Fine Cuts 2014 - The New School

THE NEW SCHOOL

The 35th Annual Invitational Film Show Friday, April 25, 2014 Outstanding student films selected by a panel of distinguished filmmakers

School of Media Studies www.newschool.edu/media-studies

The Program:

c o r r e s p o n d e n c e ; a (12.22), ISABEL MEHL FLYELYFE NYC (15.44), JACK STANNARD DANCEFLOORED (4.34), LAUREN ELIZABETH KELLY YOU GOTTA HAVE HEART (15.01), SANDI PERLMUTTER MY SHADOW IS FOLLOWING ME (10.45), ROSHANAK ELMENDORF JOSHUA (3.48), ANGELO SILVIO VASTA AMERICANO PSYCHO (3.41), BRIA COLE REALITIES (2.41), CHRISTOPHER GORSKI

The 35th Annual Invitational Film Show Presented by the School of Media Studies Dawnja Burris, Producer Sam Ishii-Gonzales, Producer Mitra Bonshahi, Associate Producer Rehana Esmail, Associate Producer The School of Media Studies is proud to present the best short films made by students in New School courses during the past two years. The show is juried by a panel of film industry professionals. Awards will be presented at the conclusion of tonight’s show and a reception for the filmmakers will follow.

THE NEW SCHOOL The Auditorium 66 West 12th Street New York City

correspondence;a

FLYELYFE NYC

correspondence; a depicts a city, New York and two persons, K. and J. as they write each other from distant locations and share the place they long for. While telling stories of their everyday life a net of shared references and observations evolves, connecting both characters who rarely meet in person. Their special form of communication is mirrored in their correspondence. While not sharing their daily routine they do share a certain perspective on the world.

After a string of odd day jobs throughout the mid-west United States, dreams of success in the art world brought a young artist named PJ O’Rourke from his native Oklahoma to New York. He spends every day creating and selling his work from a rolling handcart on subway platforms; this is his only means of income.

He is a romantic, a realist, a salesman and a dreamer. The cart is literally held together by binder clips and shoelaces; it is ”his office”. The subway is a platform for ”Flyelyfe”; his brand of urban art. The way graffiti artists in the early 1980s looked at the New York City subway and saw a canvas, PJ looks at the subway and sees a studio.

digital video, analogue photography; 12.22

ISABEL MEHL was born in 1986 in West Berlin. She studies art theory and media art at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG). In 2013 she was an exchange student at the Media Studies Master of Arts program at the New School. Besides her studies she is working at Berlinale International Forum of New Cinema, in press relations at Badischer Kunstverein Karlsruhe and as a freelance writer/photographer.

digital video; 15.44

JACK STANNARD is an independent media professional, filmmaker and graduate of the 2013 Documentary Media Studies Program at The New School. He is interested in producing purposeful and original non-fiction and narrative content that lives across all media and continuing my personal growth, gaining new perspective on the world around him. FLYELYFE NYC is his first film and has been a part of the New York No Limits Film Series, 2013 Unofficial Google Plus Film Festival and will be a part of the 2014 Phoenix Film Festival. It has also won an Indie Fest Award of Merit.

DANCEFLOORED

YOU GOTTA HAVE HEART

This piece was produced as a prelude to a larger project about childhood memory formation and imagination in which oral histories of adults with dance performance backgrounds are woven together with contemporary public performances in hopes of engaging with children and adults alike. The intention is to utilize documentary and oral history practices with dance and performance aesthetics to simulate an experience of early childhood imagination and memory. This piece combines real and imaginary, interior with exterior reality, and uses the filmmaker’s old collection of pointe shoes as participants in the dance. Music is by Todd Reynolds, faculty at Mannes College, The New School for Music.

In a small SoHo apartment, a thirty-one year old heart beats in the body of a sixty-five year old. Edd, who barely survived four open-heart surgeries, two experimental procedures and a heart transplant, wants to dance again. Joe, his partner, wants to grow old together. After conquering death, now they must figure out how to cope with life.

digital video; 4.34

LAUREN ELIZABETH KELLY is a documentary filmmaker with a background in dance interested in oral history, experimental practices, cognition, and creativity. She works as an editor and shooter and lives in Brooklyn. She completed the MA in Media Studies at The New School in January 2014.

digital video; 15.01

SANDI PERLMUTTER For twenty-five years, Sandi, A former Midwesterner (Illinois), now current New Yorker (SoHo), and once upon a time writer/producer (television), has wanted to make documentary films.

