Workshops
Learn how to effectively engage your subject, gain trust, and take your documentary to a deeper place.
There are no available registration dates at this time.
This class will be held in a live, online format using the Zoom platform.
Tues./Thurs. 3:00-5:00 p.m. EDT (plus 1:1 meetings by appointment)
If you are working in challenging cultural situations (most likely not your own) such as
indigenous, hard to reach communities or with marginalized, or traumatized participants;
these projects are challenging and require special approaches. Yet the rewards for
successfully building trust and communication can make for significant storytelling with
impact. The potential for making memorable, important documentaries is there if you
have the willingness for going deeper into your material and embracing the challenges.
Ben Levine will offer his decades-long experience from his early video work with street people, in the criminal justice system, with mental illness stories, and shooting for the Academy Award-nominated Crip Camp as well as with current projects with Native American, Mexican, African indigenous peoples, and immigrants. In this intimate workshop we will look at case studies and workshop your projects for solving problems of access, trust, and discovery.
Learn how to make the most deeply affecting and impactful film you can.
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Instructor: Ben Levine
Most recently seen in the celebrated 2020 Oscar-nominated film “Crip Camp”, Ben Levine’s award-winning work expands uses of documentary video from storytelling to engaging both the film and the filmmaking process to motivate social change, address injustice and trauma stories, and revive endangered languages. A documentary filmmaker who trained as a clinical psychologist, Ben teaches an approach that offers the opportunity to achieve visual and thematic intimacy with subjects where cultural differences, trauma, or marginalization affect communication. Often people are motivated to talk about what they have never been able to share openly before.
