Join us Thursday, October 8, through Saturday, October 10, for an immersive weekend of experimental and documentary film screenings and discussion. The Tang, along with MDOCS and Troy’s Picture Lock One microcinema, offers all six 2026 Flaherty Film Seminar programs—each consisting of short works followed by discussions—that engage this year’s theme Gestures of Refusal.

In this year’s Flaherty, acts of remembering, reworking, and refusing take shape through gestures of archival intervention, fragmented narration, and embodied recollection, exploring how memory is constructed, displaced, or reclaimed.

While the in-person Seminar is held this weekend in Marlboro, Vermont, our pod is one of five internationally that offer local Seminar experiences.

These programs are free and open to the public, though registration is requested, and are part of the Tang’s Whole Grain series, which explores classic and contemporary work in experimental film and video. 

Schedule

In the tradition of all Flaherty screenings, details of each program are not revealed until the start of the show. Each screening runs roughly 90 minutes and will be followed by a robust, moderated discussion.

Thursday, October 8
- 6:00 pm: Program 1

Friday, October 9
- 6:00 pm: Program 2
- 8:00 pm: Program 3

Saturday, October 10
- 1:00 pm: Program 4
- 3:30 pm: Program 5
- 7:00 pm: Program 6

About the 71st Flaherty Film Seminar
Gestures of Refusal

At a time when images risk losing their capacity to affect and transform sensibilities, as Spanish philosopher of aesthetics Andrea Soto Calderón proposes, this year’s Flaherty Film Seminar turns toward images that resist such disintegration: works that excavate what empire and erasure have buried beneath landscapes, archives, and the surfaces of images themselves.

If to imagine is to register a possibility for life, then this loss signals not only an aesthetic crisis, but an existential one. And yet, before accepting such disintegration, we might ask instead: how can images take on other forms, other temporalities, other densities, in order to resist the circulation of sensibility imposed by dominant cultural regimes?

Across this year’s program, acts of remembering, reworking, and refusing take shape through gestures of archival intervention, fragmented narration, and embodied recollection, exploring how memory is constructed, displaced, or reclaimed. Territory and home appear not as stable grounds but as haunted, contested spaces. The material properties of the image carry political weight in these films in every grain, pixel, and archival residue, making visible what has been concealed. This year’s invited artists and their works engage with grief and historical erasure not by resolving them, but by creating spaces for their partial reappearance and shared witnessing.

But how do we encounter such images together? We offer a program to think without reliance on fixed frameworks or inherited categories, a program that asks us to remain open, provisional, and exposed to uncertainty. These films challenge habitual modes of spectatorship and require a different kind of attention: durational, relational, and willing to inhabit ambiguity. Confusion here becomes generative, not a failure of meaning but a condition through which new forms of understanding might emerge collectively.

About the Flaherty Film Seminar

Now in its seventh decade, the Flaherty is an internationally recognized forum whose mission is to create and nurture spaces around the globe for field-building collective inquiry into the form and function of independent non-fiction cinema.

With a focus on curation as a means of gathering, and cinema as an invitation to step outside oneself, the Flaherty brings together an international and intergenerational community dedicated to exploring the transformative, world-building power of non-fiction cinema, the exchange of cinematic ideas across cultures, and the expansion of the limits of cinema itself.

Through its annual Flaherty Film Seminar, Flaherty Fellows Program, International Seminar Pods, Seminar Gatherings, Online Seminar Experience, Educational Seminar Activations, and stewardship of its archives, the Flaherty works to expand and strengthen the foundation for meaningful ongoing dialogue and debate among a diverse and ever-expanding community of filmmakers, scholars, curators, archivists, and cinephiles.

The Seminar is an exploratory process, which emulates the concept of non-preconception. To this end, the Flaherty does not announce the Seminar program beforehand. Beyond the programmers and production team, no one knows what they will be watching until the lights go down in the cinema. Film notes and trigger warnings will be made available upon request to participants before each screening begins. The Seminar is programmed as a continuum wherein individual screening programs relate to, riff off of, and expand upon one another.

About Whole Grain

The Tang Museum’s Whole Grain series explores classic and contemporary work in experimental film and video. Whole Grain is programmed by Assistant Director for Engagement Tom Yoshikami. All events are free and open to the public.