SPRING 2023 ⸻ BEYOND
NO EVIL EYE CINEMA is proud to announce, FILM FUTURA 2023 (FF ‘23), a continuation of our previous model of virtual learning that will now host SHORT TERM COURSES, a selection of 5-week intensives that aim to deconstruct cinematic legacies, traditions, and unorthodox sensibilities.
Shepherded by a team of cutting edge international film practitioners, educators, and programmers, these SHORT TERM COURSES will challenge the traditional dissemination of scholarship via multidisciplinary offerings for students eager to deepen their outlook on cinema.
From a lecture series outlining varied histories of the cinematic image by critic and scholar Yasmina Price, to a project-based tutorial led by Rory Padgett, a AfroFuturist worldbuilding intensive hosted by NEEC co-founder Ingrid Raphaël, and a hybrid film critique workshop-seminar guided by Chrystel Oloukoï … FF ‘23 continues to be a one-stop shop for all your alternative film school needs.
This edition of FILM FUTURA will be hosted in spring and autumn intervals with the first SHORT TERM COURSE starting on April 3rd and the last COURSE ending on June 27th 2023 respectively. We once again welcome a global cohort of prospective students with varying levels of educational background and a genuine interest in exploring decolonizing film to apply with an emphasis on BiPOC applicants. Due to the intimate learning environment, only a select number of students will be chosen for each session. Each course will be hosted online and on Eastern Standard Time during the evening hours. There will be occasional office hours dependent on the educators’ availability, as well as opportunities for students to build community outside of class.
⸻ EDUCATIONAL TRACKS & THEIR OBJECTIVES ⸻
The mission is for students to leave our classes with a singular educational experience that sparked their imagination, re-shaped their thinking, connected them to history and community, and overall made them a more robust student of film than they were when they first started.
CALL FOR DONORS/SPONSORS
We’re currently seeking donations that will help fund the school and scholarships for lower income students. Pls support FILM FUTURA and the future of cinematic risk takers by sharing and/or considering making a contribution to our microcinema.
You can make a tax-deductible donation via our fiscal sponsor, Maysles Documentary Center!
INGRID RAPHAËL
ON WEDNESDAYS FROM MAY 10 – JUNE 7 @ 6-8PM EST
How do we see (y)ourselves in the future? How have we been depicted on screen in futuristic films? How have we not? Have we found joy, despair, peace, longing, memory, and reclamation in y(our) futures? How are (y)our pasts in conversation with (y)our future selves? We will excavate these questions by watching futurist films, reading speculative short stories, exploring themes, myths, forms, symbols, story, magic, technology, and solutions with the opportunity for participants to workshop and develop their own futurist film idea: learning script-writing, character development, world-building, and the history of futurism on screen. As Octavia Butler ushered us, “you got to make your own worlds – you got to write yourself in.”
Wed. May 10
DEFINING: FUTURISM & GENRE
We begin with an examination of the futurism-landscape from filmmakers and authors whose works define, question, excavate worlds through the genres of speculative fiction, science fiction, cyberpunk, fantasy, etc… Participants will kick-off the class with an introductory collage of their futurist film idea for the course –with no expectation to have the full plot, story, or characters fleshed out. Films and readings will be assigned prior to class to be discussed.
Wed. May 17
EXCAVATING: ARTIFACT-RELICS
We progress into examining what I define as artifact-relics: themes, myths, forms, symbols, story, magic, technology, and solutions. This participatory lecture will present these artifact-relics, and we will aim to explore or answer: do these worlds form out of optimism, hope, despair, need? how are the tools of magic & technology used? who has access? what metaphors jump out? what rules defy our current earthly ones? what reckonings are weaved? what has been shown as possible, and what’s yet to be written/shown? And more… Films and readings will be assigned prior to class to be discussed.
Wed. May 24
MOLDING: FORM & STORY
We’ll continue to dive into storytelling in futurism: time shifts, poetic symphonies, metaphorical or symbolic instances etc.. and explore questions like: what are its rules, its motifs, its problems, its soundscape, its colors, its feeling, its reckoning, its whys, hows, whats, whos, and whens. Dreaming big and pushing the boundaries of what we consider possible. Process-based interviews from authors and film-practitioners will be assigned to watch before this class.
