Description:

Join us for two Documentary Media MFA Thesis screenings on June 11 and 12, 2025.

These two nights of showcases are a culmination of ongoing cinematic explorations of Xiaolu Wang 王晓璐, Seunghee Chang, Blair Barnes, Gríma Irmudóttir, Shawn Antoine II, and Blake Knecht. Expanding their practices within the Documentary Media MFA program from 2023 to 2025, they are excited to present a myriad of audiovisual experiences that respond to the ruptures of reality. These images and sounds move between the opaque, the uncanny, the mysterious, and the contemplative, traveling through the Hui Muslim Autonomous Region in northwestern China, around the watery edges of Seoul, within the Black interiority, across the highlands of Iceland, inside a 1970s Bronx apartment, and engulfed by the scorched desert of the American Southwest. These works muddle the familiar with the unfamiliar, resource irresistible whispers from deep inside, and bear witness to our collective entanglement and unraveling.

Day 1 - Origins - June 11 at 7 PM:

An outsider returns, myths emerge, and a report is established. Through fractured words and filtered means, these projects collapse time and collide with historical contexts to unsettle the fabrications of the nation-state. From a place of urgency, they reorient us towards a reminder—whose truths puncture through? This program will feature a performance-lecture by Xiaolu Wang 王晓璐, and films by Seunghee Chang and Blair Barnes.

Following the screening, Professor Lakshmi Padmanabhan will join the filmmakers for a conversation and Q&A with the audience.

Line up:

You people talk from flags, I want to speak from Grandpa, Xiaolu Wang, 20min, performance lecture

An outsider from the future gets hold of a lost archive, sending us on a journey following associative clues in the movement of infinite yearnings.

Hangang Paradise, Seunghee Chang, 20min

From a journey of a visually impaired man emerges the origin myths of South Korea’s Han River and its ultimate development into a river of illusions.

sitrep, Blair Barnes, 18min

Sitrep is a situation report of the American project in 2025. Filmed on a broadcast camera produced in 1974, it utilizes an anachronistic image to interrogate compression and censorship.

Total Runtime: 58 min + Q&A