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DocuClub Screenings: El Bondera and Republican Dad

Our next DocuClub screening will take place on Wednesday, July 15, 7 p.m., at The Tank, located at 354 West 45th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues, near Times Square).

Our moderator will be Reva Goldberg. As Communications and Special Projects Manager for Cinereach—a nonprofit organization that supports filmmakers who produce films that “challenge, excite, innovate, offer new perspectives and inspire action”—she handles all public/external communications. She also heads that organization’s Reach Film Fellowship, which provides mentorship for recent film graduates who are interested in creating socially-conscious short films. Goldberg has an extensive background in film and television production and audience building. Most recently, she was a producer and director at Pureland Pictures where she produced All of Us, a documentary that has been airing frequently on Showtime since its December 2008 premiere in connection with World Aids Day. In addition, she co-produced Pureland’s feature film Toe to Toe, which premiered at Sundance 2009 and will be released theatrically soon. Goldberg has directed and produced promotional short docs for nonprofit organizations including Girls Quest, the Cooke Center for Learning and Development, EMpower and many others. In 2004, Goldberg was Associate Producer of an Emmy-nominated History Channel documentary on the 9/11 Commission.

We will screen two rough cuts of short documentaries:

1. El Bondera by Sherif Sadek.
In a city as highly populated and congested as Cairo, hostility runs high as an adequate standard of living seems to be out of sight for the average worker, particularly the Cairo taxi driver. El Bondera chronicles the story of two cab drivers, Ashraf and Ibrahim, as they focus viewers’ eyes on a world of inadequate meter prices and their day-to-day struggle to survive. 

Cairo-born and New York-based Director Sherif Sadek has been making shorts since 1999. After graduating with a B.F.A. in filmmaking from the Rochester Institute of Technology, he returned to Egypt to work on a documentary film about the nomadic Arab/African tribe of the Bisharin, thought to be the descendants of the Beja tribes of Ancient Egypt. In late 2001, Sadek returned to New York, working on award-winning documentaries on Arab-Americans in post-9/11 America, the Iraq War, Latin gangs in Los Angeles, and documenting different dance traditions in Brooklyn.

Producer Carole Ryavec is an award-winning screenwriter (Venus Retrograde, A Romantic Comedy, Semifinalist, Emerging Narrative, IFP Market 2005; Chef’s Special, Quarterfinalist, Slamdance 2006), who currently writes, produces and edits in New York City. She is working on the documentary Shifting Borders depicting identity at the western border of Slovenia where four generations of the population have lived under different nationalities for the past eighty years. Ryavec joined the production team of Sherif Sadek’s documentary El Bondera in 2008.

Dina Emam is Executive Producer of El Bondera. She is a recent graduate of New York University‘s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, earning a B.S. degree in Marketing and International Business, along with a concentration in Entertainment Media. In 2007, she was awarded the Nielsen TV Measurement Scholarship and presently works as a Ratings Analyst for Vh1 at MTV Networks in New York City. 

2. Republican Dad by Robert Hatch-Miller.
In 2008, filmmaker Hatch-Miller set out to document his dad’s campaign for the U.S. House Of Representatives. The resulting short film tells the story of a son who doesn’t want to be like his father. For a trailer, go to: http://www.republicandad.com/.

Robert Hatch-Miller is a graduate of the Film and Television program at New York University’s Tisch School Of The Arts. For much of the past two years, he has worked as an Associate Producer and Assistant Editor on a new film by Laura Poitras (Flag Wars, My Country My Country), a close creative adviser to Republican Dad. In addition to his work on documentaries, Hatch-Miller hosts a weekly radio show on the independent free form station WFMU.

Editor Joaquin Perez has cut programs for Showtime, PBS, and MTV. Some of his feature credits include work on the independent documentaries A Jihad For Love and Tibet in Song. In 2007, he attended the Sundance Documentary Edit and Story Lab. Perez also directed and edited a short documentary about his own father, which screened at festivals in 2006.

Admission is free for current DocuClub members and $5 for non-members.

If you plan to attend, please RSVP to: (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Membership is an annual $50 and it includes free admission to all DocuClub events. It takes five minutes to join online:

www.artsengine.net/store/#tools_consul

Please note that DocuClub is taking August off—so all the more reason to come to our July screening!

About DocuClub
DocuClub is Arts Engine’s monthly film screening series of works-in-progress documentaries. For more info, please go to: www.docuclub.org.

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About The Tank
The Tank is a non-profit arts presenter whose mission is to provide a welcoming, creative, collaborative, and affordable environment for artists and activists engaged in the pursuit of new ideas. Through a wide range of low-cost, high-concept arts and public affairs programming, The Tank seeks to cultivate a new generation of audience for live performance, civic discourse, and the work of emerging artists.