DOC’S KINGDOM – THE PERMANENT COMMUNITY
The Permanent Community of Doc’s Kingdom aims to reflect, expand and articulate the collective knowledge produced at the annual Seminar, organizing study-days, in-person meetings and online sessions throughout the year.
This first series of online masterclasses aims to interrogate the very idea of community, based on the practices of four leading artistic and cultural organizations, with very different histories, scales and missions, operating simultaneously at a local and global level in different territories of documentary cinema.
Through a discussion around the gestures of producing, directing, distributing and programming films, we want to question: how can cinema build communities?
Dear Doc 2022 ONLINE SESSIONS (in English)
22 November La Vulcanizadora – Andrés Jurado & Maria Rojas Arias
29 November Mediateca Onshore – Filipa César & Marinho de Pina
5 December LUX – Benjamin Cook
12 December The Flaherty 2022 Online Experience – Juan Pedro Agurcia
All sessions at 8pm–9pm GMT
Free registration is first come, first served, up to 25 participants, with priority to Dear Doc Fellows 2022 and participants in all sessions.
22 November 2022, 8pm-9pm GMT
La Vulcanizadora – Andrés Jurado & Maria Rojas Arias
LA VULCANIZADORA is a film production and creation laboratory founded in 2017 by filmmakers, artists, and producers, Maria Rojas Arias and Andrés Jurado. La Vulcanizadora is devoted to experimental creative projects and to explore various models of production and collaboration to make films, in a commitment to cooperate with processes of historical memory and to give life to narratives that go against the grain of the official stories or canonized by cultural circuits and by official institutions. Maria and Andrés propose an intense dialogue between disciplines supported by a practice articulated with the artist’s craft and experimentation with film and hybrid formats. They incorporate methods from performance and theater and contemporary art, generating critical approaches to ethnographic devices and visual anthropology. La Vulcanizadora embraces archival work and audiovisual counter-archive, where the cinematic is at the base of operations. They are interested in stories about radical otherness, the efforts to understand the processes of colonization and decolonization, examining their representations very closely and transgenerationally.
Andrés Jurado is an artist, filmmaker, and producer whose work explores the intersections between experimental and expanded cinema, archives, counter archive, contemporary art, propaganda, mosquitoes, aliens, the space race, and the incidences of those in the construction of contemporary narratives and politics. His works have been presented at Docs Buenos Aires, MIDBO Bogotá International Documentary Festival, and EMAF, among others. He is co-founder and co-director of the Laboratory of Experimental Cinema and Expanded Theater La Vulcanizadora. In 2021, he was part of the Forensic Architecture Team in the investigation into land dispossession, disappearance, and deforestation in Colombia.
Maria Rojas Arias is co-director of La Vulcanizadora, Project Laboratory in Visual Arts, Cinema and Expanded Theater. As visual artist and filmmaker, Maria’s work is developed in the audiovisual and installation fields with the moving images. She works with official and unofficial archival materials seeking to articulate in an expanded way the relations with specific events of the past that have constituted national speeches, war policies, foundation and colonization of spaces, among others.
29 November 2022, 8pm-9pm GMT
Mediateca Onshore – Filipa César & Marinho de Pina
The MEDIATECA ONSHORE is an arts and culture platform in a socially and ecologically sensitive area in Guinea-Bissau. As a venue, it hosts archives, workshops, seminars, production and community gatherings. As a network, it acts as a hub for transferring local, South-South and globalizing knowledge through performing arts, archival practices, moving image and digital media. It articulates practices in the fields of art, agroecology, traditional knowledge and media as contributions to social, economical and environmental justice.
Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the porous relationship between the moving image and its reception by the public, the fictional aspects of documentary, and the politics and poetics inherent in the production of moving images. A large part of her films focus on the specters of resistance within the geopolitical history of Portugal. Through the creation of performative spaces, she proposes a subjective approach to knowledge and questions the mechanisms of production of the great national narratives as well as the erasure of events and gestures of minorities.