And now she is.

MY SHADOW IS FOLLOWING ME

JOSHUA

A woman covered in a black veil walks alone. Her shadow always follows her in close proximity. Uncomfortable with the fact that she is always being followed, the woman is both envious and resentful toward this entity that knows no distress and follows her weightlessly and flawlessly, gliding over all obstacles and boundaries. On the other hand, her shadow, in its duality, represents the part of her being that contains and confines all inherited fears and superstitions.

When through a glance, she cannot find her shadow, she thinks she is free at last — only to realize that the old bondage is not so easily abandoned. She feels naked without her shadow. She desperately searches for it only to realize that she is the shadow.

A video portrait of a day in the life of a New York City ballet dancer. Movement and gaze are the elements chosen to portray a contemporary master of dance.

digital video; 10.45

ROSHANAK ELMENDORF was born in Tehran, Iran. In 1977, she came to the United States to pursue a career in medicine. Influenced by the social changes in Iran, she returned to the country in 1979. Whether from memories of her life in Iran or her present experiences her work explores the make-up of the cultures we live in through the expressive language of art and the moving image.

digital video; 3.48

ANGELO VASTA is an Italian filmmaker based in New York. In 2011 after graduating with a degree in International Politics from the University of Milan he moved to New York City to pursue a career as a filmmaker. Since the autumn of 2012 he has been enrolled in the Film Production Certificate at The New School. Angelo has developed a strong interest in cinematography and production of films about dance.

AMERICANO PSYCHO

REALITIES

Every espresso drink dispensed from a third wave café is made with precision and thought. Americano Psycho unveils the internal voice of one barista dedicated to pulling the best shot of espresso ever. This is the making of your cappuccino.

Chopped up and optically re-printed single-source found footage from a 1970’s educational film paired with audio samples from a dialog between a doctor and patient during an early LSD experiment, sequenced to convey the challenges of modern life between freedom and banality, happiness and compliance, selfexpression and rigidity.

digital video, 3.41

BRIA COLE After a period of working in Canadian art house film distribution and independent documentary filmmaking, Bria Cole joined The New School community in the Media Studies MA program to explore junctions of research, media production, and critical aesthetics.

She is currently working on a thesis excavating sensorial impressions of digital technology in public spaces. She continues to pursue media productions and ideas while maintaining a healthy diet of six cups of coffee a day.

16mm film, optical sound; 2.41

CHRISTOPHER GORSKI is a Brooklyn-based photographer and film artist. Working primarily with physical media (super 8, 16mm motion picture film and large format photography), Gorski’s work explores elements of the human condition as they exist in harmony and discord with modern society.

THANKS TO OUR DISTINGUISHED JUDGES The selection process for FINE CUTS: The 35th Annual Invitational Film Show took place over two sessions. A panel of faculty jurors reviewed initial submissions, creating a list of semifinalists. For the second round, a panel of external judges made the final selection for the show, and determined which pieces would receive the top awards.

DIANNE BELLINO is an NYC-based writer and filmmaker originally from Rhode Island. She has written and directed numerous short format films in both live action and animation. Her work has screened at festivals such as SXSW, Hamburg, Maryland, MadCat; on television (MTV); online (Netflix and Fandor); and has been distributed on DVD by The Journal of Short Film and Drag City.

She is currently finishing production on The Itching, a 15-minute clay animation about a mentally unstable wolf. Recent support for her work includes grants from NYSCA and the Boomerang Fund for the Arts, and residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Since 2002, Bellino has also regularly taught courses in filmmaking. She currently serves as Assistant Dean of the School of Art and Design at Pratt Institute.

LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON has directed a number of films including Conceiving Ada (1997), Teknolust (2002) and Strange Culture (2007), all of which feature the actress Tilda Swinton. Her most recent film !Women Art Revolution (2011) has screened at major museums internationally and was named by the Museum of Modern Art as one of the three best documentaries of the year. Hershman Leeson is also well known for her pioneering use of new technologies and new media. Her work has been acquired by a number of prestigious cultural institutions, including MoMA and the Tate Modern. In 2004 she was named “the most influential woman working in New Media.” Hershman Leeson is Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Davis. She is also the current Dorothy H. Hirshon Artist in Residence in the School of Media Studies.

