Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Steven Hock has dedicated his life to rescuing stray cats. This portrait follows him on his mission to trap, socialize, and find homes for as many cats as possible. Weaving through the underbelly of New York City mostly at night, he teams up with a cast of other dedicated “feeders” on his many adventures. “Not Wasting My Time” reveals the unseen world of stray cat trapping, while posing the question who is actually rescuing who?
co-directed & DOP by Derek Howard
co-directed by Christopher Kline
music video for Early Labyrinth : Kerosene to the Zombie
DOP
Directed by Derek Howard, Emma W. Howes & Justin F. Kennedy
Cannibalizing the Conductor is a hybrid film that combines experimental dance with narrative and documentary filmmaking techniques to create a deep observation of trance choreography. Each performer moves and is moved by the camera, engaging with the filmic gaze to seduce and antagonize, while disrupting the monocular focus of the camera eye. This film is a ritual transgressing of the ethnographic gaze by encouraging everyone to partake in every role: the camera becomes a dancer, the filmmakers dance with the performers, and the performers have agency to pick up cameras and redirect their focus. Both filmmakers and performers share in this ongoing, long-duration visceral experience of improvised trance choreography. Cannibalizing the Conductor becomes a collective and individual unearthing of shifting knowledge in the forms of music, dance, sound, and ultimately the eye of the camera, questioning and problematising the power relations intrinsic in capturing a subject on film. The film features an original score composed and performed by Anand Wilder, formerly of Yeasayer.
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Filmed deep in the Peruvian Amazon jungle, Venda Los Ojos is a verité portrait of motherhood. A mother and her young son observe the sights and sounds of wildlife in an intimate twilight moment. An elderly blind mother transfers her knowledge to her daughter as they prepare a meal in their rural home. Tranquil and unhurried moments create a tender atmosphere that favors atmosphere over story in this visually striking tribute to feminine energy and nature.
This project was filmed as part of the Playlab Filming in the Amazon led by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul. 50 filmmakers had 9 days to scout, shoot, and edit a film working alone in a remote jungle location.
co-Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
co-Directed with Early Labyrinth
A music video for Early Labyrinth’s “Suicided”
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Music-film for Anand Wilder’s new single “Fever Seizure” off the album “I Don’t Know My Words”
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Music-film for Anand Wilder’s new solo album “I Don’t Know My Words.”
Stereogum article click here
2nd D.O.P. & Assistant Director
Directed By Victor Kossakovsky
Aquarela is a unique and truly visual journey into water, the very substance that is making all life forms on earth possible. In this film, the magnificent, artistic documentary-maker Victor Kossakovsky, plunges into the ‘spirituality’ and essence of water and takes audiences on a visually poetic and dramatic journey reflecting their own personal connection to water at every level.
click here for more info
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Every day in New York City, packed subways provide a veil of anonymity for unwanted invasions of personal space. Carefully composed imagery of the labyrinthine train tunnels immerses the viewer inside an unsettling industrial world. Faces of queer, straight, and cis women and men of all backgrounds are seen reflected in train windows, surveillance monitors, and glossy digital billboards, transforming this bustling space into a chorus of intimate traumas. The ghostliness of the faces mirrors how these attacks go largely unnoticed in the crowd – an absence “Underground” attempts to address.
“The Harvesters” is a short observational documentary about three Maasai men harvesting honey in the Mau Forest in Kenya. Without any dialog and with a pensive camera, “The Harvesters” is a carefully composed portrait of often invisible labour in a now extinct forest.
“Passion Play” is a short documentary that thrusts the viewer inside the middle of a visceral re-enactment of the last hours of Christ’s life, as portrayed by the local towns people of Angles, Philippines. Every Easter the town organizes a passion play that culminates in a procession and crucifixion of the same person who feels it is his pentane to by nailed to the cross after surviving a near fatal fall some twenty years ago. This dialog-less mediation on religious traditions and spectacles gradually separates itself from reality and embraces a bombastic “Hollywood” style orchestral score to emphasize the performative and theatrical aspects of worship. The subjectively of shock and delight, worship and sacrilege, meet in a tense document of passions not for the squeamish.
watch a shorter version of the film below
1st Assistant Director & 2nd D.O.P.
Directed by Victor Kossakovsky
With this film Victor Kossakovsky grants himself a childhood wish. Haven’t we all asked ourselves as children where we would come out if we dug a tunnel right through the centre of the earth? Haven’t we all wondered at some point what was happening just at this moment beneath our very feet at the other side of the planet? In this film those reveries turn into reality. In breathtaking images and a stunning montage we go on a trip to the world’s rare inhabited land-to-land antipodes. We discover the wonders and contradictions of nature and people around the globe. With unprecedented camera movements and exhilarating new perspectives our conventional view of the world is challenged. On the evocative title follows a revolutionary film, that gives three cheers to our planet and its people in all their antagonisms and commonalities: Vivan las Antipodas!
Founded in 2016 by Sol Calero, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Derek Howard, Christopher Kline, and Dafna Maimon, CONGLOMERATE explores the potential of the Television Network model, utilizing the organizational structure and output format of “television” while building a collectivity-focused network. While the overall project is conceived of as a Gesamtkunstwerk, each video segment ties into and utilizes a different artistic practice or gesture. At times these segments form an entire TV show or video work, while at others they appear as a structural element facilitating a greater whole, without hierarchical division. Through the multiple ways the different elements and modes of collaboration are woven together, the Blocks form a kind of network of voices, perspectives, relations, skills, and collective affective labor. The varying degrees of involvement of CONGLOMERATE’s makers and contributors create platforms within platforms, or artworks within artworks, where one artist’s practice can be featured within another’s. This flexibility and continuous shifting of vision and responsibility from maker to maker offers a new potential model for the sustainable and independent realization of larger art projects.
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2nd Unit Director & 2nd D.O.P.
Directed by Chelsea McMullan
Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John tells the story of the five children (whose names comprise the title) of John Hanmer, a Canadian police officer who lived a troubled life before suffering a tragic death. The film explores how the children, scattered around the world, have each been forced to resolve their father’s troubled past without him.
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Assistant Director
Directed By Victor Kossakovsky
Varicella portrays the tender and trusting relationship between two sisters who share a common dream: becoming a soloist ballet dancer. Nastia, 13 years old, and Polina, 7 years old, are studying at one of the most prestigious ballet academies in Russia through being selected among 5500 talented children from all across the country. In order to make their dream come true, they practice intensively at the academy for six hours every weekday.
Assistant Director
Directed By Victor Kossakovsky
A short film about homeless people sleeping near an A.T.M. in a bank, a growing phenomenon in Europe.
click here to watch
Music video for “Supernatural,” the title track off the first Hush Hush E.P.
3D music video for “Chicas En La Ducha” (Girl’s in the Shower), off the new Hush Hush album Pisces Iscariot.
Editor
Directed by Salomé Jashi
Flanked by her phlegmatic sidekick, Dariko is the only outside broadcast journalist at a local Georgian television channel. With derisory resources, she races from one report to another to give an honest, if not objective, image of the current events that shape her environment: from the capture of a “giant” owl to the obituaries – where we thus learn that the bearer of the Soviet flag fluttering over the Berlin Reichstag in 1945 has just been buried — passing via the elections. Noticed with Bakhmaro (2011, screened as part of the Focus Georgia, VdR 2015), Salomé Jashi provides, with humour, distance and a consummate sense of framing, a pseudo-ethnographical portrait of a community that, due to modernity and technological miniaturisation, has never ceased to gather material about itself. The multiplication of camera angles (journalist, filmmaker, amateur filmmakers) in The Dazzling Light of Sunset induces a relative competition between images and their distinct depth of focus. She turns the micro-events that punctuate this tragi-comedy with absurd overtones into revealing examples of a country whose transition still looks chaotic.
Shot entirely through a peephole of a door, Doctor Korbes chronicles the voyeuristic relationship that develops between a filmmaker and his compulsively hoarding neighbor. What starts as surveillance footage prompted by a mysterious break-in, evolves into obsessive documentation of bizarre occurrences over a two-year period. The camera bares witness to the comings and goings of a variety of people: prostitutes, the fire brigade, the police, all seen from the perspective of spying on one’s own neighbor. A 7 minute excerpt can be watched below.
