MCLC: Flaherty Seminar at Bishan Fest

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin B Lee <kevin at dgeneratefilms.com>
Subject: Flaherty Seminar at Bishan Fest
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The Flaherty Seminar will be presenting several films at the 2012
Bishan Harvest Festival* in Bishan Village in the Anhui Province of
China, an area famous for its rural village architecture, which has
all but disappeared elsewhere in China.

The festival takes place November 2 - 7 and highlights documentary
films and other art forms, which focus on traditional rural culture in
China. Independent documentary filmmaking in China is a relatively new
industry having developed over the past 20 years, and thriving in the
just the past several. Through film, Chinese documentarians are not
only fighting for social justice on issues such as the environment,
public safety, globalization, and politics, but they are also fighting
for freedom of expression through the act of making the film itself.

In 2010, artist/filmmaker/curator Ou Ning and writer/curator Zuo Jing
made bases for themselves in two villages in Anhui Province. In 2011
they created the Bishan Project which brings together artists and
intellectuals to get involved in rural reconstruction in the local
area, and shortly after they launched the first Bishan Harvest
Festival as a way to use art and culture to reactivate community life
(Ou Ning and Zuo Jing just won the Wall Street Journal's* Innovator of
the Year Award 2012 (China) with the Bishan Project). This year the
Bishan Harvest Festival will be held simultaneously with the Yixian
International Photo Festival, and will showcase documentary films
about rural life inside and outside of China. The Festival serves as
the perfect host for the Flaherty Seminar and its namesake, Robert
Flaherty, who is considered by many to be the father of ethnographic
and documentary filmmaking.

Flaherty former Executive Director Mary Kerr, trustee Elizabeth
Delude-Dix, and Seminar filmmakers Lisa Barbash and Laura Kissel will
make the trip to China to screen Barbash's Sweetgrass and In and Out
of Africa, Kissel's Cabin Field and Cotton Road, and Robert Flaherty's
Lousiana Story and The Land. The Harvest Festival will also showcase
works featured in the Folk Memory Project, established by Wu Wenguang,
a prolific videomaker, performance artist, and writer who is
considered the father of China's independent documentary movement. The
Folk Memory Project features work by the newest generation of China's
documentary makers, known as the 80-hou generation (born after 1980)
and is devoted to recording pivotal historical moments and movements
in socialist China as recalled by village elders. Additional Flaherty
screenings will also be held at Fudan University in Shanghai on Nov. 8
& 9.

Ilisa Barbash is a filmmaker, writer, teacher and museum curator. She
made Sweetgrass in 2009 together with Lucien Castaing-Taylor.
Sweetgrass was released theatrically in the United States, Canada,
Latin America, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and aired on PBS's
POV American television series.  Previous works by Barbash and
Castaing-Taylor include Made in USA (1990), a film about sweatshops
and child labor in the Los Angeles garment industry, and In and Out of
Africa (1992), an ethnographic video about authenticity, taste, and
racial politics in the transnational African art market, that won
eight international awards. Barbash and Castaing-Taylor's films are in
the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art and the
British Museum; they have screened at the AFI, BAFICI, Berlin, and New
York film festivals, as well as at Punto de Vista, and the Flaherty
Seminar. Barbash resides in the Boston area where she is a Curator of
Visual Anthropology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum.

Laura Kissel is a documentary filmmaker whose work explores
social/cultural landscapes, the representation of history, and the use
of orphan films. She was named the South Carolina Arts Commission's
Media Arts Fellow for 2007-2008 and has received numerous fellowships
and grants including a Fulbright Award and funding from the South
Carolina Humanities Council (2003 and 2008) and the Fledgling Fund
(2010 and 2012). Her educational travelogue Beyond the Classroom:
China (2007) was nominated for a Southeastern Emmy. Cabin Field
(2005), a non-fiction essay about farm workers in rural Georgia, was
honored with three festival awards including the Jurors' Citation
Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival. She is currently at
work on Cotton Road, a documentary about the global cotton trade which
brings together the stories of South Carolina cotton farmers, Chinese
textile workers, and global consumers.

This event is the first step in The Flaherty's commitment to a
cultural exchange between Chinese documentarians and American
filmmakers. We are indebted to Karin Chien, Zhang Xianmin, and
Genevieve Carmel for their hard work and long hours in making this
exchange possible. Stay tuned for reports and photos from Flaherty's
visit to China.