Three Duke students will have their work highlighted later this week at the New York Film Festival.
The students, Marika Borgeson, Erin Espelie and Talena Sanders, join Duke faculty members David Gatten and Shambhavi Kaul, whose work is also being shown.
The students are all members of Duke's Master of Arts in Documentary and Experimental Arts program. Gatten and Kaul are both experimental filmmakers teaching in Duke's Art of the Moving Image program.
This strong showing by Duke artists speaks well of the MFA program, which debuted last yearand this fall enrolled its second class of graduate students, said Tom Rankin, the program's director.
"To have three of our MFA students featured at the New York Film Festival while still in graduate school speaks volumes about the strength, creativity, and powerof our students," Rankin said. "It shows the uniqueness of our program and affirms how in under two years of a new MFA program we are attracting and mentoring serious and important film artists."
The film festival, "Views from the Avant-Garde," is considered one of the most important film events in the country. Sixteen of Gatten's films have been shown there; Espelie's film, "Beyond Expression Bright," is her fifth be shown there; Kaul's film, "21 Chitrakoot," is her third.
"Views from the Avant-Garde" is the New York Film Festival showcase for artist-made film and digital moving image works and is generally regarded at the most selective and most important venue for this work -- not only in the U.S. but in the entire world," Gatten said. "Curators from other festivals and from museums and cinematheuqes around the world come to New York the second weekend in October to see the new work and make plans to show it at their own institutions. It is just about as big a deal as it gets: New York City; Lincoln Center; immaculate projection; packed houses; curators and programmers from around the world; the best place possible for one's work to enter the world." Gatten's film, "The Extravagant Shadows,"will be screened at Duke Nov. 30 at 3 p.m. in the Biddle Rare Book Room at Perkins Library.
For more on the filmmakers, click here.