We are excited to be back at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at the Harvard Film Archive for a very special screening of Diego Echeverria’s Los Sures. This moving 1984 portrait of South Williamsburg is a primary inspiration for our three year community documentary Looking at Los Sures, currently in production through our Collaborative program.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see the film on 16mm. Featuring a conversation afterwards with Echeverria, UnionDocs artists and team, along with Jesse Shapins and Kara Oehler with metaLAB (at) Harvard.

Presented with the Film Study Center at Harvard, this event is free and open to the public. The program will get underway at 7pm. For more information visit The Film Study Center’s site.

James T. Hong in person. Co-presented with UnionDocs and the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.

Discussion moderated by independent curator Chi-hui Yang and UnionDocs writer Colin Beckett.

UnionDocs has a cinema/classroom/meeting space available for rent immediately!

• 500 ft² charming multi-use space outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment.
• 10 foot tin ceilings
• Seating for up to 50 people
• WiFi
• HD projector
• Linn Isobarik HiFi Speakers
• Mackie Onyx 1220 Premium Analog Mixer
• Up to 4 Shure S58  Mics
• Blackout capability
• Area for bar setup
• Access to large courtyard with picnic table.
• Excellent lunch/coffee options nearby, and great post office within 1 block.
• Great location & transportation, easy access to L/G/JMZ, street parking easy.
• Ability to hang artwork on walls from installed pipes.

Main Space and Backyard: click each thumbnail to view larger image.

UnionDocs cinema/gallery/meeting space is available for  rental.  We are able to provide a space for up to 50 people to comfortably hold meetings, classes,  presentations, parties, and receptions.  Our gallery is also open to private screenings for work-in-progess documentaries and other showcases, as well as radio listening events and one night art shows.  While we don’t advertise rental events as part of UnionDocs public programs, we can provide advice on promotion for your event.

For more information or rates email INFO@UNIONDOCS.org

Filmmakers from the UK and from around the world are invited to enter their new short, medium or feature length films. If you are a debut  filmmaker, student director or if you are established in the industry, your new films are welcome.

2009 saw the the best Doc/Fest ever with public and delegate attendance at record levels. But the film programme couldn’t have done it without the 1400 doc submissions we received during the viewing season. Our Youth Jury winner, Special Mention and Innovation Award winner were all selected from our submissions. We can’t wait to see what its in store for us this year.

This year Sheffield Doc/Fest will be accepting film submissions on DVD and, for the first time, via online platforms such as Vimeo and Daily Motion. Why post DVDs when you can get them up on line, save a few quid on materials & freight and help the environment in the meantime?! Special strands in the programme include Music, Sports, Gay and Arts docs and unexpected films are highlighted in the Anti-Docs strand. We are particularly looking for Cross-Platform films again this year. But as always, Doc/Fest is looking for new, exciting documentaries films on any subject, of any length. The Special Jury,  best Green Doc, Innovation, Youth Jury Award,  Audience prize and the Student Doc Award are all up for grabs this year. All submissions have the potential to be short-listed for the awards, but you have to be in it to win it!

Don’t forget: film schools are eligible for entry discounts. Get your Head of School to write to our programmer for the details. Submissions close on Wednesday 16 June 2010. There’s no time like the present.

For any questions about the film submission process, email film programmer Hussain Currimbhoy:hussain@sidf.co.uk and go to sheffdocfest.com/view/submitafilm for more details.

Mock up on Mu by Craig Baldwin (2009, USA, 110 min, 16mm to DigiBeta)

A radical hybrid of spy, sci-fi, Western, and even horror genres, Craig Baldwin’s Mock Up On Mu cobbles together a feature-length “collage-narrative” based on (mostly) true stories of California’s post-War sub-cultures of rocket pioneers, alternative religions, and Beat lifestyles. Pulp-serial snippets, industrial-film imagery, and B- (and Z-) fiction clips are intercut with newly shot live-action material, powering a playful, allegorical trajectory through the now-mythic occult matrix of Jack Parsons (Crowleyite founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab), L.Ron Hubbard (sci-fi author turned cult-leader), and Marjorie Cameron (bohemian artist and “mother of the New Age movement”). Their intertwined tales spin out into a speculative farce on the militarization of space, and the corporate take-over of spiritual fulfillment and leisure-time.