Wed. May 31
EXPANDING: OBJECTS, SOUND, CLOTHING, VFX, SCULPTURE …
We will pivot to expanding and shifting our traditional understanding of futurism on screen by evoking works by video artists, sculpturists, choreographers, fabric/fashion artists and more who are exploring our artifact-relics and definitions of futurism. This class aims to offer a holistic and expansive approach to futurist “non-film/image” objects and forms as part of the filmmaking process. What’s a film without its costume design, props, lighting, actor direction (movement,) score etc…?
Wed. June 7
WORLDBUILDING SHOWCASE
We return to the first class– making a full loop to the past by returning to (y)our original collages, but now there are newly fleshed out additions: your questions excavated, your characters present, your world imagined and detailed, your why answered, and your imagination of a futurist world. Creating a portal space where we get to experience each others’ renditions of your futuristic showcase: it can be a pitch deck, an excerpt from your script, a character profile, a costumes sheet, a dream location scouting sheet, etc…: with the hopes that this can be useful for you and/or the project’s needs. We’ll end on a sweet note, meditation, and ways for us to connect beyond the course.
ABOUT INGRID RAPHAËL (they/them)
Informed by their ‘resident alien’ status in the u.s, Ingrid Raphael’s artistic voice is carved with a poetic borderless framework. As a filmmaker, they are developing a speculative narrative feature that explores a future with memory loss, spiders, environmental downfall, and a possibility for renewal. They co-directed They Won’t Call It Murder, a short documentary that navigates Ohio’s injustice system through the voices of mothers and sisters directly impacted. They also co-founded NO EVIL EYE Cinema, a nomadic microcinema aimed to redefine filmic experiences via education and programming. As an educator, they’ve co-taught and co-led programs & courses at Mono No Aware, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Eyebeam, Powrplnt, Black Quantum Futurism, The Young Artist Program, Film Futura and more.
CHRYSTEL OLOUKOÏ
ON TUESDAYS FROM MAY 23 – JUNE 20 @ 6-8PM EST
Students will learn about the practice of film critique and criticism via a mix of practical workshops and theory or history based lectures. In workshop-based sessions, they will practice visual analysis, pitching ideas and writing. They will learn about the history and political economy of film criticism, its institutionalization / professionalization, crucial debates in the field as well as counter-cartographies of critique beyond well-known Western-based institutions. The course materials will privilege minoritized, especially Black and queer film critics and filmmakers.
Tues. May 23
THE ART OF CRITIQUE
This class will be mostly based on text analysis and contextualize film criticism within the broader practice of critique. We will go over examples of stellar, undisciplined film criticism, to analyze what makes an interesting critique but also the multiple possible approaches to a single film.
Tues. May 30
VISUAL ANALYSIS (1)
Workshop style analysis of films focused on non-fiction, experimental shorts, with complementary readings on visual analysis.
Tues. June 6
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CRITIQUE
A review of the history of film critique (a practice inherent to the art of making/viewing films) vs. film criticism (a professionalized field), some of the main debates that have marked the field and critical approaches that destabilize or even question its existence. We will end with a power mapping of the field that attempts to decenter well-known, Western-based institutions to think collectively about counter-cartographies and the futures of film criticism.
Tues. June 13
COUNTER-IMAGE 2–FILMIC INTERNATIONAL INSURRECTION
Workshop style analysis focused on feature-length films, with complementary readings on visual analysis.
Tues. June 20
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CRITIQUE
This class briefly looks at different forms and platforms for film criticism (specialized film journals, web-based platforms, academic publishing, restorations, reeditions or new releases, curatorial programs, festivals…), their specific temporalities, how to pitch ideas, as well as how to navigate and destabilize an industry marked by all the -isms.
ABOUT CHRYSTEL OLOUKOÏ (they/them)
Chrystel Oloukoï is a moving image artist, film critic and curator, broadly interested in experimental cinema, queer cinema and Black continental and diasporic cinema. They are completing a PhD in African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
YASMINA PRICE
ON MONDAYS FROM APRIL 3 – MAY 1 @ 7:30-9:30PM EST
This course aims to offer students an overview of the trajectory of cinema from its photographic emergence alongside the colonial and imperial political, cultural, social and economic forces which shaped it, to the oppositional, revolutionary and experimental filmmaking cultures which arose in the 1960s and 1970s, finally touching on their inheritors in the present. The hope is that students will come away armed with more knowledge of how systems of power and visual culture meet in order to be better equipped to read/experience/create images.
