External Lecturers and Guests

^{Wang Bing (middle) and some of our students at the end of the second day of the workshop. Thank you to Yunlong Sung (right) for the translation.}

Student's Workshop 2024
Wang Bing is widely known for his exceptional contributions to cinema. Born in Xi’an, in 1967, WANG Bing studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts and cinematography at Beijing Film Academy. He began his career as an independent filmmaker in 1999. Discovered in 2003, WEST OF TRACKS (Tiexi qu/铁西区), an enormous documentary work of more than 9 hours, has garnered great success internationally. In addition to his feature documentaries (THREE SISTERS/San zimei/三姊妹, ’TIL MADNESS DO US PART/Fengai/疯爱), he is also active in videoinstallation (CRUDE OIL/Yuanyou/原油, a 14-hour film), fiction film (BRUTALITY FACTORY/Baoli gongchang/暴力工厂, THE DITCH/Jiabiangou/夹边沟), and photography. His documentaries have been released in theatres internationally. Acclaimed by critics and recognised as a major Chinese artist, documentary maker and film director, he has been honoured by retrospectives of his oeuvre in major museums such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, Filmoteca Española and Museo Reina Sofía.

JP Sniadecki works between the US and China as a filmmaker and anthropologist. From Chengdu demolition sites to New York City junkyards to the Sonoran Desert borderlands, he collaborates with people and places to explore film’s capacity for transfiguration of the discarded and transgression of the status quo. His films are in the permanent collection of New York ’s Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and have been exhibited there and at the Whitney Biennale, the Shanghai Biennale, the Shenzhen Biennale, and the Guggenheim, as well as at international film festivals such as Berlin, BFI London, Locarno, New York, AFI, San Francisco, Rotterdam, Viennale, IDFA, Mar del Plata, Taiwan International Documentary Festival, and more. His films include "Foreign Parts" (2010, with Véréna Paravel), "People's Park" (2013, with Libby Cohen) and "El Mar La Mar" (2017, with Joshua Bonnetta).

JP serves on the editorial board of the Chinese Independent Cinema Observer journal, and he co-founded the traveling screening series «Cinema on the Edge,» which showcases independent Chinese film around the world. He has also written articles for Cinema Scope, Visual Anthropology Review, and the edited volume DV-Made China. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, J.P. earned a PhD at Harvard and is Professor in the Radio/TV/Film Department at Northwestern University, where he directs the MFA in Documentary Media program and the Buffett Institute’s Climate Crisis + Media Arts Working Group.

Joshua Bonnetta is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist, working with sound and image, for installations, in performances and also in the classic form of the cinema. His work has been presented in art institutions and film festival alike, including the Berlinale, the London Film Festival, the New York Film festival and the Toronto International Film Festival, as well as MOMA New York and the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
His best known works are probably Two Sights from 2020, El Mar La Mar from 2017 and Lago, also from 2017 but his website has many more works you should keep an eye on.
If I have read his information correctly, one of Joshua's interests lies in documentary sound and he has also taught classes about this. We will most certainly speak about the sound in our Q&A after the screening.
Joshua Bonnetta is currently an Associate Professor of Cinema, Photography, & Media Art at Ithaca College.

Ruth Anderwald + Leonhard Grond have worked collectively as artists, artist-curators, and artist-researchers since 1999, and currently share the professorship for the Artistic Research PhD Program PhD in Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Within their co-creative artistic-research practice, they develop theory-led and practice-oriented artistic research on dizziness. Within their topic of dizziness, Ruth and Leonhard are researching the social, affective, somaesthetic and sensory impact and epistemic potential of this state, the navigation of aporetic situations within artistic and arts-based research practice, the potential for epistemic solidarity in cross- and transdisciplinary contexts. Further, Ruth and Leonhard conduct intergenerational arts-based research on resistance against fascisms, exploring the transdisciplinary and transformative potential of remembrance cultures.

Filmmaker and artist born in 1956, lives in Tel Aviv. Filmography: The first 54 years – an abbreviated manual for military occupation (2021), Between Fences (2016), Once I entered a garden (2012), Z32 (2008), Avenge but one of my two eyes (2005), August (2002), Happy Birthday Mr. Mograbi (1999), How I learned to overcome my fear and love Arik Sharon (1997), The Reconstruction (1994).