“…this new work hits your synapses like a cluster bomb, assailing your tremulous gray matter with a barrage of cinematic fragments (most recycled, some newly shot), miscellaneous rants and ruminations”––Manohla Dargis of the New York Times

“…Mock Up on Mu is a modern American myth fashioned from all manner of cultural detritus”––Jim Hoberman of the Village Voice

Boško Blagojevic will join Craig in a discussion following  the screening. Boško lives in New York and exhibited last fall at NYU’s Kimmel gallery. His writing has most recently appeared in Anton Vidokle: Produce, Distribute, Discuss, Repeat edited by Brian Sholis and published by Sternberg Press. He has lectured at the Parsons School of Design and is co-founder of Platform for Pedagogy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sunday, March 21 – 7:30pm

Discussion with Craig Baldwin to follow the screenings.

Accelerated Underdevelopment by Travis Wilkerson

(2003, USA, 55 min)

Acclaimed documentary on Santiago Alvarez, an unashamedly didactic, partisan portrait in its subject’s own style: brash intertitles, involving music, stark images.

Other Cinema Selects curated by Craig Baldwin

Key West (Coast)-ern Subcultural short works, fragments, and experimental exercises.

• Thad Povey: Thine Inward-Looking Eyes. Relax; Take a deep breath.  (1993, 2 min)
• Sarah Christman: Dear Bill Gates; A simple correspondence evolves into a poetic visual essay exploring the ownership of our visual history and culture. Combining original and archival film, video and images from the internet, “Dear Bill Gates” draws unexpected connections among mining, memory and Microsoft. (2006, 17min)
• Sylvia Schedelbauer: Remote Intimacy; Stream of consciousness with fictitious and found stories and a personal reference. (2008, 14 min)
• Davis Sherman: Tuning the Sleep Machine; “TUNING THE SLEEPING MACHINE maintains a dreamy oscillation between visual abstraction and a disjointedly submerged narrative of sexual menace. … [It] recalls our shared experience of late-night television in which lambent images emerge from the screen and turn strange as they percolate through our half-conscious thoughts and reveries.” – Paul Arthur, Film Comment (1996, 13 min)
• Kelly Sears: Voice on the Line; Voice on the Line is a collage animation made from figures cut out of archival ephemeral films from the late 1950s. This animation mixes the history of these films with events of this era which results in a large scale secret operation that veers bizarrely off course. The film also reflects on current and troubled relationships between the areas of national security, civil liberties and telephone companies. Voice on the Line explores how technology can be used to shape our fears, desires and how we feel connected. (2009, 7 min)
• Damon Packard: Tom Jones
• Tony Gault: TBD

About Craig Baldwin

Craig Baldwin is an American experimental filmmaker. He uses “found” footage from the fringes of popular consciousness as well as images from the mass media to undermine and transform the traditional documentary, infusing it with the energy of high-speed montage and a provocative commentary that targets subjects from intellectual property rights to rampant consumerism. He is the founder of Other Cinema, a long-standing bastion of experimental film, video, and performance in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The 33rd Annual Margaret Mead Film & Video line-up is out now.  As usual the festival will showcase a variety of amazing international documentaries, from anthropological to the avant garde.  They will present 33 films, 25 premieres, and 26 filmmakers will be in attendance.   As usual, the event takes place at the American Museum of Natural History and will run November 12-15.

Travel the world all from the comfort of the American Museum of Natural History—, where you can get to know the people and places from Mauritania to Mumbai, from Chongqing, China, to St. Petersburg, Russia, and from the Gulf Coast of southern Florida to right next door in Brooklyn. We’ll follow the length of a race-track that starts in Paris and ends in Dakar Africa, pausing to meet with the communities along the way. We’ll go north to the Seward Peninsula where a Native Alaskan community comes together to mourn the impending loss of their land to climate change. A schoolyard in Brooklyn becomes a battlefield in the War on Terror. And two historic neighborhoods facing the ugly side of urban renewal, one in Beijing, the other St. Petersburg.