Join us for a discussion with documentarians and artists Luma Jasim, Mariam Bazeed, Cecilia Aldarondo, and EB Landesberg on how they use humor in their work to reflect memory, trauma, and loss. The discussion will be moderated by Sam Garcia ’19.

This panel is organized as part of the 2019 MDOCS Forum, presented by the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS). The forum is free and open to the public.

About the Panelists

Luma Jasim (2019 MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute Fellow) is an interdisciplinary Iraqi-born artist. Jasim’s art deals with war, violence, and her experience with immigration and the acculturation which rose from that. In her artwork, she uses the personal to address the political and activate the viewer’s curiosity. Jasim often reconstructs her memories, traumas, and thoughts on displacement, belonging, and strangeness in various mediums including writing, painting, performance, video, and animation. Since graduating with a Master’s degree from Parsons School of Design in May 2017, Jasim has completed different artist residencies and fellowships, including The Corporation of Yaddo Residency in 2018, MASS MoCA Residency in 2017, Surel’s Place Residency in 2018, and The AAF/American Austrian Foundation/ Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts in 2017. Her work has been shown and exhibited nationally and internationally. Currently, Jasim lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Cecilia Aldarondo is a documentary director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora whose work has been supported by ITVS, HBO, A&E, the Sundance Institute, Cinereach, Firelight Media, Field of Vision, IFP, the Jerome Foundation, and many others. Her feature documentary Memories of a Penitent Heart had its world premiere at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on POV in 2017. She is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2017 Women at Sundance Fellow, two-time MacDowell Colony Fellow, recipient of a 2019 Bogliasco Foundation Residency, and was named by Filmmaker Magazine as one of 2015’s ‘25 New Faces of Independent Film.’ She currently teaches at Skidmore College.

Elizabeth (EB) Landesberg (2019 MDOCS Storytellers’ Institute Fellow) is a filmmaker, multimedia artist, and educator. She is currently co-director of the Lewis Hine Documentary Fellows Program, as well as a producer and facilitator for Another Kind of Girl Collective, an expanding global media collective for young women living in displaced communities. EB’s documentary practice seeks to put different lives and communities in conversation—with one another, and with herself—and to make different forms of power more visible. Over the past ten years, EB has explored themes of labor, memory, loss, humor, culture, and the sacred. She has also collaborated with young people through educational programs, media workshops, and community organizations throughout the Americas. In all of her work, she is committed to including marginalized voices in processes of illuminating inequality and initiating social change; to media-making as a tool of cultural affirmation and self-determination; and to redistributing resources and access to dispossessed communities.

Mariam Bazeed is a queer, immigrant, non-binary, Egyptian, Brooklyn-based writer, singer, and performance artist. They were born in 1980s Kuwait, a product of the Gulf Labor Migration that brought, and continues to bring, seekers of oil’s fortunes from across the globe. If there is a place that can school you in injustice, it is the Gulftastic dystopia of Kuwait in its glut. After their father passed away, and after their mother became disabled in a car accident, the work visa that had kept their mother there for twenty-five years, and them there for a lifetime, was not renewed. Their family’s move to Egypt was abrupt, this home that was home but for the fact that they’d not lived there. A full scholarship to study in the States made leaving possible. They graduated and worked in book publishing for nine years before quitting to pursue writing and performance.

About MDOCS Forum

Each June, as part of the annual Storytellers’ Institute, Skidmore College’s John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative (MDOCS) hosts a weekend-long documentary forum around an annual theme. This year’s theme, Humor: Laughing With Reality, honors the long tradition of non-fiction makers who, through satire and silliness, have employed humor as means to transgress social norms, toy with the taboo, and empower us through laughter. An international group of documentary makers will explore the theme through various mediums and connect with Skidmore and the greater community at locations on Skidmore College campus from June 6–9, 2019.

For more information on the 2019 MDOCS Forum, visit their website.

2019 MDOCS Forum Events

Thursday, June 6:
- 8:00 PM – Performance of “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller” Sam Green, and Yo La Tengo (at Arthur Zankel Music Center)

Friday, June 7:
- 10:00 AM – The Natural World and Climate Anxiety
- 11:45 AM – Sitting in the Waiting Room
- 3:00 PM – Sam Green Artist Talk
- 4:30 PM – Documentary, Mockumentary and Prank Panel
- 6:00 PM – Keynote: Kristina Wong Performance and Artist Talk (at Filene Auditorium)

Saturday, June 8:
- 10:00 AM – Docs in Progress
- 11:45 AM – Documentary Film Industry and Humor
- 3:00 PM – Land Without Bread Redux
- 4:30 PM – Humor, Memory, Trauma, Loss
- 6:15 PM – Radio Atlas

Sunday, June 9:
- 10:00 AM – Storytelling Workshop with Micaela Blei
- 11:45 AM – Teachings and Takeaways Workshop