Art of the Real: Counter Encounters

Spanning 115 years of innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking.

Film at Lincoln Center presents the eighth edition of Art of the Real, the essential showcase for vital and innovative voices in nonfiction and hybrid filmmaking, from November 19–21. The 2021 slate features a vibrant collection of works by acclaimed filmmakers from around the world. Aptly subtitled “Counter Encounters,” this year’s Art of the Real presents one feature and 41 shorts, and encompasses works by historical and contemporary filmmakers, artists, collectives, and communities. Their practices not only disturb classical ethnographic paradigms, but also reinvent an art of the real in itself.

Highlights of the showcase include two presentations by Onyeka Igwe: Specialised Technique, her attempt to return authorship of West African dance footage taken by the British Colonial Film Unit to its original subjects, and the names have been changed, including my own and truths have been altered, exploring family history and the slippery notion of “truth”; Jodie Mack’s Wasteland No. 2: Hardy, Hearty, a hypnotic silent animation about growth and regrowth through nature; Barbara Hammer’s Vital Signs, a haunting short confronting profound losses and mortality; At the River, an ongoing effort by filmmaker Angelo Madsen Minax to document his small-town Michigan roots; Les Enfants de la guerre, Jocelyne Saab’s document of her time spent bonding with surviving children in a shantytown in Beirut; Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction, which considers the identification and representation of womanhood, and the sense of possession and dispossession through consensual and abusive sexuality; and Djibril Diop Mambéty’s first film: Contras’ City, framed as a journey through Dakar, encompassing colonial and indiginous culture and architecture. The insightful program is complemented by a roundtable conversation, with filmmakers Carlos Motta, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme joining curators Laura Huertas Millán and Rachael Rakes to discuss different strategies, ethics, and forms of alter-ethnographic practice.

Counter Encounters is a cinephilic letter to ethnography, one of rupture and reignition, inviting consideration by everyone interested in building visual cultures of mutual recognition. Almost since its inception, ethnography has reckoned with its own complicated foundations, among them its roots in colonialism, and the imbalanced and troubled relations inherent in a one-sided narrative of encounter. Through this self-reflection and reinvention, new forms of cinema have been devised by ethnographers and artists, which have helped to question and reinvent the languages representing alterity.

Organized by Laura Huertas Millán and Rachael Rakes, Counter Encounters Collective.

Tickets are now available with discounts for students, seniors (62+), persons with disabilities, and FLC members. See more with an All-Access Pass (early bird through November 12). Plus, our student offerings continue with a special Student All-Access Pass.