From Mehedi:

“Making Places” is my first documentary project. I’m learning about documentaries as I’m making it. My shoot has been on halt since the beginning of the pandemic. I believe this summer lab will help me to develop the project more to start shooting again and my practice as a filmmaker. Please consider supporting me so I can participate in the summer lab at UNIONDOCS.

About the project:

Is Dhaka really unlivable? Citizens try to make and find their own spaces in the world’s most densely inhabited place, Dhaka. ‘Making Places” is a cinematic essay with narration from an architect’s point of view. It’s divided into twelve chapters. Each chapter shows different spaces where different characters are trying to find and make their spaces. The narrator is an architect and a flaneur. We never see him in the film. His aural presence is the spine of the film. Through scenes of intimate home life to following characters onto the streets and to their workplace we get an inside look into the city. By showing all these fragmented spaces the film aims to create an overall picture.

Mehedi Mostafa was born in Bangladesh and studied architecture in Dhaka before joining a Mumbai based film school Whistling Woods Int. in India. He finished his diploma in filmmaking with direction specialization in 2017. Currently he′s developing a feature length documentary project called “Making Places”. The project was pitched at Dhaka Doclab and Docedge Kolkata. Having studied both architecture and film, his work tends to explore different film styles.

About the Summer Documentary Labs:

The UnionDocs Summer Documentary Lab are a program for a select group of media artists from the US and abroad. Based in one of NYC’s most exciting neighborhoods, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Summer Labs offer a platform for participants to spend the Summer making strides and clarify the creative direction of their projects to attract the 

potential team members, funders and producers they need to find their way to the finish. With a specialized hybrid in-person / remote format, an intensive schedule of screenings, open seminar discussions, weekly industry “field trips,” and inspiring artist visits from some of the most dynamic voices across the field of documentary, the SUMMER DOCUMENTARY LABS are tightly structured environments that bring participants into a select group of emerging filmmakers to get challenged and encouraged to think through every aspect of their works-in-progress.

Drawing inspiration from across disciplines, this intensive program should not be mistaken for an industrial, journalistic, or traditional documentary training. Scholar Scott MacDonald highlighted in The New York Times that, “UnionDocs has a healthy sense that the older definitions of what constitutes ‘experimental’ cinema and what constitutes ‘documentary’ are up for grabs.” Much emphasis is placed on workshopping lab participants’ writing about their projects as a way to both clarify the creative direction and attract potential team members, funders and producers. Participants receive focused, honest and helpful feedback on their project proposals from prominent documentary artists and industry experts.

The Early Production Lab in July is for projects about to go into production. Filmmakers have already likely shot some of their material and have access to their subjects and are looking for ways to strengthen their media samples, and pitches and work through the ideas as they approach the production stage and plan for the entire process all the way through to distribution.