Mon. April 3
IMAGE 1 — VIOLENT VISUALITY
For our first session, we’ll introduce ourselves to each other as an invitation into a collaborative educational space. We’ll start with some thoughts about contemporary issues of popular visual culture, surveillance, “representation” and how seeing/watching are learned. This will be followed by an introduction to the early history of photography as shaped by political, social, cultural projects of domination and how we cannot grasp visual art/media/technologies without confronting the history and continuations of capitalism and colonialism. This will be the most lecture-based session, but absolutely have time set aside for discussion and questions.
Mon. April 10
IMAGE 2 — COLONIAL CAMERAS & BLACK CINEMA
Beginning with Stuart Hall as an entrypoint to thinking about distributions of power and the division of the world between West and Non-West or Global South and Global North, we’ll look to audience and spectatorship as the early signs of resistance to white/Western/Euro-American visual domination. This will transition into considering the emergence of Black filmmaking in the United States and the shifts from colonial control to the initial efforts at anti-colonial cinema and autonomous production on the African continent.
Mon. April 17
COUNTER-IMAGE 1 — MANIFESTOS, MILITANCY & THIRD CINEMA
We will trace the emergence of ‘Third Cinema’ in Latin America as a filmic tidal wave of exercises in using filmmaking practices as a weapon against colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. The manifestos which emerged from this movement will be our guiding documents. This will lay a foundation for considering the development of oppositional and militant visual cultures and how they participated in political, economic and social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s.
Mon. April 24
COUNTER-IMAGE 2–FILMIC INTERNATIONAL INSURRECTION
To close out the second session on counter-imaging, we’ll delve into experimentations in radical, disruptive, revolutionary filmmaking that emerged from Africa and Asia in conjunction with the Latin American roots of Third Cinema. We will also engage the political filmmaking in the Soviet Union and Europe from the 1960s and 1970s, and the emergence of independent Black filmmaking in the U.S. and the U.K. We’ll end with indigenous filmmaking, Fourth Cinema and a critique of “World Cinema.”
Mon. May 1
FREE THE CINEMA / LIBERATION BY ANY MEANS
For our last class, we will review where we started and where we might go. Looking at the trajectory of film through the lens of global systems of oppression and liberation, we’ll think together about the stakes of cultural imperialism and visual media for our present. Each student will be invited to share a short individual/or collaborative contribution in a form of their choosing (a set of questions, a video, a clip from a film, any textual or visual responses, a mini manifesto, a challenge to the course, etc…). This will also be an opportunity to draw connections between the 4 Image/Counter-Image sessions & to the contemporary landscape of cinema.
ABOUT YASMINA PRICE (she/her)
Yasmina Price is a writer, programmer, and PhD candidate in the departments of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. She focuses on anticolonial cinema from the Global South and the work of visual artists across the African continent and diaspora, with a particular interest in the experimental work of women filmmakers. Yasmina has interviewed filmmakers and participated in panels on Black film and revolutionary cultural production organized by the Maysles Documentary Center, International Documentary Association, New York Film Festival, and more, while her series “In the Images, Behind the Camera: Women’s Political Cinema 1959-1992” played at the BAMCinematek in May 2022. Recent writing has appeared in The Baffler, Criterion’sCurrent, Lux Magazine and Film Quarterly.
RORY PADGETT
ON TUESDAYS APRIL 9 – MAY 11 @ 6-8PM EST
The goal of the course is to get students to think about their culture, their politics, their access to certain technologies, and their communities’ needs as the foundation of their own cinematic approach. Through lectures, discussions, and exercises this course is designed to equip students with historical, theoretical and practical knowledge in the development of their approach to filmmaking, distribution & exhibition, film culture, criticism, and education.
Tues. April 11
PRIMITIVE CINEMA ↔ DIGITAL CINEMA
This lecture focused class presents a new historiography of film that threads early cinema and the marginalized cinema from the 20th century to our modern practice of cinema and internet media.
