Kites Nest and Basilica Hudson Film and Media program co-present a documentary film workshop for teens. The workshop is lead by Basilica Hudson Film and Media Curator Aily Nash. The class description and registration info are below:

Class Description
“All great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction.” – Jean-Luc Godard

Is there a distinction between reality and fiction? How do we define those boundaries and what are the responsibilities of filmmakers and viewers to reality? How do we make sense of the overwhelming amount of images and stories that we’re exposed to? And what is the relationship between our personal politics of representation and what we encounter in films?  In a film culture that conditions us to think of fiction and documentary as distinct forms, what tools can we develop to read works that complicate our definitions of genre?

Exploring experimental documentary and narrative forms, in this workshop we will expand our idea of the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction cinema. We’ll watch films that give a broad historical overview of the evolution of the essay film and documentaries, spanning from early cinema to today. The selection will be international in scope, and touch on ethnographic filmmaking, social documentary, feminist perspectives, and non-western storytelling approaches. The workshop will be seminar-style, and based around weekly film screenings and a discussion group. (This is not a production workshop.) Some appearances by special guest experts and filmmakers.

The course will include films by Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker, Joshua Oppenheimer, Sensory Ethnography Lab, Abbas Kiarostami, Kidlat Tahimik, Jean Rouch, Robert Flaherty, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Andy Warhol and others.

About the instructor, Aily Nash
Aily Nash is a curator based in Hudson and Brooklyn, New York. She is a curator of Projections, the New York Film Festival’s artists’ film and video section, and has curated programs and exhibitions for MoMA PS1 (NYC), FACT (Liverpool), BAM/Brooklyn Academy of Music (NYC), Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Northwest Film Center (Portland), Image Forum (Tokyo), and others. Her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Artforum.com, Film Comment, de Filmkrant and elsewhere. Speaking engagements include Centre Pompidou (Paris), Harvard University, Cornell University, The New School, Universität der Künste (Berlin). She has served on the jury at Media City Film Festival and on the FIPRESCI Jury at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. Nash is the Film/Media curator at Basilica Hudson, is co-editor of a film criticism program at the Berlinale Film Festival, and has taught at Parsons and Bruce High Quality Foundation University in New York.

Schedule + Registration Info
Screening Dates: Tuesdays 7 – 8:30pm, April 7 – May 26
Seminar Dates: Wednesdays 4 – 7pm, April 8 – June 9
To register, go to http://kitesnest.org/fact-fiction

Image Credit: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, William Greaves, 1968 (still)

John Waters popped our fundraiser cherry! October 18th, 2014, marked our first, major annual fundraiser event. Inspired and lead by our daring guest of honor John Waters, who offered gracious support of Basilica and the AIDS Council of Northeastern New York. Photo above of the simply stellar turnout with special guests Amanda Palmer, Jemima Kirke, Sarah Sophie Flicker, Jennifer Venditti, Jesse Peretz, Natasha Lyonne, Fred Armisen, and the man himself – you don’t want to miss next year! (more…)