Whole Grain: Flaherty Film Seminar Screenings

Join us Thursday, October 8, through Saturday, October 10, 2026, 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. These works excavate what empire and erasure have buried beneath landscapes, archives, and the surfaces of images themselves. The material properties of the image carry political weight in every grain, pixel, and archival residue, making visible what has been concealed. The films engage with grief and historical erasure not by resolving them, but by creating spaces for partial reappearance and shared witnessing.

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

These programs are free and open to the public; registration is requested. They 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
• Friday, October 9 — 8:00 pm: Program 3
• Saturday, October 10 — 1:00 pm: Program 4
• Saturday, October 10 — 3:30 pm: Program 5
• Saturday, October 10 — 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, this year’s Flaherty turns toward images that resist such disintegration. Across the program, acts of remembering, reworking, and refusing appear through archival interventions, fragmented narration, and embodied recollection. Territory and home appear as haunted, contested spaces. We offer a program to think without reliance on fixed frameworks or inherited categories—asking us to remain open, provisional, and exposed to uncertainty. 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 dedicated to collective inquiry into the form and function of independent non-fiction cinema. The Seminar is an exploratory process that emulates non-preconception: the program is not announced beforehand, and beyond the programmers and production team no one knows what they will be watching until the lights go down. Film notes and trigger warnings will be made available upon request before each screening.

About Whole Grain
The Tang Museum’s Whole Grain series explores classic and contemporary work in experimental film and video. All events are free and open to the public.