Film Screening
The Flaherty Film Seminar
Hosted by Juan Carlos Zaldivar
JUAN CARLOS ZALDIVAR
Cuban-born, Juan Carlos Zaldivar is a LatinX visual artist living and working in the United States. Some of his work includes:
• producing a feature-length art film with the support of La Biennale di Venezia College Cinema 2019, Sundance Writers Lab and Locarno Open Doors.
• video artworks screened at many festivals worldwide and broadcast on PBS, ABC, IFC, Showtime, and WE.
• recently tenured with Doc Society (previously Britdoc Foundation) as the Outreach Director for their first PanAmerican event, Good Pitch Miami 2017 https://goodpitch.org/events/gpmia2017.
• directing credits include "90 Miles" (PBS), "The Story of the Red Rose" (Showtime), "Palingenesis" and "Soldiers Pay" (IFC), co-directed with David O. Russell (“Three Kings,” “The Fighter”) and Tricia Regan
FLAHERTY FILM SEMINAR
We are dedicated to the proposition that independent media can illuminate the human spirit. Its mission is to foster exploration, dialogue, and introspection about the art and craft of all forms of the moving image. The Flaherty was chartered (as International Film Seminars, Inc.) in the state of Vermont but is based in New York City. It was established in 1960 to present the annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, which was started five years earlier by the Robert Flaherty Foundation. The Seminar remains the central and defining activity of The Flaherty.
Through its unique annual Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, The Flaherty provides media makers, users, teachers and students an unparalleled opportunity to confront the core of the creative process, reaffirm the freedom of the independent artist to explore beyond known limits and renew the challenge to discover, reveal and illuminate the ways of life of peoples and cultures throughout the world.
The Flaherty endeavors to:
• Nurture the production, distribution, exhibition, and preservation of humanistic works
• Position itself at the cutting edge of contemporary discourse through various forums of interchange and appreciation of media makers and their art from established, current, and emerging forms and technologies
• Stimulate interest, understanding, and support for media makers to work with creators in all art forms and humanistic disciplines
• Share an enlarged vision of media art that helps us cherish and communicate the humanity common to all peoples
Over the years, The Flaherty has evolved from a small, informal gathering of filmmakers and students into a respected, established media arts institution, recognized as a leader in its support of the documentary and other independent film and video.
HISTORY
The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar is named after Robert Flaherty (1884-1951), who is considered by many to be the father of the American documentary. Flaherty's groundbreaking documentary of Eskimo life, Nanook of the North is among the most noted films of the silent era. He was also the creator of such classic poetic films as Moana, Man of Aran, and Louisiana Story. The Seminar began in 1955-before the era of film schools-when Flaherty's widow, Frances, convened a group of filmmakers, critics, curators, musicians, and other film enthusiasts at the Flaherty farm in Vermont. For more than sixty years the Flaherty Seminar has been firmly established as a one-of-a-kind institution that seeks to encourage filmmakers and other artists to explore the potential of the moving image. The films of such directors as Louis Malle, the Maysles brothers, Mira Nair, Satyajit Ray, Agnés Varda, John Cassavetes, Yasujiro Ozu, Pedro Costa and Joris Ivens were shown at the Seminar before they were known generally in the American film community. New cinematic techniques and approaches first presented at the Seminar have routinely made their way into mainstream film.