New York Film Academy Documentary Department students learn to make films by making films. Hands-on Conservatory and bicoastal MFA programs pair rigorous instruction with close mentoring by a distinguished faculty including Bob Eisenhardt (Free Solo), Claudia Raschke (RBG), and Randy Dottin (the Chicago TV franchise), who support both beginners and professionals from around the globe […]
The New School Documentary Media Studies program provides an opportunity to study the theory and practice of documentary filmmaking in a small, tightly focused program. The program culminates in an end-of-the year film festival, Truth Be Told, which is open to the public and features Q&As with student filmmakers and faculty. Graduates earn a certificate […]
Hunter’s MFA Program in Integrated Media Arts (IMA) offers advanced studies in nonfiction media making. The IMA Program educates multidisciplinary, socially engaged media makers in a diverse range of skills across the media landscape. Working with faculty from film, video, emerging media and journalism backgrounds, students learn to conceptualize, create and distribute innovative, politically and […]
Brooklyn College is proud to showcase student documentaries from the FILM Department and TREM (Television, Radio, and Emerging Media). The Brooklyn College Film Department was founded in 1974 and provides students with a rigorous, hands-on production curriculum. The Department of Television, Radio and Emerging Media’s slate includes “Self-Portrait” projects illustrating explorations and visions. Between Me […]
NYC PREMIERE When renowned mountain climber Alex Lowe died in an avalanche, his son Max was just ten years old. Nearly 20 years later, Max explores his family’s experience with loss in this deeply personal film. The cinematography captures the astounding vistas that inspired Alex’s adventures while Max’s intimate interviews with family members probe what […]
US PREMIERE Filmmaker Alessandro Rossellini explores his complex family and the complicated legacy of his legendary grandfather, director Roberto Rossellini, the “father of Neorealism.” The son of Roberto’s oldest living child, Renzo, and the African American dancer Katherine Cohen, Alessandro previously directed the documentary Viva Ingrid!, profiling his grandfather’s third wife, Ingrid Bergman. Now in […]
INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE Using the only known photo of his grandfather, filmmaker Sherman De Jesus illuminates the legacy of prolific photographer James Van Der Zee. Van Der Zee took historic and elegant portraits of the Black community during the Harlem Renaissance when images of Black joy were still rare. De Jesus’s single photograph unspools several proud […]
WORLD PREMIERE Guo Chuan is the first Chinese man to embark on a solo, non-stop circumnavigation of the world. But instead of completing his quest, he went missing. Filmmaker Zhao Qi weaves together Guo Chan’s go-pro footage and his wife’s grief into a tapestry of a man struggling to hold together the happiness of his […]
NYC PREMIERE In the 1900s, Indian men immigrated to Louisiana, often intermarrying with African American women. Fatima, a descendant of this practice, journeys from her New Orleans home to Kolkata, seeking her long-lost forbears. Armed with a handful of faded documents, she struggles with language and suspicion, but the lure of family and the kindness […]
NYC PREMIERE Filmmakers Jerry Risius and Beth Levison celebrate the vitality of local journalism as it undergoes a crisis with this portrait of a small-town Iowa paper, The Storm Lake Times. Editor Art Cullen oversees the family-run business that was recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on dark money in corporate agriculture. “Storm […]