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In a world awash in sexual imagery, why does so little of it speak to the common pleasurable reality of sex?  Tony Comstock has been a filmmaker and photographer for more than 20 years, exploring a wide array of topics relating to the human condition. Subjects of Comstock's films have included love and sex, 9/11, indigenous fisheries, hurricanes, refugees, HIV/AIDS orphans, and the visualization of God. His current focus is his Real People, Real Life, Real Sex series.  Saturday evening he will treat us to a sneak preview of his latest erotic documentary effort Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl, which profiles a young lesbian couple.  Comstock will be on hand to discuss his work, censorship, and the healthy depiction of sexuality in art along with CineKink's Lisa Vandever and Diana Cage from Velvet Park.  Moderated by curator Colin Weatherby.

Digital technology and emerging platforms have opened up endless possibilities for us to reflect life and the world around us.  From traditional news outlets to new media start-ups, interactive projects and participatory storytelling, there are a variety of paths being taken for short-form, digital documentaries that increasingly reside on the Internet.  Sunday we will bring together five different producers of emerging content from Video Nation (BBC2), WSJ.com (online arm of the Wall Street Journal), the Global Lives Project, Breakthrough, and Metropolis (VPRO) to share clips and engage in dialogue in a panel discussion comparing strategies and objectives in this ever-changing landscape.  Curated with UK-based producer Mandy Rose (Collab Docs, Video Nation), moderated by Kara Ohler (UnionDocs Collaborative Co-Director) and Steve Holmgren (UnionDocs Programmer), please join us for this event on Global Perspectives in Digital Media.

See you soon,
UnionDocs


Brett and Melanie: The Erotic Documentary with Tony Comstock
Saturday, October 23 at 7:30pm
Global Perspectives in Digital Media:
A Panel
Sunday, October 24 at 7:30pm
WRITING

A World Subdivided Into 30 Frames A Second: A Conversation With Su Friedrich
by Colin Beckett

NOTE: This interview was conducted last year. Since 1978, Su Friedrich has been making films that render the borders between documentary, experimental film, and conventional narrative... more»

VIDEOS

Director ADAM BHALA LOUGH talks with VICTOR VAZQUEZ on THE CARTER
by UnionDocs

Edited by Marine Lormant Sebag. more»

NEWS

Matthew Barney Judges Shooting People's Monthly Film Competition
by UnionDocs

From our friends at Shooting People are partnering with Revolver Entertainment for their monthly film competition. This month is Destricted, focused on the subtle intersection of art and... more»

COLLABORATIVE BLOG

Understanding cities... and ourselves
by Andrew Parsons

Venkatesh and Andersen both offer up lengthy critiques of myths that Hollywood filmmakers and sociologists build around cities that they seek to portray or understand. However, in many ways I... more»

UPCOMING EVENTS
you may find yourself: Short Films Exploring Urban Landscapes
Friday, October 29 at 7:30pm
Danny Williams: Factory Films
Saturday, October 30, 2010 7:30pm
Cinebeasts: Campaign Spots & SPIN-
An Election Special
Tuesday, November 2nd at 6:30pm.
FROM LAST EVENT

Brett and Melanie: The Erotic Documentary with Tony Comstock

Saturday, October 23 at 7:30pm. $9 suggested donation

Tony Comstock present for a panel discussion with Diana Cage (Velvet Park) and Lisa Vandever (Cinekink) following the screening. Moderated by curator Colin Weatherby.

Purchase Tickets

A sneak preview of the seventh in Tony Comstock’s ongoing Real People, Real Live, Real Sex documentary series, Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl is an exploration of sexual pleasure in committed relationships and the problematic place of explicit sexuality in cinema. ”Brett and Melanie” depicts a butch/femme couple, and opens up questions about strength and vulnerability in the context of how we portray and interpret gender. Throughout Brett and Melanie’s interview, there is a constant dance of who is strong for whom, of who is vulnerable and who nurtures; and this dance continues when Brett and Melanie make love.

By including frank footage of Brett and Melanie’s lovemaking along with their candid testimony, the film also opens up questions about the meaning of reality in the context of documentary filmmaking, and explodes preconceptions about the place of sexuality and eroticism in cinema.

Curated with Colin Weatherby.


Tony Comstock has been a filmmaker and photographer for more than 20 years. In a world awash in sexualized imagery, why does so little of it speak to the common pleasurable reality of sex? He has explored this and other aspects of the human condition. Subjects of Comstock’s films have included love, sex, 9/11, indigenous fisheries, hurricanes, refugees, HIV/AIDS orphans, and the visualization of God. His current focus is the Real People, Real Life, Real Sex series. Reaction to these films has ranged from film festival laurels and critical and popular acclaim, to police raids on screenings and intimidation of DVD retailers.

Diana Cage is the managing editor of Velvetparkmedia.com and author of several books on sex and sexuality including, Girl Meets Girl: A Dating Survival Guide and Box Lunch: The Laypersons Guide to Cunnilingus. She is the former editor of On Our Backs, the only lesbian sex magazine made by women, and host of her own show on Sirius XM. Featured in the Here! Television series Lesbian Sex and Sexuality, she was also named one of GO magazines 100 Women We Love. Her newest book, A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Ecstasy, will be out next spring.

Lisa Vandever is co-founder and director of CineKink, an organization that recognizes and encourages the positive depiction of sexuality in film and television. She curates and oversees an annual film festival and touring series designed to promote and showcase such works. A producer and consultant with over twenty years of experience in film and television, Vandever was formerly the director of programming for a regional network of public television stations, worked as a development executive for two New York-based independent production companies and was associate producer of the Sundance award-winning feature film, “Songcatcher.”