SAM ISHII-GONZALES is Assistant Professor of Film in the School of Media Studies, where he teaches courses on aesthetics, media theory and film production and serves as coordinator of the graduate film sequence, Focus Area in Film Form. He is the co-editor of two books on Alfred Hitchcock and has published essays on a number of filmmakers, artists and philosophers, including Francis Bacon, Claire Denis, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Godard, David Lynch and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, His writings have been translated into Italian and Hungarian. He is currently working on two book projects and several short films, including a video essay inspired by Henri Bergson’s great philosophical work Matter and Memory, first published in France in 1896.

DEANNA KAMIEL is a Canadian-born director/producer and Guggenheim Fellowship recipient with a long-standing career in public television at the CBC in Toronto and PBS in Minneapolis – St. Paul. As an independent documentary filmmaker in New York, she has made non-fiction shorts for WNET/Channel Thirteen’s Emmy-winning programs Egg and City Arts and has co-produced an indie documentary feature Primary Primary on the 2004 presidential campaign of Howard Dean. Her current project is Newstand, a film on kiosk newsstands and their influence on the printed word, free speech and literature.

Her work (including Nuclear Outpost, Mickey’s Diner, Boys with Bats, Milgrom’s Obsession and Maggie and The Men of Minnesota) has also won awards from the Tokyo Video Festival (first prize), Chicago Film Festival, International Public Television Festival and Northwest Broadcast News Association and has had screenings at the Museum of Modern Art, BBC2, the National Film Board of Canada and the Flaherty Film Seminar. Kamiel is Assistant Professor in the School of Media Studies and the current Director of the Documentary Studies certificate.

RAFAEL PARRA is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media Studies where he teaches classes on editing from both a practical and aesthetic perspective.

He is the owner and senior editor of TimeLine Film & Video Inc., a New York City post-production facility. In 2010, he was awarded a Daytime Emmy Award by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in the category of Outstanding Achievement in Multiple Camera Editing for his work on Sesame Street. He won a second Emmy in 2011 and currently he is editing the Latin American television series Plaza Sésamo for Sesame Workshop.

TILL SCHAUDER, who teaches at NYU and Vermont College of Fine Arts, is a graduate of the University of Television and Film in Munich, Germany. He has directed shorts, television films, and two features: Santa Smokes (2002) and The Iran Job (2012). Santa Smokes won several international awards, among them Best Director at the Tokyo International Film Festival and the Studio Hamburg Newcomer Award. The Iran Job was recently shortlisted for the Best Documentary Film prize at the German Academy Awards. For The Iran Job, Schauder ran one of the most successful Kickstarter crowd funding campaigns of all time together with his producing partner (and wife) Sara Nodjoumi. He also has a side career in acting where he occasionally appears in works like Todd Haynes’s HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce (2011).

CAVEH ZAHEDI, who is an Assistant Professor of Culture and Media in Eugene Lang College at the New School, began making films while studying philosophy at Yale University. After an ill-fated sojourn to Paris, Zahedi enrolled in the UCLA film school where he co-directed his first feature A Little Stiff (1991). The film premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival, received modest critical acclaim, and aired on both German television and the Sundance Channel. His subsequent list of works includes I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (1995), which won the Critics’ Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival; In the Bathtub of the World (2001); I Am A Sex Addict (2006), which won the Gotham Award for Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You and was released theatrically by IFC Films; and The Sheik and I (2012), which premiered at SXSW in 2012 and was picked up for theatrical distribution by Factory 25. In all these works, Zahedi has forged his own original, idiosyncratic path through the world of filmmaking.

Factory 25 will release a box set of Zahedi’s films in 2014.

THE SCHOOL OF MEDIA STUDIES

MASTER OF ARTS IN MEDIA STUDIES

Since our first film course, The Motion Picture, offered in 1926, The New School has been at the forefront of media and communication studies among institutions of higher learning.

Today, our broad and interdisciplinary curriculum offers students critical understanding of the mediated global culture in which we live, and teaches them to make and distribute messages in a variety of genres.

