The New school Joins Sundance with a panel on experimental filmmaking and social justice

WHAT:

The New School partners with Sundance Film Festival to provide an engaging discussion: how experimental storytelling forms can provoke social inquiry and activism. Artists, actors, and filmmakers will use examples from their work to showcase ways in which non-conventional filmmaking techniques have the potential to prompt social analysis and create meaningful change. In today's social and political landscape, diverse and accessible forms of entertainment are critical. This discussion will highlight how a conscious creative process—and the resulting works—can address urgent issues of inclusion and social justice.

WHO:

Caveh Zahedi is an autobiographical filmmaker and an assistant professor of Screen Studies in Eugene Lang College who makes films about the disparity between reality and our pre-conceived ideas about reality. His filmography includes The Show About the Show (2017), The Sheik and I (2012), I Am A Sex Addict (2006), The World is a Classroom (2002), In the Bathtub of the World (2001), I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1994) and A Little Stiff (1991).

Abou Farman is an artist and anthropologist teaching at the New School for Social Research. His interdisciplinary work ranges from experimental writing and lecture performances to conceptual art and site-specific installations. He produced Icaros: A Vision, co-directed by Leonor Caraballo and Matteo Norzi that premiered in competition at Tribeca in 2016, and his new projects in the Peruvian Amazon revolve around indigenous territorial sovereignty, environmentalism, and plant medicine. He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Canada Council for the Arts Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. His various film credits include producing Iranian filmmaker Amir Naderi’s Vegas: Based on a True Story, which was in competition at the Venice and Tribeca Film Festivals in 2008.

Melanie Crean is an artist and teacher working with film, performance, and dissenting technologies to explore how stories can be used as instruments of justice to equitably shift relationships of power and difference. Crean experiments with the construction of narrative to surface the absurd and surreal ways in which identity and experience are manipulated through social structures of control. She is an assistant professor at Parsons School of Design, teaching courses on emerging media, social engagement and visual culture. She has received fellowships and commissions from a variety of institutions, including Art in General, Creative Capital, Creative Time, Franklin Furnace, Jerome Foundation, No Longer Empty, Performa 11, and Rhizome.

Nitin Sawhney is a professor and filmmaker conducting participatory research through multisensory media in the School of Media Studies. His projects and coursework combine performance with documentaries to understand issues of memory in contested sites, and use experimental approaches to create a form for social inquiry. His recent project, ZonaIntervenida, focuses on genocide, memory, and body through site-specific performance interventions in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala.

Erica Fae is an actor and theatre professor within the School of Drama in the College of Performing Arts who focuses on feminist issues and telling the stories of powerful, radical women. She workshops embodied movement practices to provide actors with tools for more authentic performance and uses film to share the uncovered lives of women from history. Her most recent film, To Keep The Light, won the Fipresci Prize in Germany, and has premiered at film festivals around the world.

WHEN:

Sunday, January 22nd from 12:00-1:30pm at Cinetransformer, 500 Main St, Park City, Utah.

The event is free with Sundance Registration, but members of the press must RSVP with Will Wilbur.

All faculty experts will be available for interviews before and after the panel discussion.