Documentary Archives - Public Seminar

Capitalism

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

A talk with filmmaker Swetha Regunathan

December 10, 2020 • by Jeannette Estruth

By all measures we are living in an era defined by housing crises, a flood of human habitat destruction. The losses are both economic and environmental. Over 17 million people in 2018 alone were displaced from their homes because of climate change–associated disasters, according to the United Nations. Here in ...

How Do We Process the Loss of Our Homes?

Reviews

The Tangled Web of Familial Homophobia

A Secret Love (Directed by Chris Bolan, Netflix, 2020)

June 25, 2020 • by Jen Manion

But I was not prepared for the central role in the documentary film played by Terry’s nieces, Diana Bolan and Tammy Donahue; nor was I prepared for their jarring, casual homophobia. A Secret Love begins with Terry and Pat coming out to their families after having been a couple (they told ...

Reviews

What Do Walls Do?

Reflections on William Callahan’s “Great Walls” — and on Filmmaking as an Ethnographic Method

December 5, 2019 • by Jiyoung Cho

What Callahan spurs us to challenge is the premise that walls are “problems” that need to be “solved” (Callahan 2018, 460). When Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it was meant to signal the end of the Cold War rivalry between a totalitarian East and a democratic West, a victory ...

Feature

GIDEST: The Tar Sands Songbook

The work of Tanya Kalmanovitch

May 17, 2018 • by GIDEST

In her documentary play The Tar Sands Songbook, musician, ethnomusicologist, Associate Professor at The New School’s College of Performing Arts, and 2017-18 GIDEST fellow Tanya Kalmanovitch uses strategies from the creative and performing arts, ethnography, and design to invite participants into an imaginative, critical process of unnerving the intimate relationship of oil ...

Uncategorized

Grounded Struggles

Land, Dispossession, and Freedom

February 5, 2018 • by Ujju Aggarwal

Please join us for a series of films and discussions on grassroots struggles for land, dignity, the means of subsistence, and self-determination in Brazil, Morocco, Tunisia, Haiti and the U.S. In the face of (neo)colonial/(neo)imperial interventions, increased state repression and intensified capital expansion, these grounded struggles shed light on the mechanisms ...