The New School has offered the Master of Arts degree in Media Studies since 1975, when Marshall McLuhan’s colleague John Culkin brought his Center for Understanding Media here. Taking advantage of the natural laboratory of media industries in New York City and The New School’s tradition of interdisciplinary education, the Media Studies program has evolved into a complex and sophisticated curriculum, mingling cultural and technological history and social theory with media production and business. The curriculum emphasizes scholarship rooted in production and production informed by scholarship across media formats, theories, and methodologies. It is about finding the right “tools for the task,” whether the task is academic, creative, or professional.

Students can study full-time or part-time, with courses offered both on campus and online. They can follow a thesis or non-thesis option. Students who live outside of New York City can earn the master’s degree entirely online.

New School courses in cinema studies, film and video arts, and screenwriting are offered to the public on a noncredit basis or for general undergraduate credit, and students can earn a certificate in Film Production or Screenwriting. Students in the New School Bachelors Program (a completion program for adults) can focus on cinema and filmmaking in several areas of study. Film studies can be pursued at the graduate level in a number of ways including the Focus Area in Film Form and the one-year certificate program in Documentary Media Studies.

MA students have the option of taking courses in the Focus Area in Film Form, a five course, fifteen-credit sequence of classes that culminates in the planning and execution of a ten- to fifteenminute film.

For detailed information about the master’s degree in Media Studies and admission requirements, visit the website at www.newschool.edu/mediastudies.

CERTIFICATE IN DOCUMENTARY MEDIA STUDIES The New School awards a certificate in Documentary Media Studies for completion of a one-year, full-time, graduate-level program that immerses students in the history, theory, and practice of documentary film and video. Upon completion of the program, certificate holders will be qualified to enter into variety of media careers, such as documentary directing/producing, the television documentary business, the theatrical distribution business, and work with film festivals, film magazines, and museums—or to continue graduate school in pursuit of an MA and/or PhD in film or media studies, sociology, or a related field.

Students who earn the certificate in Documentary Media Studies and apply for and are admitted to the New School master’s program in Media Studies can usually apply certificate credits to the master’s degree.

Visit www.newschool.edu/docstudies for a complete description of the program and application information.

CERTIFICATE IN FILM PRODUCTION

CERTIFICATE IN SCREENWRITING

ADMISSIONS AND ADVISING

The New School awards a certificate in Film Production for completion of eight approved courses that guide the student through the art and craft of filmmaking. Students receive an official certificate upon successful completion of all courses, attesting to their expertise in the field.

Taught by a faculty of experienced professionals, the curriculum is an opportunity to explore the creative aspects of filmmaking and professional development in the film industry. The certificate program is open to committed students at all levels of experience.

The New School screenwriting curriculum has been cooperatively designed by our distinguished faculty to create a cohesive program for the serious student. It provides a comprehensive grounding in story, character, theme, action, visuals, and dialogue. Students who complete the core sequence of screenwriting courses have been carefully guided through the entire screenplay writing process and should have a professionalquality screenplay ready for the marketplace.

The certificate program is open to committed students at any experience level.

For noncredit, general credit (non-matriculated), or film production or screenwriting certificate advising, contact the School of Media Studies at 212.229.8903. For information about the New School Bachelors Program, the MA in Media Studies, or the certificate in Documentary Media Studies, contact the office of admission at 212.229.5630; nsadmissions@newschool.edu.

It can be completed in one year of full-time study or two years studying part time. Students have opportunities to show their finished work at public screenings at The New School.

The New School awards the certificate in Screenwriting for successful completion of six courses (a sequence of four writing workshops plus two electives). The program could be completed in one year (3 terms), but two years is recommended.

In the sequence of four production courses, a number of short filmmaking exercises lead toward the completion of a final film project in 16mm film or digital format. In the other required courses and two electives, students learn technical and aesthetic aspects of cinema and the motion picture business, such as cinematography, sound, screenwriting, and producing.

There is no formal admission process for the film production and screenwriting certificate programs, but students should consult with the School of Media Studies before they register and must register as certificate students. For more information, visit www.newschool.edu/ mediastudies.

A Special Thank You to Our Sponsors

School of Media Studies Anne Balsamo, Dean Sumita Chakravaty, Associate Dean Peter Asaro, Director of Graduate Programs Melissa Friedling, Director of Undergraduate Programs Dale MacDonald, Director of Creative Technologies Rosalie McManis, Technical Operations Manager

www.newschool.edu/media-studies