Vandever holds an MFA in Film and Video from Northwestern University and a BA in Telecommunications and Film from the University of Oregon. She is currently producing and directing her own documentary,  A Public Voyeur, a profile of fine-arts photographer Barbara Nitke and her landmark legal challenge against the federal government’s CDA obscenity law.

Global Perspectives in Digital Media: A Panel

Sunday, October 24 at 7:30pm. $9 suggested donation
Producers present for a panel discussion.

Purchase Tickets

Digital technology and emerging platforms have opened up new ways of reflecting life around the world.  We will share some content and begin a discussion with producers of five projects that have taken advantage of new technologies and novel production methods to bring global stories to North American and European audiences. What are the agendas in bringing these stories home? How do producers negotiate these cross-cultural exchanges? What strategies are used to engage audiences with distant lives and experiences?

This evening will feature a panel conversation with video clips from Video Nation (BBC 2), WSJ.com, Global Lives, Breakthrough, and Metropolis (VPRO), with producers in attendance for a panel discussion. Complete information on each participant below. Curated with Mandy Rose.


Video Nation was a ground-breaking access television and participatory media project which was co-founded in 1994 by producers Chris Mohr and Mandy Rose of the BBC’s Community Programmes Unit. Fifty people across the UK were given camcorders and training and recorded aspects of everyday life during the course of a year. Selected recordings were broadcast on BBC2 with the best known output, the Video Nation Shorts, broadcast on weeknights forty weeks a year for nearly six years. The project won a Race in the Media Award and the European Prix Iris. During Video Nation’s first decade ten thousand tapes were shot and 1,300 shorts were screened on TV. The project migrated to the web in 2001 and continues today in a new format as Video Nation Network.

Mandy Rose is an award winning producer who has overseen participatory and interactive projects including the BBC’s pioneering digital storytelling project Capture Wales (2001-2008), Voices (2004) & My Science Fiction Life (2005) the latter both webby nominated. Between 1994 and 2000 she was co-founder and producer of Video Nation. In addition to the UK project for which fifty people made recordings about everyday life, Video Nation travelled to the Caribbean, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Africa, and the Balkans, bringing vivid, first person perspectives from these regions to BBC screens. Mandy blogs at http://collabdocs.wordpress.com/


WSJ.com, the online arm of The Wall Street Journal, aims to tell the stories behind the numbers and increasingly utilizes multimedia tools and videos on the web to give the audience a glimpse of the lives of people all around the globe.

Hilke Schellmann is a producer with WSJ.com, her first initiative being the multimedia project Faces of Health Care. The videos which were narrated by the protagonists themselves, showed the struggle of every day people in the US with health insurance. It was pegged to almost all the WSJ.com stories about health care reform.  In March, Schellmann reported an influential video story about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. She met with the stakeholders in Germany and made a very moving video, in which the victims talked about their plights and the church also addressed these issues directly.


The Global Lives Project is a collaboration of more than 700 filmmakers, photographers, artists and everyday people working together to create a video library of human life experience. They have produced ten recordings of 24 hours of daily life of individuals in Brazil, Malawi, Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Serbia, Lebanon, Kazakhstan and the US. Their multi-screen video installations have been shown at museums, galleries, universities and public spaces around the world including the United Nations University in Tokyo and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Currently they are developing an interactive web version of the installation that allows for dynamic navigation within the video content, tagging, participatory subtitling, geolocation and hypervideo navigation, as well as a feature-length film.  Producers Rahul V Chittella and Khairani Barokka in attendance.


Breakthrough is an innovative, international human rights organization using the power of popular culture, media, and community mobilization to transform public attitudes and advance equality, justice, and dignity in India and the United States. Through initiatives in India and the United States, Breakthrough addresses critical global issues including violence against women, sexuality and HIV/AIDS, racial justice, and immigrant rights.

Madhuri Mohindar is a Multimedia Manager of Breakthrough’s video documentary campaign Restore Fairness which deploys new media tools like online video, blogs, democracy in action tools and and social networking to mobilize action on fair immigration and racial justice. Its documentaries include “Face the Truth: Racial Profiling Across America” produced with the Rights Working Group, a coalition of 275 organization across America, ‘Restore Fairness’ documentary produced with 26 leading human rights and immigrant rights organizations, and ‘Death by Detention’, voted as ‘Best Long Form Video’ for the 2009 DoGooder TV Nonprofit Video Awards.


VPRO Television’s Metropolis is an award-winning TV show and new media project featuring content produced by a network of more than 60 documentary filmmakers from around the world. In each episode, Metropolis brings viewers a geographically diverse collection of short films, all grouped around a weekly theme. From obesity and the lives of fifteen-year-old girls, to self defense, outcasts and Elvis impersonators, Metropolis presents a new ‘global view’ every week, and exposes the surprising differences and similarities between people and cultures worldwide. The televised version of Metropolis has been airing in The Netherlands since 2008. All short films produced by Metropolis —over 600 in total—are also available worldwide on the show’s website, which recently won a special commendation from at the 2009 Prix Europa Awards.

Kel O’Neill (US) & Eline Jongsma (NL) have been US correspondents for Metropolis since the project’s inception. In addition, they are currently working on a new media project entitled Empire, which investigates the legacy of European corporate-colonialism in former Dutch East India Company colonies and trading posts in Asia and Africa.

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