As a filmmaker who was trained in music from an early age, sound has always held a special place in my creative practice. Sometimes it has been in a strong relation to moving images, like when I started to do live improvised scoring for silent films. Sometimes it has been in its own right, like when I launched the musical project Traveling Blind Cinema last February, which combines live piano and electronics with live mixing of my field-recordings. “Cinema” there is what’s summoned by the minds of the listeners in the space and time of the performance. Now I have the unique opportunity to keep researching and exploring sound in this Lab at UnionDocs, a space that has been deeply inspiring for me in recent years. My goal is to dive deeper into soundmaking, to learn and share about sound’s power to conjure up different worlds as well as different ways to inhabit our environments as individual and collective beings.

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Bio

Emilio Tamburini (they/he) is a researcher, filmmaker and sound person. In the context of a practice-based PhD at NYU, they are working on a film on housing struggles in the city of Bologna, Italy, with a focus on soundscapes and urban imagination. Their sound practice encompasses field-recording, piano live-scoring, jamming and songwriting, all of which nurture their live-sound project ‘Traveling Blind Cinema’.

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.