How to pregame for Unorthodocs.

This weekend, the Wexner Center will be awash with some of the most adventurous and radical documentaries being made today (and from years past), along with many of the filmmakers that made them! Our Unorthodocs. festival will be a weekend alive with powerful experiences and memorable conversations and hopefully you can make time to be a part of it!

Unorthodocs. takes place during the one bye week that Ohio State’s football team has this year so it seems like a good time for another type of pregaming! If you want to get a sense of some of the people and films that you’ll encounter at the festival, here’s a short pregaming playbook to get you ready for the great cinema and engaging artists ahead:

1. Yance Ford
Unorthodocs kicks off with one of its most anticipated events, a masterclass with the Academy Award nominated filmmaker Yance Ford. Audiences will be treated to a very personal look into his filmmaker process, with lots of opportunities for extended conversations and questions. Yance’s debut film Strong Island is among the most striking non-fiction debuts in recent memory and is currently available on Netflix. Beyond being one of the best offerings on Netflix, the film is an unforgettable introduction to Yance’s life and work. After viewing the film, you’ll definitely want to clear your schedule in order to attend his sure-to-be-extraordinary masterclass on Thursday at 4:30 PM. Here's the film’s trailer.

2. Soda_Jerk 
The Australian art collective Soda_Jerk (siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro) make impossible, playful, and insightful collisons of pop-culture and politics. Their latest film, Terror Nullius, is a punk rock yelp of reclamation from the colonized, the marginal, and the abused. It’s pretty safe to say that you’ve never seen anything like it. And that you won’t want to miss it! To get a sense of the delightful possibilities of Soda_Jerk’s aesthetic, check out The Was, an extended music video they made for the long-awaited release of the newest album by The Avalanches.

3. RaMell Ross
Already nominated for Best Documentary at the Gotham Awards, the first announced awards of the season, Hale County This Morning, This Evening is a beautiful, powerful, and idiosyncratic debut. Photographer RaMell Ross has a distinctive cinematic voice and an even more distinctive eye. It’s such a treat to have him visit the Wexner Center (and also to meet with local high school students as part of our Education department’s Pages program). Read this Los Angeles Times interview with RaMell and then come meet him and discover his film for yourself!

4. Robert Greene
Bisbee ’17 is one of the most vital and exciting films you’ll see all year. Filmmaker Robert Greene's approach to nonfiction filmmaking exemplifies a lot of the central issues of the Unorthodocs festival. He and his team wrote this great piece about the movie and how they came up with their visual approach to interrogate American mythologies. 

And as one last pre-gaming link, below is a flashback to last year’s Unorthodocs. Nathan Truesdell’s Balloonfest was an audience favorite of our Shorts program last year. Similar to his new film, The Waterslide (showing in this year’s Unorthodocs Shorts program), Balloonfest is made up of vintage news footage reporting on a Cleveland civic pride event that moves quickly from delight to tragedy.