Avi Mograbi is one of the most significant international documentary filmmakers of recent years. His films serve as engaged commentary on current events in Israel and in the Middle East. Blurring the lines between documentary and the staging of his own position as a filmmaker, his works have played a pivotal role in renewing the language of documentary filmmaking. Themes such as the necessity of forgiveness in conflicts, the nature of cinematic truth, humor, and a persistent exploration of the political and filmmaker's responsibility to both protagonists and society are recurring elements in his works. These aspects contribute to making his body of work uniquely outstanding in the international context of innovative documentary filmmaking.

The two documentarists Alex Gerbaulet and Mareike Bernien engage in their works with media archaeological themes, utilizing archival material on historical subjects often intertwined with their own biographies and consistently carrying a socio-political backdrop. Approaching documentary filmmaking from this perspective, they conduct artistic research, for which they received a research fellowship from the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme (gkfd) in 2020-21.
Both have been members of the production platform pong film in Berlin for several years. Their works are showcased in festivals and presented in exhibitions. Their collaborative projects in recent years include Depth of Field (DE 2017, focusing on the NSU murders in Nuremberg) and Sun Under Ground (DE 2022, exploring uranium mining in Wismut).

Guy Ben Ner, born in 1969, is an Israeli artist who has been primarily working with video since 1999. His works are consistently situated in the domestic environment of his everyday life, often leading to comparisons between the artist and the private individual Ben Ner. Ben Ner temporarily constructs sets in his apartment, where he, along with his family, playfully stages classic stories (such as Moby Dick or Kaspar Hauser) or addresses the conditions under which he, as an artist, can realize his works. He casually explores taboo subjects, hints at political connections, and delves into existential questions in these narratives, providing a space for discussions that extend beyond the private sphere.
In 2005, Ben Ner represented Israel at the Venice Biennale and has since been invited to solo and group exhibitions worldwide. His works are also featured in film festivals.

Ed Atkins lives and works in Copenhagen. Recent institutional solo exhibitions include ‘Refuse’ at Tank, Shanghai (2022); ‘Get Life / Love’s Work’ at the New Museum, New York (2021); Kunsthaus Bregenz and  K21 Düsseldorf (both 2019); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; MMK Frankfurt; The Kitchen, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2015), The Serpentine Gallery, London (2014); Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2013); and MoMA PS1 (2012). Atkins was included in the 56th and 58th Venice Biennales, the 13th Lyon Biennial, and Performa 13 and 19.

Born in Bulgaria in 1968, Theodore Ushev graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia and was a sought-after poster artist before seeking new opportunities in Canada. He moved to Montreal in 1999. Over the course of two decades, Ushev has directed 15 animation films at the NFB, winning more than 200 awards, and earning an Oscar® nomination for Blind Vaysha (2016). The Physics of Sorrow (2019) won the prestigious Cristal Award for Best Short Film at the 2020 Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
In addition to his films, Ushev has created a range of innovative installations, VR and mixed-media projects. In 2021, Ushev was named the world’s most influential animator of the past 25 years by a group of leading animation critics, journalists, curators, and festival directors. His first live-action feature Phi 1.618 was released in the autumn of 2022.

Barbara Pichler holds a degree in Theatre and Film Studies from the University of Vienna and an MA in Film and TV Studies from the University of London/British Film Institute. Since 1995, Pichler has been working in the film and media sector as a curator, publicist, film mediator, and teacher. She has developed concepts for numerous film series and educational programmes and has worked on various festivals and events. She is the co-editor of the film studies essay collection Moving Landscapes, Landscape and Film (Vienna, 2006) and the monograph James Benning (Vienna, 2007). From 2008 to 2015 she was the artistic director and managing director of the Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film. Since 2016, she has been the producer and co-managing director of Vienna-based KGP Filmproduktion.

The Berlin-based artist Julian Rosefeldt (born in Munich in 1965) is internationally renowned for his visually opulent and meticulously choreographed moving image artworks, mostly presented as complex multi-screen installations. Inspired equally by the histories of film, art and popular culture, Rosefeldt uses familiar cinematic tropes to carry viewers into surreal, theatrical realms, where the inhabitants are absorbed by the rituals of everyday life, employing humour and satire to seduce audiences into familiar worlds made strange. Rosefeldt is holding a professorship of Media Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2011.

