Still from Talena Sanders’s “Tokens and Penalties”
Work by three students and two instructors in Duke’s MFA in Documentary and Experimental Arts program was selected for the 50th Annual New York Film Festival, and a film by Certificate in Documentary Studies graduate Jean Rheem will be screened at the NYC Independent Film Festival.
Films by MFA students Marika Borgeson (Impressions), Erin Espelie (Beyond Expression Bright), and Talena Sanders (Tokens and Penalties) screened recently as part of the New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant Garde” series, the prestigious festival’s showcase for artist-made film and digital moving-image pieces, and one of the most important venues in the world for this type of work. Also shown were films by Lecturing Fellow and Artist in Residence David Gatten (The Extravagant Shadows) and Visiting Artist and Adjunct Instructor Shambhavi Kaul (21 Chitrakoot), of Duke’s Arts of the Moving Image program. “It is extremely unusual for the festival to show works of MFA candidates,” says Gatten, who has had sixteen films there since 1999. “In the seventeen-year history of ‘Views’ there have been only a handful of students shown.” MFA and Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) director Tom Rankin, in an article in Duke Today, said “It shows the uniqueness of our program and affirms how, in under two years of a new MFA program, we are attracting and mentoring serious and important film artists.”
And recent Duke graduate Jean Rheem, who received a CDS Certificate in Documentary Studies in May 2012, will screen her short film The Social Group at the NYC Independent Film Festival. She completed the film as her final certificate project and recut a shorter version that will be shown at the festival on October 21. Watch The Social Group here.
Tokens and Penalties by Talena Sanders
Friday, October 5, 5:30 p.m.
The Extravagant Shadows by David Gatten
Friday, October 5, 8:30 p.m.
Beyond Expression Bright by Erin Espelie
Saturday, October 6, 1:30 p.m.
Impressions by Marika Borgeson
Sunday, October 7, 1:30 p.m.
21 Chitrakoot by Shambhavi Kaul
Sunday, October 7, 7 p.m.
Gatten’s The Extravagant Shadows will screen on the Duke campus on Friday, November 30, 3 p.m., in the Biddle Rare Book Room at Perkins Library.