The MIDBO Documentary Film Festival mounted the Latin American launch of Patricia Zimmermann’s and Scott MacDonald (Hamilton College) new book, Flash Flaherty: Tales from a Film Seminar (Indiana University Press, 2021) in a special international Zoom event on Wednesday, October 27, sponsored by the US Embassy in Bogota, Colombia.
Zimmermann is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies and Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival at Ithaca College. Scott MacDonald is Professor of Film Studies and Art History at Hamilton College.
Together, they wrote the first volume of the history of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (Indiana University Press, 2017). Flash Flaherty, which features 103 creative nonfiction essays by Flaherty participants, is the second volume in this history of the longest continuously running nonprofit film organization in the world dedicated to documentary and experimental film.
The launch was moderated by Dr. Juana Suarez of New York University, and also featured Carlos Gutierrez, Executive Director of Cinema Tropical, one of the largest distributors of Latin American cinema in the United States. Gutierrez contributed an essay to Flash Flaherty.
The International Documentary Exhibition of Bogotá (MIDBO) is organized by the Colombian Corporation of Documentalists ALADOS. It specializes in the cinema of the real, and is one of the most prominent venues in Latin America for showcasing documentary films and scholarship. Over the last 23 years has served as a key node for exhibition, dialogue, and thought exploring documentary and nonfiction in Colombia and Latin America.