Johan Grimonprez’s curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and MoMA, New York. His filmic works are in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and Tate Modern, London. His feature films include Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), Double Take (2009) and Shadow World (2016). Traveling the main festival circuit from the Berlinale, Tribeca to Sundance, they garnered several Best Director awards, the 2005 ZKM International Media Award, a Spirit Award and the 2009 Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, and were also acquired by NBC Universal, ARTE, and BBC/FILM 4.

Johan Knattrup Jensen graduated from filmschool in 2012, and his work have since been shown in most of the major film festivals, incl. Cannes, Locarno, IDFA, and New York Film Festival, as well at biennales, art galleries and museums all over the world. His work traverses both cinema, installation, and performance, and he is considered to be among the pioneers of cinematic virtual reality.

Agostino Ferrente (Cerignola, 28 October 1971) is an Italian film director, screenwriter and producer. He is founder of the production company Pirata Produzioni Cinematografiche and belongs to the collective Apollo 11, which transformed a historic cinema in Rome into a cultural centre. He established the Doc/it Award for Documentary Film, which is awarded as part of the Venice International Film Festival. In 2013, Le cose belle premiered there, a film about ten years in the lives of four young Neapolitans, which he co-directed. 2019 he directed the documentary film Selfie.

Michael Baute, based in Berlin, is an author, lecturer, media worker, and curator. He has been writing and publishing on cinema since 1992, contributing to books, catalogs, journals, and the weblog newfilmkritik.de, which he co-founded in 2001. In 2006, he co-edited (alongside Volker Pantenburg) "Minutentexte. The Night of the Hunter" (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose). In 2008, he was a co-author of the radio play "Minutentexte," based on the same book. From 2008 to 2009, Baute served as the artistic director of the project "Kunst der Vermittlung. Aus den Archiven des Filmvermittelnden Films", focusing on the exploration, collection, and dissemination of audiovisual forms of film and cinema mediation. Since 2010, he has been conducting courses and workshops on film mediation and film-mediating films, including the production of video essays. His latest film release was in 2010: Godardloop.
(Source: https://nachdemfilm.de/texts/authors/michael-baute)

Since September 2014, Alexandra Schneider has been a professor of film studies with a focus on media dramaturgy at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. At the Institute of Film, Theatre, Media, and Cultural Studies, she heads the master's program in media dramaturgy. Prior to this position, she taught at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Department of Film Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Following her studies at the University of Zurich (Film Studies, Sociology, Political Theory), where she also earned her doctorate, she served as a visiting professor at the University of Lausanne for one year.

Born in 1983 in Munich. She studied media art and film at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Saar, the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan and the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne. Between 2009 and 2012, she was intensively involved in the construction of Turkish nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk’s “Museum of Innocence”. In the course of preparing the exhibition, she filmed a documentary about collectors in Istanbul which celebrated its premier in Montréal in March 2014. Her following documentary Draussen (Outside) about the personal belongings of homeless people, premiered at Berlinale Film Festival 2018. She was founding member of DOKOMOTIVE-Plattform, a collective of german documentary filmmakers.

Cross-disciplinary artist Meira Asher studied traditional music in India and Ghana. She holds a BFA in percussion and multidisciplinary arts from the California Institute of the Arts (1990) and a Master's in Sonology from the Royal Conservatory, The Hague (2002). Asher works in music, installation, performance and is the author of various art projects, including "Face_WSLOT" (album, book, interdisciplinary art installation, and documentary film on female ex-child combatants in Sierra Leone), which toured and were published throughout the world. She is also a co-founder of the bodylab art foundation in The Hague.

Guido HENDRIKX (1987, Netherlands) is an Amsterdam-based film director and screenwriter. He studied Liberal Arts & Sciences at Utrecht University, Directing Documentary & Screenwriting at the Netherlands Film Academy and Practical Ethics at Utrecht University. His short films Day is Done (2010), Escort (2013) and Among Us (2014) were featured at film festivals throughout the world and gathered over 20 international awards. His feature debut Stranger in Paradise was the opening film of IDFA 2016 and was nominated for the European Film Awards in the category best documentary. In 2019 he founded his own production company Aventura. Their first feature-length film was A Man And A Camera.

• Lukas Frei
• Ursula Palla
• Mario Doulis
• Johannes Binotto
• Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña
• Marcy Goldberg
• Monica Studer/Christoph van den Berg
• Uwe H. Martin
• Irene Muñoz
• Werner Schweizer
• Caroline Kirberg
• Fredi Murer
• Hristiana Raykova