Sundance 2021 Beyond Film Programming

While we couldn’t open for in-person Sundance festival screenings, we’re pleased to announce that these Sundance Beyond Film Programming events, all virtual, will still take place during the week of the festival. These events include films and conversations with friends and artists from our community, including Vassar film professor Dr. Mia Mask, filmmaker and activist Astra Taylor, filmmaker Brooklyn Demme, and several of our Creative Culture filmmaking fellows whose work has screened at Sundance in years past.

You Are Not a Loan Virtual Q&A

January 30 at 7:30 pm

We’re excited to be joined by filmmaker Astra Taylor to discuss her film You Are Not a Loan with two of the film’s subjects, Wendy Brown and Marques “Mark” Vestal.

On February 7, 2020, weeks before Covid-19 disrupted our lives, a group of activists and academics gathered to discuss the growing movement to cancel student debt and transform higher education. You Are Not a Loan documents a unique gathering that brought together student debtors, organizers, and esteemed scholars to discuss the perils and possibilities of the moment. The dialogue that ensued is both deeply personal and profoundly philosophical, historically grounded and engagingly hypothetical. What would free college—meaning free as in cost and aimed at liberation—be like? How have racism and capitalism sabotaged public education as we know it? And what will be required to bring a radically different system into being? Featuring leaders of the country’s first student debt strike and some of the most revered thinkers of our day (including Wendy Brown, Barbra Ransby, Stephanie Kelton, and others) the film offers an intimate view of the ongoing and urgent grassroots struggle to democratize education—a topic that has only become more timely in the year since it was shot. As a result of the pandemic, colleges across the country are facing budget shortfalls and student debt cancelation has become a mainstream issue. You Are Not a Loan puts the current debates in a deeper context, and points toward the utopian horizon we have to reach toward if we want to truly solve the current crisis. This film was supported by Onassis Los Angeles.

You Are Not a Loan is available to stream online via The Intercept. Watch the film and then join us for a discussion!

Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker, writer, and political organizer. She is the director, most recently, of What Is Democracy? and the author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone and the American Book Award-winning The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. She is co-founder of the Debt Collective, a union for debtors, and contributed the foreword to the group’s new book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition.

Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Chair at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches political theory. Her recent books include In the Ruins of Neoliberalism (2019), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) and Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010).

Marques Vestal is a postdoctoral scholar and incoming Assistant Professor of Critical Black Urbanism in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA. He serves as a Faculty Advisor for Million Dollar Hoods, a community-driven and multidisciplinary initiative documenting the human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration in Los Angeles. He also serves as a historical consultant for the Luskin Center for History and Policy. Marques is a tenant of Los Angeles and a member of the South Central local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.

Join the conversation! Tune in live via our YouTube Channel.

 

The Place Where the People Gather Virtual Q&A

January 31 at 7:30 pm

We’re excited to be joined by filmmaker Brooklyn Demme, Owl Steven Smith, and Chenae Bullock for a discussion of Demme’s short film The Place Where the People Gather.

The Place Where the People Gather weaves together an old Lenape woodpecker-story of symbiosis with a newer one of extinction to form an ode to Indigenous futures, diversity, and life.

This short film will be made available to stream from 10:00am on January 29 through 5:00pm on January 31 for audience members who register for this event. Watch the film and then join us for a discussion!

Owl Steven Smith is the son of William Alfred Smith, Esquire, who spent his childhood in the Ramapo mountains and grandson of Ira Smith, professor/educator from Hillburn, NY. He received his BA in political science from UC Santa Cruz and his PHD of jurisprudence from UC Berkeley. Mr. Smith studied Mexican culture and history as a Pacific Rim scholar of the University of California for which he wrote an essay on an afro-mestizo community on the pacific coast of Mexico. He has assisted Navajo, Tohono O’odham, and Guyanese villagers with environmental issues in national courts, before Congress, and the United Nations.

Brooklyn Demme is a community storyteller from Nyack, NY, passionate about justice and film. In addition to his work with the Ramapough Lenape Nation, Brooklyn is involved in efforts to end the culture of racism in Rockland County law enforcement. He is currently serving as the Interim Executive Director of YTI in Yonkers, and strives for a future of collective health.

