Please join us, in partnership with ArtsThursdays, for a special screening of short films by Darol Olu Kae, Kendra McLaughlin, Tiff Rekem, and Svetlana Romanova—current fellows at the Film Study Center at Harvard. Following the screening, the filmmakers will participate in a conversation with Dennis Lim, Artistic Director of the New York Film Festival.

Tiff Rekem
Trilogy (working title), 2026, work in progress, 15 min
Ten years ago, prominent director of Taiwan popular cinema Wei Te-sheng (魏德聖) set out to make three historical epics set during the little-known 17th-century Dutch colonial period in Taiwan — until the production fell apart, unfinished, in 2025. This project refashions the visual and sonic traces of the Taiwan Trilogy into an alternative historical period piece that, during a time of rising nationalism in Taiwan, observes the construction of cinema as the construction of a national identity. A work in progress.

Kendra McLaughlin
Lo que las olas no rompen (What the Waves Don’t Break), 2026, work in progress, 12min 30s
Along Lima’s southern coast, men fish, camels eat, and life cycles through death and back again.

Svetlana Romanova
Hinkelten, 2023, Russia, 15 min
Filmed in the Yakutian Arctic and constructed out of personal poems and notes, this visual essay poses questions about our perception of contemporaneity and image production’s intersection with the creation of narratives around the idea of love (romantic, platonic, intimate, and maternal).

Darol Olu Kae
Keeping Time, 2023, USA, 32 min
Keeping Time is a kaleidoscopic audiovisual homage to musicians who pass on the magic and the communities that nourish them.

The only Center devoted to artistic practice at Harvard, since its inception in 1957 the Film Study Center has been at the forefront of nonfiction filmmaking. Its annual fellows have made original and innovative contributions to contemporary media practice:  in analogue and digital filmmaking, moving image practices between the gallery and the theater, sensory ethnography, phonography, and more recently the hybrid landscape that probes the border between fiction and nonfiction. A major presence at international film festivals, the works produced in the FSC have shapeshifted over the seventy years of its history, and many of them are now considered pioneering landmarks of their time.  The FSC is considered to be one of the most important international hubs for the creation of emerging and experimental forms of cutting-edge cinema and related media.

This event is co-presented by the Film Study Center at Harvard University and ArtsThursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA).