Filmmaking for Older Adults With Artist Sarah Friedland
Movement Study:
An Introduction to Filmmaking for Older Adults
With AIM Artist Sarah Friedland
Thursday, April 18 • 2–4:30PM
Free, Registration Required, Space Limited
In this workshop for older adults, 2020 AIM Artist Sarah Friedland will guide participants through making one-shot silent gesture films. Friedland will lead participants in investigating their daily movements and selecting gestures for their films. After reviewing the basics of film directing, participants will work in small groups to frame their gestures for the camera.
This is a participatory and hands-on workshop that culminates in a screening of the films created. By focusing on gestures, this workshop is accessible for all physical abilities, as each task can be adapted and scaled to the mobility of the individual, as well as for individuals with memory loss.
As part of the workshop, artist Sarah Friedland will draw on her “embodied interviewing” process, which she used in making Movement Exercises, the film trilogy exhibited in Part Two of The Sixth AIM Biennial.
The event is free and is intended for older adults. Pre-registration is required to participate and space is limited.
Top Image: Sara Friedland, Film Still from Home Exercises.
About Sarah Friedland
Sarah Friedland is a filmmaker and choreographer working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies. Through hybrid, narrative, and experimental filmmaking, multi-channel video installation, and site-specific live dance performance, she stages and scripts bodies and cameras in concert with one another to elucidate and distill the undetected, embodied patterns of social life and the body politic. Facilitating a research process integrating found movements from social choreographies, gestures and postures from archival footage, embodied memories, and contemporary dance languages, she choreographs through practices of interviewing, pre- and re-enactment, adaptation, and improvisational play, shaping dances with diverse communities of performers and movers—from professional dancers to cohorts of older adults and teenagers.
Her work has screened and been presented in numerous festivals and film spaces including the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Oberhausen Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, Mubi, and BAM, in art spaces such as MoMA, Performa19 Biennial, La MaMa Galleria, and Sharjah Art Foundation, and in dance spaces including the American Dance Festival and Dixon Place, among many others. Her work has been supported by Film at Lincoln Center, the Jerome Foundation, NYSCA, Dance Films Association, Panavision, Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Bronx Museum, and Berlinale Talents. From 2021 – 2022, she was both a Pina Bausch Fellow for Choreography and a NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Film/Video. Sarah is a graduate of Brown University’s department of Modern Culture and Media and started her career assisting filmmakers including Steve McQueen, Mike S. Ryan, and Kelly Reichardt. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Roger Ebert, Screen Slate, and Jewish Currents, and she was named to Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2023. Her recently completed short film trilogy, Movement Exercises, is distributed by Video Data Bank. Sarah has worked on collaborative research and writing projects with media theorists Wendy Chun on slut-shaming and new media leaks, with Erin Brannigan on the dancing body on film, and has an ongoing collaboration with writer, scholar, and programmer Tess Takahashi on masses and embodiment. As a teaching artist working across age populations, she has taught workshops on choreographic practices in filmmaking at universities such as Brown, Yale, Skidmore, and Reed, among many others, and has worked in creative aging for seven years, facilitating intergenerational filmmaking projects and teaching in older adult communities.
ABOUT AIM ARTIST-LED
EVENTS & ACTIVITIES
The Bronx Museum invited artists who completed our flagship AIM (Artist in Marketplace) professional development program in 2020, 2021, 2022, or 2023 and have work on view in Part One or Part Two of Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial to further engage the public in the exhibition and their respective artistic practices by curating events or activities.