UNIONDOCS // Williamsburg Documentary Center Gears Up For Another 10 Years & Needs Your Help

 

A couple weeks ago we expressed our excitement about the new Bronx Documentary Center (which is set to officially open on October 22), but we'd also like to highlight another great documentary center right here in Brooklyn: UnionDocs.

Founded in 2002, UnionDocs is a multifaceted endeavor, encompassing film screenings, seminars and workshops, online publishing, collaborative projects and more. The center has produced events at MoMA and the Camden International Film Festival and partnered with Harvard University's metaLAB and the World Wildlife Foundation. It also hosts over 100 events each year and offers fellowships for emerging media producers, theorists and curators, giving them the resources to explore and develop their work.

UnionDocs just secured a new 10-year lease for its space at 322 Union Avenue in Williamsburg and raising funds on Kickstarter to upgrade the building to meet their growing needs. They're almost half way to their goal of $12,000, with a deadline of October 16, so help out if you can! Your donation could get you everything from an invitation to a private party celebrating the center's renovations to an Associate Producer credit on Looking at Los Sures, a major collaborative production that revisits Los Sures, a 1984 documentary film about the center's South Williamsburg neighborhood.

Check out a few of UnionDocs' upcoming events along with the video for their Kickstarter campaign after the jump.

October 8, 7:30pm: Moment of Impact - "Julia Loktev, the director of the critically acclaimed The Loneliest Planet (New York Film Festival 2011) and Cannes award-winning Day Night Day Night made her extraordinary debut with this sui generis documentary, an intimate family triptych. Loktev gets up close and personal with her parents after a freak accident immobilizes her father and renders her mother a full-time caregiver. What emerges, in carefully wrought 16mm black-and-white, is a candid, tough-minded, and moving portrait of individuals, relationships, and the crosscurrents of past and future in a difficult present."—Nicolas Rapold

October 9, 7:30pm: Three Artist Films with Albert Maysles - A screening of the short films Anastasia, about an American dancer in the Bolshoi Ballet, Salvador Dali's Fantastic Dream, a look at the surrealist painter, and Christo’s Valley Curtain, an Academy Award-nominated piece about the orange curtain that the artist hung between two Colorado mountains.

October 16, 7:30pm: No Bills: Stories of North Brooklyn - "No Bills presented audio oral histories about North Brooklyn through listening stations situated in construction fences and on the street to create serendipitous encounters for passersby, inviting them to engage with neighborhood’s history while standing at the sites of its developing future."

October 22, 7:30pm: Doxita: Inside/Outside - "Society has lines and boundaries that most people are expected to fit within. But many exists on the edge of those boundaries. Some try to fit in, while others embrace a unique path. These four films portray people on the edges -whether physically or personally – and while some might see them or the situation as “strange,” it is just the reality."

-- John Ruscher