Projects

by Kathryn Goldfarb and Jason Hogstad The goal of the Marshall Fire Story Project (MFSP) is to create a community archive of experiences with the Marshall Fire and aftermath. The MFSP provides a space for affected individuals to share their story, and offers the entire community a place to have their voices heard and added to the historical record. The Project will also capture hundreds of GoFundMe campaigns created in response to the fire. The Project’s index of these campaigns will document who received community funding and at what levels, how affected individuals understood their experiences, and differing experiences of...Read more »

by Chilton Tippin Sounding the River merges sound recordings with ethnographic interviews and writing to consider the Rio Grande as a more-than-human actor involved in societal conflicts and projects of place-making. I ask how the Rio Grande is both a river of hope and a river of violence, or, more specifically—what cultural formations have changed the ‘river of hope’ into a ‘river of violence?’ With situated interviews and soundscape recordings, listeners will hear a river with a life and a voice of its own, however, one that is everywhere impacted, transformed and produced through the ambitions and imaginations of the...Read more »

An ethnofiction by Emilie Upczak A look at the Super-8 films of Ann Roy, the relatively unknown Tulsa-born poet and feminist activist, who among other engagements, explored mysticism through the use of hallucinogens in Tepoztlán, Mexico in the 1970's. Support This ProjectRead more »

A documentary film by Laura Conway A collaged essay film that tells an emotional history of socialism in the United States. Filmmaker Laura Conway enacts a cinematic seance using archival documents to communicate with her departed communist grandparents and ask them questions about the end of capitalism. An account of the dreams, struggles, and losses of revolutionaries in the United States. At its heart is the question - how can we imagine an alternative to capitalism? The Length of Day premiered at the 2021 Slamdance Festival in the documentary shorts category. Support This ProjectRead more »

A feature-length documentary film by Bentley Brown Sudanese-American poets and musicians engage in performances and conversation around the revolution in Sudan, from which they have been physically cut off. In 2019, after months of peaceful protests across Sudan, the country’s thirty-year dictator Omar Al-Bashir was removed from power by a military leadership that cracked down in a violent fashion on the peaceful sit-in outside its headquarters. Internet was shut down across Sudan, leaving only those outside to carry on a voice for the revolution in an ever-despairing quest for peaceful transition to civilian government. Revolution from Afar premiered at Sudan...Read more »

“It's our whole identity where I am from. It is what makes us, us.” Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar is a 39 year old mother of four. She spends her waking hours working to save her community, advocating for coastal restoration and preservation as the water rises. Chief of the Grand Caillou/Dula Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana for the last eleven years, she is consumed by her efforts to gain tribal recognition from the US Government. As she tirelessly works to serve her tribal citizens, their native land is being swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico. A documentary film by...Read more »

Through oral histories, community-based media workshops, and extended reality technology, this multimodal project is a collaboration with the people of Costilla County, Colorado, a community of predominantly Chicanx families who have fought for their rights to an 83,000-acre mountain tract known as ‘La Sierra’ for nearly 200 years. Using emergent media to create a simulated experience of three significant sites on this land, La Sierra explores the ways technology can serve as a critical mediator in a community’s navigation and understanding of antagonistic histories dealing with land, power, and use. An extended reality experience by Sarah McCormick and Kevin Sweet...Read more »

A cinematic archive captured for a world where ice is a distant memory. An operatic converation between generations in the time of climate change. Imagining a world where ice is a distant memory, the powerful multimedia opera and hybrid music-film MELT: The Memory of Ice archives the meanings and memories of ice for future generations through persuasive sonic and visual counterpoint. With spectacular aerial footage of glaciers giving birth to icebergs, visual portraits of Arctic residents, visitors and scientists, ambient music made from glimmers of Arctic sounds, and memories of ice sung by children’s choirs and the New York-based vocal...Read more »

The forest is a place of refuge, but it’s hard to escape the past. As the homeless flee the gentrifying cities of the American West and take refuge in nearby forests, the residents of a small, mountain town in Colorado, led by a progressive minister who was himself once homeless, must learn to live with the strangers in their midst and the limitations of the American dream. A feature-length documentary film produced and written by Christian Hammons. Directed by Eric Coombs Esmail & Christian Hammons. Coming Fall 2021. Support This ProjectRead more »

A anthropolgist reflects on his life, career, and the 1,000-year journey of 400 Nubian mummies. In 1979, Prof. Dennis Van Gerven exhumed the bodies of 400 Nubian mummies from the desert in Sudan. They were itinerant farmers in the 6th and 7th centuries BC, but in the three decades after they were excavated, they would go to work again as "messengers from the poor." At the end of his career, Van Gerven reflects on his life with the mummies and their afterlife in the United States speaking to the problems of poverty and discrimination. A short documentary film produced and...Read more »