Episode 3 : Jesse Taylor Smith

 Nikolas Candido is a filmmaker and author who graduated from Cuba's International Film and Television School (EICTV). He is a member of Super OFF, a Super 8 active film collective from São Paulo. He currently studies Comparative Literature at University of Geneva in Switzerland, where he has taught Super 8 courses. His works are composed by an immersion in Super 8 and analogue process, inner-voice acting and non-traditional storytelling.

Ghen Dennis is a documentary filmmaker and teacher. Their world view is informed foremost by being an outsider punk kid from Alaska who came of age during the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, and ultimately the impact that the video recording of the beating of Rodney King had on questions of citizen agency to push back against abuses of power. Ghen believes that media, in the hands of the people, and a powerful agent for dialogue and social evolution - their approach to teaching and filmmaking reflects these ideas. Ghen’s film work has found them standing atop of the Berlin Wall in 1990; shooting super 8 footage of anti-war protesters after 9/11; working in post-Katrina New Orleans; and thinking about the politics of disaster representation in Sierra Leone, Haiti, and Puerto Rico as a videographer for the United Nations. They are an adjunct professor of Global Communications at Ramapo College and the Artistic Director of NYSSSA Media Arts.

Anna Kipervaser is a Ukrainian-born artist whose practice engages with a range of topics including human and animal bodies, ethnicity, religion, colonialism, and environmental conservation. Her engagement with these topics is informed by a commitment to formal experimentation, DIY and alternative processes, spanning disciplines including experimental and documentary moving image works in both 16mm film and digital video. Her work has screened at festivals internationally at Slamdance Film Festival, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Crossroads Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, Light Field, Antimatter, Fracto, Imagine Science Film Festival, Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, Athens International Film and Video Festival, Indie Grits Film Festival, Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogota, among others. Anna's work also screens in classrooms, galleries, microcinemas, basements, and schoolhouses! Her films are distributed by CFMDC, Alchemiya, and Canyon Cinema. She is also a painter, printmaker, educator, curator of exhibitions, programmer of screenings.

Matthew Wade is inspired by the exploration of ideas, dreams, creative techniques, and how the application of personal exploration lends itself to the way others absorb his work. With clear intentions about the exploration of a film's imagery, inquiries of sequence, timing, and atmosphere manifest into something more akin to the recording of a dream, as opposed to a traditionally structured "narrative." Matthew believes that  aesthetics are king, and they matter more than the plot of a film or its attempts to impart some specific agenda. Matthew’s hope is that his films are the starting point of conversations, not a passive experience meant to be a cheap moment of entertainment.

Jesse Taylor Smith is best known for his music videos, working as a director in Australia and New Zealand. He has worked with some of the most exciting names from the music scene down under, his videos deliberately evoke a low-fi feel, while displaying his love for the imaginative and surreal. His work has reached millions of people worldwide being selected at the BBC Music Video Festival and the Berlin Music Video Awards. Always inspired by the subject and always exploring the depths of a rather wild imagination.

Zoe Beloff is an artist, educator, filmmaker. Her projects often involve a range of media including films, drawings and archival documents organized around a theme.Currently Zoe is completing a feature film “The Tramp’s New World”. It is the third film in a trilogy about a movie proposed but never realized by radical artists. She is also one of the head curators for The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society Dream Films.

Taylor Dunne is a filmmaker, curator and educator. Her practice explores the intersection of place, history and landscape. Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival (NYFF), Tribeca Film Festival and FOL : Experimental Film Society (Istanbul). She is a programmer for Transient Visions: Festival of the Moving Image. In this episode we discuss her experience as young film student, her travels across the country filming her documentaries (including her feature film in the works, "Off Country" which is set to release very soon), and her experience as educator teaching Bachelors of Fine Arts for Film.