OPENING NIGHT: FOUR DAUGHTERS  WITH KAOUTHER BEN HANIA

7:00 p.m. — 9:30 p.m. \\ Ragtag Cinema

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Our opening night film is Four Daughters, which is a 2024 Academy Award nominee and Spirit Award winner for Best Documentary. This boundary-pushing film uses spontaneous recreations, scenes of filmmaking process and deeply intimate interviews to tell the story of one Tunisian family’s loss to radicalization. The film has collected many awards around the world since its premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Kaouther Ben Hania, moderated by Robert Greene.

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with

Kaouther Ben Hania (she/her)

Robert Greene (he/him)

UNION : THE CAMERA AS CATALYST
9:00 a.m. — 10:30 a.m. \\ Smith Forum

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Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s Sundance award-winning film Union takes viewers inside one of the most unlikely victories in modern labor history with on-the-ground access to the Amazon Labor Union’s successful union campaign at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island, NY. From the perspectives of organizers and filmmakers, this panel probes the power of the camera as a tool for political organizing, accountability, and truth-telling. Featuring co-directors Maing and Story, producers Samantha Curley and Mars Verrone, and Natalie Monarrez, an Amazon worker-organizer and film participant. Sponsored by NBCUniversal’s Original Voices Documentary Films, moderated by Nell Augustin.

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with

Brett Story (she/her)​

Stephen Maing (he/him)

Mars Verrone (they/them)

Samantha Curley (she/her)

Nell Augustin (she/they)

Natalie Monarrez (she/her)

'SHOCKING' ACTS: DOCUMENTARY ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

10:30 a.m. — 12:00 p.m. \\ Smith Forum

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Can you tell someone’s story without taking ownership of it? Can you make a documentary collaboratively without giving up responsibility to your funders? Producer Jess Shane wrestles with these questions in her new podcast Shocking, Heartbreaking, Transformative. She brings her ongoing investigation to Based On A True Story in the form of an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure style game that will pull the audience into the documentary-making process.

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with

Jess Shane (she/her)

THE FICTION OF DOCUMENTARY IN THE FEATHERWEIGHT

1:00 p.m. — 2:30 p.m. \\ Smith Forum

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Robert Kolodny’s Venice-premiering biopic The Featherweight chronicles all-time-winningest boxing champ Willie Pep’s attempted comeback in the mid-1960s. For Kolodny, telling Pep’s story meant painstakingly channeling the look and technique of Pep’s contemporaries, legendary documentary filmmakers Albert and David Maysles and D. A. Pennebaker. Kolodny steps into the squared circle of Smith Forum to show us how he did it all, opposite writer, director and boxing aficionado Omar Mullick.

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with

Robert Kolodny (he/him)

Omar Mullick (he/him)

PALESTINIAN HOME MOVIES IN THREE PROMISES 

2:30 p.m. — 3:30 p.m. \\ Smith Forum

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Nothing lets you see inside people’s lives quite like their home movies. But when those lives become abstract — numbers in news reports, talking points in an argument — those movies are recontextualized. Few groups have received as much scrutiny as the Palestinian people, but almost always viewed from a distance. Filmmaker Yousef Srouji’s True/False True Life Fund Award winning Three Promises closes that distance using his own family’s movies, which he brings to Based On A True Story alongside the film’s producer Marielle Olentine. Moderated by Sebastián Martínez Valdivia.

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with

Yousef Srouji (he/him)​

Marielle Olentine (she/they)

Sebastián Martínez Valdivia (he/him)

CLOSING EVENT: LOOK INTO MY EYES, LIVE AND IN PERSON

9:00 a.m. — 10:30 a.m. \\ Smith Forum

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When director Lana Wilson set out to make a film about psychics, she was taking on a specific challenge: documenting the unprovable. But her Sundance film Look Into My Eyes navigates that uncertainty by focusing on the emotional world of psychic readings. Attendees will step through the veil and enter that world with help from local psychic Rexanna Ipock-Brown, who will do live readings in the room throughout the session, while Wilson takes Museum of the Moving Image curator Eric Hynes through her filmmaking process.

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with

Lana Wilson (she/her)

Rexanna Ipock-Brown (she/her)

Stephen Maing (he/him)

Eric Hynes (he/him)