Mimesis Documentary Festival

New doc fest hosts Unless You’re Living It August 12-18

July 11, 2020

The launch of the promising new Mimesis Documentary Festival by the folx at UC Boulder's Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media is welcome news. This year's program will stream online and celebrates the exciting launch of a partnership with the Flaherty: Flaherty x Boulder, a new series showcasing important works of historical and contemporary documentary media art. This first installment of Flaherty x Boulder, titled The Unwriting of Disaster, is curated by Devon Narine-Siingh, Suneil Sanzgiri, and Alia Ayman and is the first ever retrospective of films screened across the 66-year history of the Flaherty Seminar, bringing together films that work in opposition to the spectacularization of tragedy. Mimesis writes of the program:

"To write the disaster, to document the catastrophic, to bear witness to the unbearable event all seem to have become default impulses in times of crises. Luckily, this fervor to record has not remained unchallenged. Image-makers from all over the world continue to create works that overhaul the free-floating belief in the merits of visibility, archiving and inscription, thereby favoring the poetic to the sensational. This retrospective of previous films screened at the Flaherty Seminar looks to how these artists and filmmakers have responded to the explosive, destructive and inescapable forces of their times."

Frame capture from Unless You're Living It