New Narratives out of Old Film: A Conversation with Péter Forgács and Alan Berliner

Location: Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY 10029

Presented by YIVO and the Museum of the City of New York.

Presented in connection with Letters to Afar, an immersive video art installation co-presented by YIVO and the Museum of the City of New York (October 22, 2014-March 22, 2015).

Join Péter Forgács and Alan Berliner, two of today’s leading experimental and documentary filmmakers for a conversation about Forgács’s Letters to Afar, a new immersive video art installation. The Budapest-based Forgács creates work that use archival or “found footage” in unexpected ways, blurring the line between public and private narratives. Brooklyn-born Alan Berliner has been called “America’s foremost cinematic essayist” and “the modern master of personal documentary filmmaking.” His experimental documentary films include First Cousin Once Removed (2013), Wide Awake (2006), The Sweetest Sound (2001), Nobody’s Business (1996), Intimate Stranger (1991), and The Family Album (1986). Both filmmakers have been broadcast all over the world, and received awards, prizes, and retrospectives at many major international film festivals.

About the Artist

Péter Forgács is an internationally award-winning media artist and filmmaker, with works in several museums and public collections around the world. Having created more than forty films and media installations, Forgács is best known for his "Private Hungary" series, a series of award-winning films based on European home movies from the 1920s and 80s, which document ordinary lives ruptured by historical trauma. As a filmmaker, Forgács has received numerous international awards, including the Tribeca Film Festival Docu Award in 2005; the SIFF Golden Gate Award in 1999; and the Prix Europa, Berlin in 1997. In 2000-2001, Forgács was awarded the artist-in-residence at The Getty Museum/Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, where he created The Danube Exodus installation in collaboration with The Labyrinth Project (USC). In 2007, he was awarded the prestigious Dutch Erasmus Prize for his notable contributions to European culture, and in 2009, represented Hungary at the Venice Biennale, exhibiting the Col Tempo-The W. Project installation. In 2013, Forgács created Looming Fire—Stories from the Dutch East Indies installation, about Dutch colonial quotidian life for EYE, the Dutch Film Museum. Letters to Afar is his most recent project, and was commissioned by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the YIVO Institute in New York.