Chenae Bullock is an enrolled Shinnecock Indian Nation Tribal Member and descendant of the Montauk Tribe in Long Island New York. She is also African American. Chenae is an indigenous perspective historian, cultural practitioner, and preservationist. She has worked at many accredited Indigenous museums such as the Shinnecock Indian Museum and Cultural Center, Plimoth Plantation, and Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. She successfully served as a Tribal Alternate on behalf of the Shinnecock Nation for the Mid-Atlantic Committee on the Ocean, which facilitates coordination and collaboration among governmental entities and stakeholders to enhance the vitality of our region’s ocean ecosystem.

Join the conversation! Tune in via our YouTube Channel.

 

Creative Culture Filmmaker Roundtable

February 1 at 7:30 pm

Join filmmaker alums from our Creative Culture program—Matthew Puccini, Crystal Kayiza, and Emily Ann Hoffman—as they look back at the films they took to Sundance over the last few years. Attendees will have the opportunity to screen these films in the days leading up to the conversation, which will be moderated by Director of Programs, Media Arts Lab, Sean Weiner.

The three short films directed by the fellows—Dirty, See You Next Time, and Nevada—will be made available to stream from 10:00am on January 30 through 5:00 pm on February 1 for audience members who register for this event. Watch the films and then join us for a discussion!

Matthew Puccini grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and lives in Los Angeles. His short films have screened at Sundance and SXSW, qualified for the 2020 Academy Awards, and have been acquired by The Criterion Channel, Oscilloscope, Topic, and Searchlight Pictures. Matthew is a 2018 Sundance Ignite Fellow, a member of the 2017 New York Film Festival Artist Academy, a recipient of the Richie Jackson Artist Fellowship and a 2018 Creative Culture Fellow at the Jacob Burns Film Center. He is currently developing his first feature film.

Crystal Kayiza was raised in Oklahoma and is now a Brooklyn-based filmmaker. Her work reimagines the aesthetics used to tell stories about Black folks across generations and landscapes. Her film, Edgecombe was an official selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. Her most recent film, See You Next Time was an official selection of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and was released by the New Yorker. Her short narrative film, Rest Stop, was the winner of the 2020 Tribeca Chanel through Her Lens program grant. Crystal received a Heartland Emmy award in 2012 for her film All That Remains.

Emily Ann Hoffman is an animator, filmmaker, and artist whose work explores female sexuality, body, and vulnerability through a comedic lens. Her films have screened at Sundance, SXSW, Slamdance, and qualified for the Academy Awards. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies with institutes such as the New York Film Festival Artist Academy, the Sundance Institute, and the Jacob Burns Film Center. Her fine art is represented by Spacey Studios and has been featured on Architectural Digest, Fast Company, and more. She has a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and teaches illustration and animation at Parsons, The New School.

Join the conversation! Tune in via our YouTube Channel.

 

The Art of Passing Virtual Discussion

February 2 at 5:00 pm EST

We’re excited to continue our collaboration with professor Mia Mask on a follow-up event to the 2019 REMIX series “The Art of Passing” and Vassar College’s conference “Quiet as It’s Kept: Passing Subjects, Contested Identities.” As a complement to the Sundance premiere of the long-anticipated adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novel Passing, professor Mask will host a focused discussion on the phenomenon of passing and its various forms, as depicted in American cinema.

Dr. Mia Mask, Professor of Film at Vassar College, received her PhD from New York University. At Vassar, Dr. Mask teaches African American cinema, documentary history, and seminars on special topics. She also teaches feminist film theory and African national cinemas. She is the author of Divas on Screen: Black Women in American Film and the forthcoming book Black Rodeo: The African American Westerner in Film.

Join the conversation! Tune in live via our YouTube Channel.

 

What We’re Watching: Sundance Edition

February 2 at 7:30 pm

Tune in for the 2021 premiere of our livestream chat show, What We’re Watching, as the JBFC film programming team sits down to talk about some of the films they saw during this year’s festival! The team will also welcome Sundance programmer Ana Souza on to talk about this year’s lineup and the challenges of curating a major film festival during a pandemic.

Join the conversation! Tune in live via our YouTube Channel.

 

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