Tues. April 18
CULTURAL CONSIDERATIONS
This class showcases a variety of approaches to the purposes and aesthetics of film that are influenced by culture, politics, and technology. Students will be prompted to brainstorm ways they can replicate their personal, familial, regional, and ethnic cultures through cinema including: lighting, distribution, sound, narrative, and criticism.
Tues. April 25
QUILTING FILM HISTORY
This discussion focused class is designed for students to situate themselves in a historical context. Students will also participate in an imagination exercise to aid in developing their approach to film.
Tues. May 2
FINAL PRESENTATIONS
This presentation focused class is a chance for students to showcase their developing approaches to film, film culture, and/or film education; this can range from lookbooks to short films to PowerPoint presentations to collages or photo essays.
Tues. May 9
DREAMCASTING
This student led class is a reflection on the course. Students can workshop ideas, circle back to previous discussions, do some group meditations, etc.
ABOUT RORY PADGETT (he/him)
Rory is a Brooklyn based filmmaker and educator. He studied film at Howard University, under the guidance of Haile Gerima and Julie Dash. While at Howard, Rory taught ‘Film and Social Change’, a legacy course Elyseo Taylor created during the LA Rebellion. Rory revamped the syllabus to include AIDS Video Activism and Palestinian Cinema. He’s worked on films with Julie Dash (Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl) and Stanley Nelson (Boss: The Black Experience in Business). He currently runs Vibration Cinema, a collage of video essays that challenge common sense notions of film.
Nope! FILM FUTURA was specifically created to accommodate students with varied film educational backgrounds. What’s key is possessing a genuine interest in film and mapping alternative futures.
We recommend that you apply only to the course(s) that aligns with your educational interest AND your availability. We will prioritize applicants who can attend every class.
Each course aims to address each of the tracks we’ve laid out: Histories & Legacy, Discovery, or Systems of Making. Please refer to educational tracks to identify which course works best for where you are in your cinephilic journey!
Yes! If you’re accepted, attending live sessions is mandatory. This year we will be accepting a much smaller student cohort into each course so your attendance and participation is key to activating our communal learning experience.
While it’s not strictly mandatory, we highly recommend it as a way to connect with fellow students, your educator, and the virtual TA!
FILM FUTURA will utilize computer generated Live Captions throughout the duration of the school. We do encourage folks to inform us of other avenues that will make the school more accessible to all. Email us at hello[at]noevileyecinema[dot]com with references.
If you’re a student in need of financial assistance, do not let that deter you from applying to FILM FUTURA. There’s an opportunity to explain your needs in the application process and we will follow up should you be accepted into your respected SHORT TERM COURSE.
We offer a sliding scale of $250-$450 with each course valued at $400. If you can afford the course, please use our sliding scale. If you cannot afford it within the sliding scale above, apply for the scholarship.
NEEC is an independent microcinema with limited funds but committed to making a space for peoples of limited financial means. We’re currently fundraising for FF and you’ll be notified of your acceptance and tuition waiver at the same time.
Nope, no additional costs are necessary. Just the initial admissions fee. We’ll make sure to share free and accessible resources to literature and films if necessary.
Each course will have different homework policies depending on the educator’s syllabus. More information on required readings, films to watch, etc will be shared in welcome emails to accepted students before the start of the course. Certain courses will also have projects
Here are the important dates to remember regarding applications and acceptance dates:
THE IMAGE AND COUNTER IMAGE
APPLICATION DEADLINE: Wed March 1st 11:59pm EST
Student confirmation emails will be sent the week of March 6th, 2023. Payment due immediately upon acceptance.
VIBRATION CINEMA: Tuning Your Frequency of Filmmaking
APPLICATION DEADLINE: March 8th 11:59PM EST
Student Confirmation emails will be sent the week of March 13th, 2023. Payment due immediately upon acceptance.
AFRO-FUTURISM ON SCREEN
APPLICATION DEADLINE: April 10th 11:59PM EST
Student Confirmation emails will be sent the week of April 17th, 2023. Payment due immediately upon acceptance.
WAYWARD CRITIQUE
APPLICATION DEADLINE: April 17th 11:59PM EST
Student Confirmation emails will be sent the week of April 24th, 2023. Payment due immediately upon acceptance.