CEMA hosts workshops and public screenings that feature visiting artists at the forefront of the audiovisual field. Free and open to the public, these events bring together the USC and local community, fostering dialogue and knowledge exchange
THE FLAHERTY FILM SEMINAR 2025 LA POD
The Flaherty Film Seminar, the USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts (CEMA), USC School of Cinematic Arts, and Los Angeles Filmforum present: The 2025 Los Angeles Flaherty Pod.
Entering its 70th year, the Flaherty Film Seminar is revered as one of the most significant convenings around non-fiction cinema. Each year filmmakers, scholars, students, curators, critics, archivists, and cinephiles gather for an immersive, week-long program of film screenings, in-depth discussions, artist talks, installations, and/or performances around a theme.
June 26-29, 2025
LÁZARO AT NIGHT, FLORA, and DEAR CHANTAL
LÁZARO AT NIGHT, FLORA, and DEAR CHANTAL: Films by Nicolás Pereda
DEAR CHANTAL: A miniature homage to Chantal Akerman, conceived as a series of playfully impossible letters that respond to her inquiry about renting my sister’s home in Mexico City. FLORA: A reflection on the nature of representation and the ongoing drug war in Mexico, Nicolás Pereda’s Flora revisits locations and scenes from the mainstream 2010 narco-comedy El Infierno, exploring the paradoxes of depicting narco-trafficking on film—its tendency both to romanticize and to obscure. To screen is both to project and to conceal. LÁZARO AT NIGHT : Lázaro at Night follows three friends in their early forties as they audition for a coveted film role. Amid the process, one of them interviews a former literature teacher whose voice transports us to their past—a time when literature offered them an escape, allowing them to dream and hope in ways the dull, unforgiving real world never could. As they reminisce, their deep friendship becomes tangled in an uneasy love triangle, blurring the lines between memory, desire, and reality.
Friday, April 11th, 2025
Possibilities of Voice-Over
Possibilities of Voice-Over – A Workshop with Nicolás Pereda
This workshop takes an experimental approach to exploring the possibilities of voice-over narration in film, examining its different forms and effects. We will discuss the distinctions between documentary and fiction voice-overs, as well as hybrid approaches that combine elements of both. Topics will include embodied vs. disembodied narration, how the use of different verb tenses affects audience engagement, and conceptual vs. material narration. Participants will do one short exercise. To take part, please bring a photograph of your choice.
Friday, April 11, 2025
GOOD LUCK
GOOD LUCK: A film by Ben Russell
Filmed between a state-owned large-scale underground mine in the war-torn state of Serbia and an illegal mining collective in the tropical heat of Suriname, Good Luck is a visceral documentary portrait of hope and sacrifice in a time of global economic turmoil. Beginning with a 600 meter descent into the depths of the earth, Good Luck shines a flashlight onto the human face of labor in the time-warp’d working conditions of an underground state-owned mine in Serbia. The hiss of oxygen cuts through the diesel rumble, the walls of the office vibrate with explosions two levels below ; war-torn and half-forgotten, these miners’ physical struggle finds its mirror a continent away – in the tropical heat of an illegal Surinamese gold mine. The water pumps roar under the blinding sun ; silver liquid rolls across the hand of a Saramaccan Maroon as he adds mercury to dirt in a never-ending search for gold. Formed between dark and light, cold and heat, North and South, Good Luck immerses its viewer in the precarious natural and social environments of two distinct labor groups so as to better understand the bonds that men share. In a time of global economic turmoil, here is the human foundation of capital, revealed.
Thursday, March 27
ATTENTION!
ATTENTION!: A Workshop with Filmmaker Ben Russell
ATTENTION! is a practical workshop exploring perceptual re-engagement, one that seeks to re-orient the audiovisual attentions of its participants towards the present. Participants will be led in a series of walking and recording exercises that explore the possibilities of objective and subjective observation under the loose frames of “documentary” and / or “psychedelic ethnography.” This workshop draws its inspiration from sources as diverse as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maryanne Amacher’s third ear compositions, LSD test subjects, hydrophone coral reef recordings, Jean Rouch’s idea of trance-cinema and more – all in the name of recognizing one’s own intuitive, cognitive and perceptual processes within the construction of the Here and Now.
Friday, March 28
JUST A SOUL RESPONDING
Just a Soul Responding – Short Films by Sky Hopinka:
Visions of an Island, 2016, Sunflower Siege Engine, 2022, Kicking the Clouds, 2021, Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary, 2017
Sky Hopinka in-person with a Q&A to follow the films.
Thursday February 20th, 2025
A CONVERSATION WITH SKY HOPINKA
A conversation and Artist Talk with artist and filmmaker Sky Hopinka.
Friday February 21st, 2025
EVENTIDE
EVENTIDE: A film by Sharon Lockhart
In what is both a culmination and a departure, Sharon Lockhart’s latest film, Eventide (2022), is a meditative, non-narrative long shot that uses choreography to explore landscape, communal relations, solitary searching, psychic endurance, and the play of light moving through darkness. Locating drama in the real-time shift of evening fading into night, this is perhaps Lockhart’s most optical and painterly moving image to date, composing figures, scenography, and soundscape into allegory and abstraction. The artist’s investment in forms of dance in previous works is felt here too as the initial appearance of an individual slowly builds into a culture and a gathering. An astounding number of stars emerge bright in the dusking sky, blazing as a distant corollary to the growing constellation of roving bodies scanning the rock- strewn beach by cell phone light for what we do not know. The streaking of shooting stars and gliding of satellites throws the otherwise measured pace into relief. Shot on the Swedish coast with a close-knit group of friends Lockhart has been involved with for years, Eventide is concerned with the future and what it might hold.
Sharon Lockhart in-person with a Q&A to follow the film, and a workshop to follow the Q&A.
January 31st, 2025
