Dear friends, as part of my work toward completing my first feature-length documentary It’s Like I Don’t Remember Any of This, I have the opportunity to participate in UnionDoc’s Summer Documentary Lab for Projects in Early Production. Here, I will get feedback and mentorship while being exposed to people, films, and spaces that will enrich my creative process. I am asking my network of peers and friends to help me raise money to finance this unique opportunity. Your contribution is tax-deductible, and is a way of accompanying the project starting at this early stage through updates via a newsletter I will share with contributors.

My film is about how economic opportunities have shaped my family and how the rituals they carry out daily help them aspire to more. More than narratives around wealth, whiteness, belonging, and nostalgia, I reflect on how the spaces and soundscapes we inhabit and visit shape our imaginative horizons in very concrete ways. In our spaces of ritual, going to a nearby suburb we once lived in, my family nostalgically remembers and also fabulates about living the good life. 

I have spent the last two years studying documentary, experimental film, art, and theory through free workshops and seminars in Mexico City. In this time, I have found expressive tools for telling stories through creative non-fiction film. In January 2023, I began filming It’s Like I Don’t Remember Any of This alongside my family in Kingwood, Texas, a suburb of Houston. I have personally digitized home videos and collected diary entries that will serve as important material for the film. I  have also created short samples of the film with this material, and developed texts I have used to apply for funding and for opportunities like this laboratory at UnionDocs.

Between July 3rd and August 4th, 2023, I will participate in UnionDoc’s Summer Documentary Lab for Projects in Early Production. Here, I will attend daily workshops with peers, work alongside mentors, watch personalized curated films, and visit spaces that will help me delve deep into my film. By its conclusion, I will have developed a longer media sample, polished my writing materials, and gained an understanding of how to produce my film. Your contribution will help offset the costs of the laboratory and rent in New York City.

Katy Montoya’s MA research focuses on revolution-era Syrian cinema. In her current work, she builds on her years of experience working in Lebanon and Jordan with refugee families, as well as her short films made in Mexico City. She contributes to film journals like World Records, Desist, and La Rabia and translates films from Spanish, Arabic, and French. She is currently working on her first feature-length documentary.

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 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.