Laura Poitras. Photograph by Joel Mora.
Oscar– and Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras—recently named a 2012 MacArthur Fellow—will visit Duke as part of the university’s Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel Visiting Filmmaker Series and the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Visiting Artist program. Screenings of three of her films will be followed later in the month by a conversation between Poitras and Dr. Diamonstein-Spielvogel at the Nasher Museum of Art, which will focus on post–9/11 America from the perspective of the Middle East, the subject of Poitras’s latest work. All events are free and open to the public. Poitras will also meet with students in the MFA program, where she has been a visiting artist since 2011.
Wednesday, October 3, 7 p.m.: Flag Wars
Monday, October 8, 7 p.m.:
My Country, My Country
Monday, October 22, 7 p.m.: The Oath
Griffith Film Theater, Bryan Center, Duke University West Campus / 125 Science Dr., Durham, North Carolina Map
Wednesday, October 24, 6–7 p.m.: conversation with Laura Poitras and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, reception to follow / Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University / 2001 Campus Drive, Durham, North Carolina
Flag Wars (2003), for which Poitras won a CDS Filmmaker Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, looks at gentrification issues in an urban community where white gay homebuyers threaten to displace black working-class families. My Country, My Country (2006), “…the definitive nonfiction film about the U.S. occupation of Iraq” (The Village Voice) and The Oath (2010), “…a riveting portrait of Abu Jandal and Salim Hamdan, bodyguard and driver for Osama bin Laden” (The Los Angeles Times), are the first two films in a trilogy about post–9/11 America; Poitras is working on the third installment, about the ways that the war on terror has been imported onto American soil.
Last year the Center for Documentary Studies, a cosponsor of the Nasher event, hosted Poitras’s video installation, O’ Say Can You See, which featured a projection of the imagery from Ground Zero in 2001, with audio recorded weeks later at the Yankees’ come-from-behind Game 4 World Series victory on October 20.
