By Hannah Stewart (Comm’19)

The Mimesis Documentary Festival, hosted by the College of Media, Communication and Information’s Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media, will hold community film screenings, artist talks and more from Aug. 14 through 18. This year, they received nearly 300 submissions from more than 30 countries, and will feature more than 60 documentaries.

“Being five years in means that we’re fulfilling a need in the international documentary community—the need for a festival that’s really artist-focused and community based,” said Eric Coombs Esmail, director of the center.

What: Mimesis Documentary Festival

When: Aug. 14-18

Where: Venues throughout Boulder as well as virtual screenings

Who: Festival passes ($80) and virtual passes ($30) are available to the public. ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder community members are eligible for a 50% discount, and free tickets are available to ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder students.

Now that it’s a well-known annual event, the festival is attracting more community partnerships and sponsors. Cool Boulder, along  with the Endangered Species Coalition, subsidized artist submission fees for projects addressing nature-based climate solutions. These projects are part of a special category of films called that will be featured across two days in four different documentary and live performance blocks. Other sponsors include the City of Boulder and the Boulder Public Library.

Associate Professor Erin Espelie, who holds a joint appointment in both cinema studies and critical media practices, is also a filmmaker whose documentary, , will be featured as part of the block called The Tree Remembers. Emergent technologies and media art practices PhD candidates and will also have their works shown in a Moving Creatures block.

Two other particularly exciting pieces this year include the pre-festival screening of by Terra Long and by artist in residence Miryam Charles.

Long’s film was screened Saturday, Aug. 10, at the Boulder Public Library’s Canyon Theater, and was followed up with a live Q&A with the filmmaker. While this is not the first time Mimesis has hosted a pre-festival screening, Coombs said this was special because of the collaboration.

“We’ve done pre-festival screenings twice previously, but they’ve been under the radar,” he said. “This year, our partnership with the Boulder Library to make sure the festival is reaching the community beyond just the event itself. The library has gotten more funding and it’s opened up a lot more avenues for collaboration.”

Artists in residence are chosen by the programming team, and Charles was the perfect candidate because the team saw her as “someone who really works at the boundary of what documentary might become.” Her film, which reflects on the unresolved death of her cousin, will be shown at 8 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 16, and she will host a master class the next morning at 10; both will take place at the Boedecker Cinema.

“The main goal is to host something that is valuable not only to the artists, but to the broader Front Range community in general,” Coombs said. “We want to make Mimesis sustainable and something that can survive the test of time. We want to grow the community we’ve built and demonstrate to that documentary is for everyone.”

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Associate Professor Reece Auguiste is co-editing a book tentatively titled African Cinema: Modernity and Moving Image Culture, which is in the final stages of chapter revisions before submitting the manuscript to peer reviewers in January and then to press in summer 2020. He also submitted an article titled “Visible Things Unseen: Co-creation and Its Philosophical Turn,” which will appear in AfterImage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Vol.47. No.1 this March. He peer-reviewed an article for Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal and another article for The Journal of Media Practice and Education. Auguiste presented a paper titled “Can the Archive Speak? In Search of the Interior Life of Archives” at the Reframing Africa: Future Archives conference hosted by the University of Witwatersrand, and at The Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg, in October 2019.

Assistant Professor Betsey Biggs is continuing work on MELT. She also held a laptop performance as part of the Musical Ecologies series in New York City.  She has a soundtrack coming out in April for her music film, MELT: The Memory of Ice.

Instructor Pat Clark recently presented Pathways to Mixed Reality: Oral History, the i-Doc, and the Archive at the 2019 Oral History Association’s Annual Meeting. This multi-dimensional immersive media project highlights landscape photography and the environment. He was also awarded a grant through Openŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder to adopt Online Educational Resources (OER) as an alternative to high-cost course materials.

