Details:

Documentary Media MFA Showcase 2025

Origins / Departures

Screening 1 - Origins

Screening 2 - Departures

These two nights of showcases are a culmination of ongoing cinematic explorations of Xiaolu Wang 王晓璐, Seunghee Chang, Blair Barnes, Gríma Irmudóttir, Shawn Antoine II, and Blake Knecht. Expanding their practices within the Documentary Media MFA program from 2023 to 2025, they are excited to present a myriad of audiovisual experiences that respond to the ruptures of reality. These images and sounds move between the opaque, the uncanny, the mysterious, and the contemplative, traveling through the Hui Muslim Autonomous Region in northwestern China, around the watery edges of Seoul, within the Black interiority, across the highlands of Iceland, inside a 1970s Bronx apartment, and engulfed by the scorched desert of the American Southwest. These works muddle the familiar with the unfamiliar, resource irresistible whispers from deep inside, and bear witness to our collective entanglement and unraveling.

Day 1 - Origins - June 11 at 7 PM:          

An outsider returns, myths emerge, and a report is established. Through fractured words and filtered means, these projects collapse time and collide with historical contexts to unsettle the fabrications of the nation-state. From a place of urgency they reorient us towards a reminder—whose truths puncture through? This program will feature a performance-lecture by Xiaolu Wang 王晓璐, and films by Seunghee Chang and Blair Barnes.

Following the screening, Professor Lakshmi Padmanabhan will join the filmmakers for a conversation and Q&A with the audience.

Line up:

You People Talk from Flags, I want to talk from Grandpa, Xiaolu Wang, 20min, performance-lecture

An outsider from the future returns to a place she once knew. Now a visitor, a tourist, or a self-exiled memory holder, she unerases her ancestors to bring something into the open.

Holy Water, Seunghee Chang, 20min

From a journey of a visually impaired man emerges the origin myths of South Korea’s Han River and its ultimate development into a river of illusions.

sitrep, Blair Barnes, 18min

Sitrep is a situation report of the American project in 2025. Filmed on a broadcast camera produced in 1974, it utilizes an anachronistic image to interrogate compression and censorship.

Total Runtime: 58 min + Q&A

Day 2 - Departures - June 12 at 7 PM:

A grave, a vision, a prophecy—three paths through loss and wonder. The divine whispers, the ground bears witness, and we follow. Through personal memory, inherited myth, and elemental prophecy, the filmmakers invite us to witness what remains when the ground shifts beneath us, when what we’ve lost begins to speak. This program will feature films by Gríma Irmudóttir, Shawn Antoine II, and Blake Knecht.

Following the screening, Professor Debra Tolchinsky will join the filmmakers for a conversation and Q&A with the audience. 

Line-up:

Rites of Passage, Gríma Irmudóttir, 15 min

Amid landscapes marked for disappearance, a ritual of remembrance unfolds as grief surfaces for a loved one long lost to illness and a world now returned to only in memory.

The Sight Unseen, Shawn Antoine II, 35 min

In 1971, Sharon witnessed a glowing cross in her Bronx apartment, sparking belief and skepticism. "The Sight Unseen" explores her memories and Melvin Tapley’s writings, investigating whether the phenomenon was divine or a hoax.

Now That We Are Sending You to The End, Blake Knecht, 10 min

A young girl prophecies the end of time. With salt, water, and fire, direct-on-film techniques mirror the slow violence of the desert’s collapse through a handmade record of ecological loss.

Total runtime: 60 min + Q&A

FREE & OPEN TO ALL

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu