2022 Program Review with Milton Guillén

[September 12, 2022] Before making our way to mid-coast Maine, we had the pleasure to sit with the Senior Programmer at the Camden International Film Festival, Milton Guillén, to discuss this year’s stellar line-up and how the program came together. We also discuss some of the Points North Forum events that will be on offer.

  • Milton Guillén is a filmmaker and Senior Programmer at the Camden International Film Festival. His work centers on the cinematic intersections of de-colonial ethnographic research and affect.

    Milton’s films have been screened globally at CPH: DOX, Hot Docs, DOK Leipzig, Rooftop Films, and more. In 2017, his debut feature, The Maribor Uprisings, co-directed with Maple Razsa, received the Society for Visual Anthropology’s Best Feature Award.

    He also was named a North Star fellow at the Points North Institute, a MediaMaker Fellow at Bay Area Video Coalition, a Kartemquin Diverse Voices in Documentary, and is the recipient of several international artists’ residencies and grants.

  • Christina is a researcher, filmmaker, and founding editor of Docs in Orbit, where she leads the curation of content.

FORAGERS with Jumana Manna

[September 15, 2022] A conversation with visual artist Jumana Manna about her striking new film Foragers, which is one of the opening night films at this year’s Camden International Film Festival. Foragers recounts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel. In this conversation, Jumana shares insight into her artistic practice exploring the paradoxical politics of preservation and working within a hybrid format.

  • Jumana Manna is a visual artist and filmmaker. Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of archaeology, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruly potential of ruination as an integral part of life and its regeneration. Jumana was raised in Jerusalem and lives in Berlin.

    She has participated in multiple film festivals including Berlinale, Viennale, BAFICI, IFFR, Cairo Cinema Days, Goteborg film festival, Ambulante, Cinéma du Réel, Art of the Real. Her Wild Relatives (2018) won CPH:DOX’s New Visions Award, Sheffield Doc’s Environmental Film Award, DokuFest Kosovo’s Green Dox Award, and Palestine Cinema Days’ Sunbird Award. Manna’s solo exhibitions include Thirty Plumbers in the Belly, M HKA, Antwerp (2021); Tabakalera, San Sebastian, Spain (2019); The Setting of Noon, Home Works Forum 8: Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (2019); A Small Big Thing, Henie Onstad Museum, Høvikodden, Oslo (2018); A Kulturrådet – Norwegian Arts Council, Berkeley Art

    Magical Substance Flows into Me, Mercer Union, Toronto (2017), Malmö Kunsthall, Malmo (2016), and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015).

  • Born in Aleppo and raised in Dubai, Teyama Alkamli currently lives in Toronto, Canada. Her visually tender and deeply human work deals predominantly with issues of identity, sexuality, displacement and migration. She is an alumna of DocNomads, the European Mobile Film School, Hot Docs Emerging Filmmaker Lab, and the Canadian Film Centre's Director Lab.

    Teyama works fluidly across documentary and narrative film. More recently, she was the scriptwriter for Concrete Valley (2022), a drama directed by Antoine Bourges.

IT IS NIGHT IN AMERICA with Ana Vaz

[September 16, 2022] It is night in America. A young anteater is found dead by the side of a road in Brasilia; a boa constrictor wanders into the suburbs; a maned wolf is found on a farm. The question is: are animals invading our cities, or rather are we occupying their habitat?

It is Night in America (2022) by Ana Vaz is a spellbinding film that comes to the Camden International Film Festival wielding a strong, energetic power that transfixes viewers and provokes reflection on the visible and subjective effects of colonialism. To hear Ana speak about her artistic process is as affecting as experiencing her work. Facilitating the exchange is Zaina Bseiso, a programmer at the Camden International Film Festival.

  • Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker working with film as an instrument. Composed as film-poems, her films travel through territories and events haunted by the ever-lasting impacts of internal and external forms of colonialism and their footprints on the earth and different forms of life. Her practice can also take the shape of writing, critical pedagogy, installations, film programs or ephemeral events, which are expansions or developments of her films.

    Her works have been presented, screened and discussed at film festivals, seminars and institutions such as Berlinale Forum/Forum Expanded; New York Film Festival; TIFF Wavelengths, Toronto; BFI, London; Cinéma du Réel, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Fondazione In Between Art Film, Venice; LUX Moving Images, London; Tabakalera, San Sebastián; Whitechapel Gallery, London; MAM – Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo; Sesc Belenzinho, São Paulo; Matadero, Madrid; Jameel Arts Center, Dubai; Confort Moderne, Poitiers; Savvy Contemporary, Berlin; Sonic Acts, Amsterdam; among others.

    Ana Vaz is also a founding member of the COYOTE collective along with Tristan Bera, Nuno da Luz, Elida Hoëg and Clémence Seurat, an interdisciplinary group working between ecology and political science through conceptual and experimental formats.

    https://vimeo.com/anava

  • Zaina Bseiso is a filmmaker and curator working primarily in documentary and experimental cinema. Her interests revolve around diasporic relations to land, hope, and potentialities. She explores Return as a notion that conflates and contracts sounds, images and ways of existing in the world. Her practice mainly traverses among Palestine, Egypt, Cuba, Mexico, and the US.

    Her work has screened at Curtas Vila do Conde, Guanajuato, RIDM, DokLeipzig and Ajyal Film Festival, among others. She is co-founder of Bahía Colectiva, a community of filmmakers that collaborate in practice and curation.

    Zaina is also part of the programming team at the Points North Institute/Camden International Film Festival and a 2022 Sundance Humanities Sustainability fellow.

    She received her Master’s degree in Film and Video from the California Institute of the Arts.

GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE with Jacquelyn Mills

This week, we explore how to experience a place as sacred through cinema with Jacquelyn Mills, the director of Geographies of Solitude (Berlinale Forum, 2022). The film, composed of 16mm images using eco-friendly hand-processing techniques, takes us on a journey into the rich ecosystem of Sable Island and the preservation work of Zoe Lucas, an environmentalist who has dedicated over 40 years to the conservation of this remote slice of land off the Canadian coast. Jacquelyn captures her encounters with Zoe and the island with care and thoughtful intention, conveying a reverence for that which she films and imbuing it with a collaborative and engaging spirit.

In our conversation with Jacquelyn Mills, she sheds light on her intuitive approach to filmmaking and the various ways she collaborated with her surroundings (including processing the footage with plant emulsion from Sable Island and exposing parts of the film under moonlight and starlight) in the making of Geographies of Solitude.

2021 Program Review with Milton Guillén

[September 15, 2021] The Fall Film Festival season has begun, and to kick things off, we invited Milton Guillén, the Senior Programmer from the Camden International Film Festival, to take us through the slate of films included in the 17th edition of the festival, featuring a carefully curated selection of over 70 documentary films (features and shorts).  In this episode, Milton provides generous insight into how the program came together with additional texture on some of the gems that will be in display, including A Night of Knowing Nothing (Cannes, 2021) by Payal Kapadia and Faya Dayi (Sundance, 2021) by Jessica Beshir.