Instructor Eric Coombs Esmail, director of the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media, along with the center's associate director, Instructor Christian Hammons, completed a short film, Rumor, which will premiere at a major festival this year. They also completed principal photography on their grant-funded documentary feature, American Refuge, about homelessness in the national forests of the American West. The project received the Audience Award at the Society for Visual Anthropology Pitch Fest at the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association in Vancouver. As director and associate director of the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media, the pair launched Mimesis, a grant-funded program to transform the center into a hub of documentary media production on campus, in the Western U.S., and beyond. The center now offers masterclasses, microgrants and support for project development, fundraising, production, distribution, and outreach, and it will debut the Mimesis Documentary Festival later this year.

Assistant Professor Erin Espelie had a solo show in Los Angeles at the Egyptian Theater with the L.A. Film Forum, where she premiered her new film Tenebrio molitor and a night of short films at the Regulator Gallery in Norman, Oklahoma. In August she was invited to install her film Silent Springs on site at the Sagehen Creek Field Station in northern California. She recently published in the , and she plans to chair a panel at the 2020 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference entitled, Deep Horizons: Examining the Spectrum of Uneven Ecocide & Enduring Futures.

Associate Professor Tara Knight’s short animation film Unsettled continued to be presented in a wide array of venues in 2019 - from the top animation festival in the world (Annecy, the "Cannes of Animation"), to a program on the history of "Animation and the Fine Arts" (Zagreb), to a US tour with Black Maria Film Festival (Director's Choice Award). Current iterations of her collaborative Sound Planetarium VR project were invited to be presented at conferences for art and technologists (Museum of Science Boston), for live performance designers (Live Design International), and for astrophysicists (University of Liege, Belgium). The animated video projection Knight created for the theatrical performance The Great Wave at the Berkeley Rep was reviewed as "handsome," "intricate," "stunning," "breathtakingly immersive," and "bone-rattling, eye-popping." Knight also received the 2019 William R. Payden Award for Faculty Teaching and Research Excellence.

Professor and Department Chair Teri Rueb published a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art (Routledge, June 2020).  This month, she’s attending a gathering of Critical Media Study program heads at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, along with DCMP doctoral student Toma Peiu. The universities represented will include University of the Arts, London; Université Paris Sciences et Lettres; and Goldsmiths, University of London. This month she’ll also be presenting as part of the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s alumni talks. She is currently collaborating with Roberto Azaretto, a DCMP doctoral student, and Jiffer Harriman, lecturer out of ATLAS, on a commission from the Fiske Planetarium to create a sonic mobile experience based on the scaled solar system model installed on campus. And, she is exhibiting work in the group show, Charting the World: Subjective Map Making at Suffolk University in Boston, which runs from Jan. 30 through Feb. 27. 

Instructor Jason Sanford recently finished composing an album’s worth of material, tentatively titled Complications on a label based in Prague called , which will be forthcoming in May. He will tour Europe this coming summer. He is also working on a Black Box project in collaboration with ATLAS Professor Ellen Yi-Luen Do, and is doing the sound design for a dance performance featuring Helanius Wilkins, who will perform as part of the show MULTISCAPES at the Black Box on March 6 and 7.

Assistant Professor Stephanie Spray has been invited to present work at a retreat hosted by Science Sandbox at the National Academy of Sciences. She is also one of 16 directors invited to present nonfiction work in the 2020 Sundance Talent Forum and has been invited to CPH:DOX in Copenhagen to pitch her feature film, Patagonia Park. Her chapter for the Routledge Handbook for Ethnographic Film and Video will be published this April. She continues to work on both of her feature films: Edge of Time and Patagonia Park.

Instructor Andrew Young is currently in the review phase on his article “’Dark Tourism and Rwandan Media Industries: Promoting Nation and the Mythology of Memory” in the Journal of Genocide Research. He is teaching a new video game theory class this semester, which he’ll likely adapt into an article about a critical media practices approach to teaching game theory. Additionally, his research on Rwandan film and nationalism was accepted for presentation at the 2020 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, and his paper on Religion and Rwandan print media was accepted to the 2020 American Cultural Association/Popular Culture Association Conference.

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