In 1969, Celia, my mother, was 18 years old and living in the Negev desert in Israel, far from her home in Argentina, training to become a teacher. Over a year and a half, she wrote around 120 letters and recorded three audio tapes: a private archive that sat untouched for decades, until I found it by accident.

Sandstorm is my second film, currently in the research stage. Across Celia’s archive, a personal journey unfolds alongside a broader political one: the construction of diaspora identity through state sponsored education.

The project has already gone through several foundational stages, including the digitization of part of the archive, a research residency at Espacio Amazonas, and participation in Berlinale Talents Buenos Aires, where mentoring helped sharpen its direction. Now, I’ve been selected to participate with Sandstorm in the UnionDocs Research and Development Lab in New York, a rigorous space for documentary development with a strong track record of supporting ambitious, formally inventive work.

The current political and economic context in Argentina has made independent filmmaking increasingly difficult. Public funding for cinema has been dismantled, and like most people in Argentina today, I work multiple jobs just to get by. Opportunities like this one, to develop a project at an international level, alongside peers and industry experts, are rare and genuinely hard to access from where I’m standing.

My first film, Hemshej (2023), was made entirely with Argentine funding. Sandstorm is an opportunity to push my practice further: to question the documentary language I’ve built and expand it into new aesthetic territory. Attending the Lab is also a key step toward taking the project to an international level, exploring international funds, co-production possibilities, and building the networks that open those doors.

By supporting this campaign, you’ll help me:

– Attend the UnionDocs Lab and develop Sandstorm in a focused, expert-led environment
– Cover the round-trip flight from Buenos Aires to New York and three weeks of living expenses
– Connect with an international community of filmmakers
– Position this project at a critical moment for Argentine independent cinema

Crowdfunding goal: $4,650
Lab Fee: $1,950 — 42%
Flight from Buenos Aires to New York: $1,200 — 26%
Living expenses in NY: $1,500 — 32%

A note for donors in Argentina: If you’d like to support the project but can’t make an international payment, you can send your contribution in pesos to alias: julilande.mp (converted at the MEP dollar rate on the day of payment) and send me an email to [email protected] so I can send you your reward.

Bio

I’m an Argentine-Polish director, screenwriter, and producer based in Buenos Aires. My first feature, Hemshej (2023), screened at international festivals and arthouse cinemas. I also directed the short film Arjiv (2021), presented in archival and experimental film programs. I have previously received support from Argentina’s National Fund for the Arts, Argentina’s National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA), the Cultural Patronage Program of the City of Buenos Aires, and Spain’s Fundación Carolina. I work as Head of Communications at Parque de la Memoria, produce independent documentary films, and teach and mentor in artistic and professional contexts. Together with fellow filmmakers, I co-founded Asunto, a space fostering collaboration and mutual support among its members.

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, Ridgewood, Queens, 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. 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 Research and Development Lab in August is for projects preparing to go into production. Filmmakers are developing their conceptual approaches to their work and are aiming to strengthen their proposals and sharpen their creative ideas, as they approach the production stage and plan for the entire process all the way through to distribution.