Patricia Zimmermann, Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies and Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) presented the “States of Violence” program that is one of the six programs of the national touring exhibition We Tell: Fifty Years of Participatory Community Media at the Orphans Film Symposium Counter-Archives held at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, on June 18.
She presented with We Tell co-programmer Louis Massiah of Scribe Video and We Tell archivist and researcher Carmel Curtis of the Indiana University Film Archive.
We Tell: 50 Years of Participatory Community Media chronicles the hidden histories of place-based documentaries across the United States that situate their collaborative practices in specific locales, communities, and needs for social and political change. We Tell features forty separate media projects and thirty-five different nonprofit community-based media organizations.
The Orphans Film Symposium is a biennial event that brings together an international group of archivists, scholars, artists, curators, preservationists, librarians, collectors, distributors, documentarians, students, researchers, and others devoted to saving, studying, and screening neglected moving image artifacts.
Orphans 2022 focused on ‘counter-archives’, invoking a disposition toward ‘orphan films’ that foregrounds not just abandoned materials but also stories, themes, and peoples often underrepresented, absent, or silenced by historical struggles for power, access, and survival.
Zimmermann also co-facilitated the closing large group discussion on the questions of counter-archives with Dr. Juana Suarez, director of the Moving Image Archives Program at New York University.
