Project: “I’m currently working on two ongoing projects. The first is called Ellipses, about re-envisioning the Hero archetype to represent women. This Spring I’ll be working on an action for the grounds of the former Colt Arms Factory in Hartford CT, in remembrance for lives lost to arms production and unacknowledged in the process of turning the site into a State Park. I’ll be collaborating with Patricia Kelly, founder of Ebony Horsewomen and young women she works with on a series of narrative workshops, resulting in a silent performance on horseback. The second project is Mirror / Echo / Tilt; a performative workshop, curriculum and video series created with those involved in the criminal justice system; reframing their personal histories from a position of power, to move beyond being defined by their arrest and redefine social conception of the ‘criminal.’”
Erica Fae
Faculty at The School of Drama in the College of Performing Arts
Teaches: Psycho-physical acting training based on the training that Jerzy Grotowski and his company developed in the '60s. The training works at both articulating and connecting physical, emotional, and intellectual energies in practitioners. Class is called “Grotowski” at the New School, but “The Body as Source” elsewhere.
Should’ve Been Nominated: “I’d prefer to keep my thoughts about awards private… As for things to see, I first saw Hooligan Sparrow at a festival that we were both screening at earlier this year… and it is amazing.
Most Excited to See at Sundance: “Honestly, I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had much chance to read up on all that’s playing this year. I’m looking forward to being surprised and seeing what films come my way.”
Last Movie Watched: Maggie’s Plan (filmed on our campus) on an airplane from Bangkok to Frankfurt. “It was edited by the magical Sabine Hoffman (who edited my feature film!)”
Reading/Watching Now: “I’m currently reading up on a particular woman from the ’80s for my next theatre piece, and a movement from the mid 1800s for my next film.”
Favorite Socially-Engaged Film: “Actually, I think every film is potentially socially engaging, depending on what lens we view the work through... so it would be hard to say!”
Current/Next Project: “My feature film To Keep The Light, won the Fipresci Prize earlier this year in Germany, among lots of other awards. We’re screening at the New School on January 26 at the 12th St. Auditorium. My next film, The Utopians, is in development.”
Nitin Sawhney
Professor of Media Studies at The New School’s School of Media Studies
Teaches: “I focus on conducting creative inquiry of contested spaces and memory using sensory ethnography and media practices such as film, performance, soundwalks and digital archives. My projects are often conducted as participatory workshops in collaboration with designers, artists, writers and activists, both in urban contexts but also places like Guatemala, Gaza and Nepal and Tibet.”
Currently Teaching at The New School: “I’m teaching a seminar on Participatory Research and Creative Inquiry, and a design studio on Designing Engaged Learning through Making and Play. My favorite studio course is Living Collections: Memory and Performance, which I’ve taught over the past two years.”
Recommended Watching: The Pearl Button by Patricio Guzman, about the role of water in our lives and oppression of indigenous peoples during the dictatorship in Chile.
Last Film Watched: The Birth of Saké by Erik Shirai, a visual meditation on the tradition, craft and social culture of making Saké as a small family business in Japan. “I spent time in Japan this summer so the film really resonated.”
Reading/Watching Now: The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy by J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz; Running with the Mind of Meditation by Sakyong Mipham; The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe; To a Mountain in Tibet by Colin Thuborn
Favorite Socially-Engaged Film: Arna’s Children by Juliano Mer Khamis. “It transformed the course of my entire life. It led me to meet the filmmaker who became a mentor and inspired me to come work with children in Palestinian refugee camps for nearly a decade and led me to create my own documentary with children in Gaza called Flying Paper which has been shown in dozens of festivals over the past 5 years.”
Current/Next Project: “For the past few years I’ve been working on Zona Intervenida, a performance-based documentary based in Guatemala. But in the past year I’ve began an exploration of Sacred Soundwalks and Soundscapes in Kathmandu, Nepal and sacred mountains in Tibet. You can see/hear them in part on this site I created.”
Abou Farman Farmaian
Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research
Teaches: Cultural Anthropology with a specific focus on death, immortality, transhumanism and secularism. “All the different ways we have found to not die.”
Currently Teaching at The New School: “Immortality. I love this class — readings on reincarnation, resurrection, survival, mind uploading, all the good stuff. And lots of guest speakers, including a robot. Also Critical Foundation of Social Theory, which is just what it says.”
Should’ve Been Nominated: “Well, our film, of course. It got on all the ‘best undistributed films’ list from the critics. But we got distribution right before those lists came out! which is fine. Factory 25 will be releasing in the Spring.”
Last Movie Watched: Monte by Amir Naderi, at MoMA two nights ago.
Reading/Watching Now: Experience in the Medium of Destruction by Sara Jane Stoner; The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife by Jan Bremmer , which is an old book from a second hand store — a book with an afterlife.
Current/Next Project: Icaros: A Vision