Since 2011, she has made several films that take as their matrix the first hours of the cinema of struggle and liberation in Guinea-Bissau, like fragments of a lost heritage whose potential she seeks to reanimate through a collective research, Luta ca caba inda (The struggle is not yet over). In 2017, Spell Reel, her first feature film that traces this adventure, had its world premiere at the Berlinale (Forum) and then showed in festivals and museums around the world, where it received numerous awards. César has also shown her work regularly in contemporary art venues such as SAAVY (Berlin), Khiasma (Paris), Tensta konsthall, e-flux, Mumok, MoMA, Harvard Film Archive, The Flaherty Seminar, Doc’s Kingdom. She was granted the AFIELD fellowship for art and social engagement in support of the project Mediateca Onshore.
Marinho de Pina is currently pursuing a PhD at the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE-IUL), focusing on city planning in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau. He researches Guinea-Bissauan architecture and has a masterʼs degree in vernacular architecture and clay building. He is also a performing artist and a writer. Since 2016 he has been working in the public management of AJASS, a social organization in Sonaco, which aims to improve the quality of local education, to fight against female genital mutilation and HIV/AIDS, and against ecological destruction such as deforestation. Marinho de Pina is part of the collective developing the space Abotcha – Mediateca Onshore in Guinea Bissau, and has been collaborating in the New Alphabet research project at HKW, Berlin.
5 December 2022, 8pm-9pm GMT
LUX – Benjamin Cook
LUX is an international arts agency (non-profit) that supports and promotes artists’ moving image practices. Founded in 2002, the organisation builds on a long lineage of predecessors (The London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, London Video Arts and The Lux Centre) which stretch back to the 1960s. LUX is the largest distributor of such work in Europe. LUX works with a large number of major institutions including museums, galleries, festivals and educational establishments, as well as directly with the public and artists. The organisation’s main activities are distribution, exhibition, publishing, education, research, and professional development support for artists and arts professionals.
Benjamin Cook is the founder and director of LUX. He has been professionally involved with the independent film sector in the UK for the past 20 years as a curator, archivist, producer, writer and lecturer.
12 December 2022, 8pm-9pm GMT
The Flaherty 2022 Online Experience – Juan Pedro Agurcia
At the Flaherty Film Seminar, building on the feedback and lessons learned from their first online seminar in 2021, a creative team spent almost a year designing a special online platform uniquely attuned to the needs of The Flaherty community. For the 2022 Flaherty Seminar Continents of Drifting Clouds, programmed by Almudena Escobar Lopéz and Sky Hopinka, participants from far and wide were invited to to join in a custom-built online space, created around ideas of serendipity, non-hierarchy, non-preconception, agency, play, and connections with the natural and Indigenous worlds. The Flaherty Online Experience was produced by Juan Pedro Agurcia and built on ohyay by creative technologists Ziv Schneider and Michael Krisch with artistic direction by immersive director and digital artist Alexander Porter, and Mohawk artist, filmmaker and educator Katsitsionni Fox.
Who gets to participate in conversations about documentary film and what voices are heard? Hybridity offers opportunities to question hierarchies, expand access and decentralize conversations. Yet, as many of us know through firsthand experiences with endless Zoom calls and impersonal webinars, an online event presents obstacles both technological and social that can hinder the ability to create genuine connections and experiences. In this conversation, Juan Pedro will reflect on the challenges, opportunities and lessons learned in the process of building a custom online space, engaging a hybrid community and connecting voices from across the globe through documentary film.
Juan Pedro Agurcia works in alternative cinema programming, promotion, production and distribution. He has previously worked at Cinema Tropical, UnionDocs and the Flaherty Film Seminar in New York. He is co-founder and editor of Corrientes, a trilingual digital platform dedicated to expanding accessibility and opening conversation with and through experimental Latin American cinema, and serves as a programmer of Tercer Cine Honduras, the only independent exhibition project in Honduras.
The Dear Doc Fellowship Program is developed with the support of the Gulbenkian Foundation. Doc’s Kingdom International Seminar on Documentary Film is organized by Apordoc – The Portuguese Documentary Association, funded by ICA – Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture, with the support of DST and the Council of Arcos de Valdevez.