Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings 2019 is happy to welcome our three jurors for Local Sightings Film Festival 2019, taking place September 20-29! Over the course of 10 boundary-pushing days, the festival showcases the growing complexity of creative communities in the Pacific Northwest, by uplifting new talent, providing educational opportunities for youth and adults, supporting the regional film industry, and promoting diverse media as a critical tool for public engagement.

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MARTIN TRAN has deep roots in the Pacific Northwest. He was born and raised in Washington state, studied film in Olympia, Washington and Vancouver, B.C., and has long called Seattle home. He is the former Co-Director of Seattle Asian American Film Festival (SAAFF), is currently the Project and Events Coordinator for Artists of Color Expo and Symposium (ACES), and also serves as a Producer for the upcoming docuseries Vanishing Seattle, which tells the stories of the places and people being displaced from Seattle. Martin also writes, directs, and produces short films which have played in film festivals across North America.

AMY BENSON owns Nonfiction Media, a production company based in Seattle where she produces, shoots and edits films telling the stories of organizations around the globe. Since 2008, Amy has been working on a documentary trilogy about one family in Nepal. Drawing the Tiger, the first film, was a granted project of the Sundance Institute, Fork Films and recipient of the Points North Fellowship. It premiered at Hot Docs in April 2015 and screened in over 40 festivals worldwide. She is currently in pre-production for Age of Porn, a feature documentary which chronicles the state of sex education in America through the lens of progressive sex educators. Amy is a founding member of the Seattle Documentary Association and is passionate about supporting filmmakers in their process.

MIA IMANI HARRISON is a Pacific Northwest native interdisciplinary artivist (art + activist) and arts writer that currently lives in Berlin. Harrison interrogates the ways that disenfranchised communities can heal individual, communal, and societal trauma by creating works that live in-between the worlds of art and science. This “third-way” mixes unconventional methods (dreams, rituals) and science (ethnography, geography, psychoanalysis) to dream new potential ways of being.

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Join us for Mia Harrison’s Life is But a Dream two-part workshop!

Part 1 – Material Collection (2 hours)
TRAUM[A]: Healing collective trauma by dreaming a new present
The first part of this workshop will invite participants, centering those with marginalized identities (BPOC, LGBTQIA+), to daydream and interpret those dreams as a way to talk about healing from trauma. I will create a “dream tent” where we will discuss the power of installation, and performance to address the personal, historical, and political traumas of our collective past, present, and futures.

Part 2 – Installation (3 hours)
COMPOSITE REAL[I]TIES: Composing a surrealist space to reimage a world outside of structural oppressions.
The second part of this workshop the participants, will work together to create a small installation in the Northwest Film Forum lobby, to remain on display through the month of October and into the second week of November. We will discuss the different approaches that were used and the process of creating collaborative work.