Strange Truth: Past Programs

Strange Truth 2022/2023 explores the non-fiction imagination in films by Lisa Rovner, So Yun Um, Brett Story, Nia Dacosta, and Helena de Llanos.

Strange Truth 2022 explores the non-fiction imagination in the films of Vivian Kleiman, CJ Hunt, Darcy McKinnon, and Marlon Riggs.

This year’s series explores the history and power of queer comics, the successful campaign to remove confederate war monuments in New Orleans, and the legacy of groundbreaking filmmaker Marlon Riggs.

Strange Truth 2021 explores the non-fiction imagination in the films of Garrett Bradley, Sam Feder, and Cecilia Aldarondo.

This year, Strange Truth is a Tri-College collaboration, co-programmed with Patricia White at Swarthmore College, and Kate Thomas and Julien Saudeau at Bryn Mawr College.

Strange Truth 2020 examines the relationship between the visual and structures of power by engaging with politics of race, gender, and identity. Showcasing the work of international filmmakers, artists, activists, and media scholars, this year’s series explores how documentary and expanded cinema practices make visible the role of images in complicating and (re)constructing complex narratives of history, memory, and time.

Building on the work of Haverford’s Interdisciplinary Minor in Visual Studies, Strange Truth 2020 includes a screening with local partner Bryn Mawr Film Institute and in Haverford’s VCAM (Visual Culture, Arts, and Media) facility, as well as a month-long multimedia exhibition in VCAM.

Strange Truth 2019 explores the non-fiction imagination in the film and installation work of mediamakers Christopher Harris, Laura Parnes, Jonathan Olshefski, and Sabrina Schmidt Gordon.

This year’s series engages with the politics of place, race, history, performance, and cinema itself. Showcasing musicians, poets, activists, and actors in hybrids of fictional and documentary forms, these works explore how cinema represents voice, gesture, and place.

Strange Truth 2018 explores the non-fiction imagination in the film and performance work of mediamakers Pamela Z, Theo Anthony, and Sabaah Folayan.

Using diverse technical and formal means, these artists engage with the intimate connections between memory, language, and gesture; the struggles over urban space and history; and the power of resistance.

Strange Truth 2017 explores the non-fiction imagination in the films of Shirley Clarke, Stephen Winter, Joaquim Pinto, and Nuno Leonel.

These filmmakers wield portraiture, reenactment, autobiography, and ethnography for diverse ends: to charm and shock, to examine the relation between the filmmaker and the filmed, to explore queer love and kinship, and to affirm labor, land, and sea.

Strange Truth 2016 offers up bodies: bodies in labor and in ecstasy, bodies inscribed by history and time, bodies conducting the sacred, bodies memorialized or erased, bodies retrieved through ritual and performance.

Featuring films by Natalia Almada, Alan Berliner, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Kevin Jerome Everson, Chan-kyong Park, Carolee Schneemann, Chick Strand, and Hope Tucker, this year’s series tells strange truths about the bodies we inhabit and the concepts that animate them.

Strange Truth 2015 explores the non-fiction imagination in the films of Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Harun Farocki, Maureen Gosling, and Scott Stark.

These filmmakers all work with documentary materials towards diverse ends: political intervention, sheer pleasure, new modes of subjectivity, and questioning and extending the boundaries of ethnographic film.