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Breathing Room is a personal visualization of how strands of memory saturate a specific space. A continual tracking shot travels through an elderly man’s home, exploring the dilapidated domestic space in it’s owner’s absence and presence. A disappearing boy, a frightening dog, a ghostly book, and a bursting furnace animate the rooms and personify the layers of history that have settled here over a lifetime.
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Shot in five countries across two continents, this experimental film is a mythologically inspired exploration into the genesis of ancient storytelling archetypes and symbols.
Camera Operator
Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy & Trish Dalton
Focuses on the life and work of Von Furstenberg, who created a name for herself in a field that was predominantly male and amassed a multi-million dollar fashion empire.
Additional Camera
Directed by Andrew McCarthy
Feature documentary Brats follows Andrew McCarthy reuniting with and interviewing fellow Brat Packers to answer: What did it mean to be part of the Brat Pack?
DOP
directed by David Heilbroner & Kate Davis
On April 8, 2024, tens of millions will experience alignment with the Sun, the Moon and the Earth, and share in an experience of collective transcendence.
Produced by Academy Award nominees Sandbox Films (Fire of Love), Kate Davis and David Heilbroner (Traffic Stop), TOTALITY interweaves science, humor, cultural diversity and natural beauty in a sweeping feature-length documentary portrait of the human experience in the moon’s shadow.
The film will bring to life cities and towns across the country as people prepare for and experience some four minutes when the stars come out during a bright day. With no tickets required, no political agenda, no winners and losers, this celestial occurrence offers a rare moment of unity as people from all walks of life gather for a dramatic light show performed by the Sun and Moon. The visual and emotional force of the total eclipse may then remind us that we all stand together on a tiny dot in a vast universe.
co-DOP
directed by Sarah Gibson
Delving into the life and times of Stormy Daniels as she shares her story and recounts the events that became part of American history.
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Steven Hock has dedicated his life to rescuing stray cats. This portrait follows him on his mission to trap, socialize, and find homes for as many cats as possible. Weaving through the underbelly of New York City mostly at night, he teams up with a cast of other dedicated “feeders” on his many adventures. “Not Wasting My Time” reveals the unseen world of stray cat trapping, while posing the question who is actually rescuing who?
2nd DOP
directed by Sheila Nevins, Trish Adlesic, & Nazenet Habtezghi
Reveals the voices of the impacted parties of books banned from school districts, inspiring hope for the future through the profound insights of inquisitive youthful minds.
Kain chose Swan Lake to be her retirement project after a fifty-year career, but Swan Song is less concerned with further canonizing her than with observing the way aging artists can welcome a new generation, should they choose to. The film darts in and out of its subjects’ lives, homes, and rehearsal spaces to capture the company as an organic entity — performers, choreographers, and technicians pushing through physical and emotional obstacles to remake a revered work in their own image. (Principal dancer Jurgita Dronina provides considerable insight into what that feels like.)
co-directed & DOP by Derek Howard
co-directed by Christopher Kline
music video for Early Labyrinth : Kerosene to the Zombie
DOP
Directed by Alison O’Daniel
A spate of robberies in Southern California schools had an oddly specific target: tubas. In this work of creative nonfiction, deaf first-time feature director Alison O’Daniel presents the impact of these crimes from an unexpected angle. The film unfolds mimicking a game of telephone, where sound’s feeble transmissibility is proven as the story bends and weaves to human interpretation and miscommunication. The result is a stunning contribution to cinematic language. O’Daniel has developed a syntax of deafness that offers a complex, overlaid, surprising new texture, which offers a dimensional experience of deafness and reorients the audience auditorily in an unfamiliar and exhilarating way.
Blending documentary and fictionalized performances by Nyke, a deaf woman playing herself, and Geovanny, a drum major of a burglarized, now-tubaless band, the film documents their lives during the years of the robberies. Against a backdrop of Los Angeles never quite seen — or heard, rather — quite like this, the main character is sound and lack thereof. A finely-tuned sense of silence and sound — aural and conceptual — are collaged to create this utterly singular sonic and cinematic experience.
click here for more info
D.O.P.
directed by Tracy Droz Tragos
There are people out there you wish you had known about (and supported) a long time ago. Francine Coeytaux is one of those people. She has spent decades working in public health and focusing on new reproductive technologies, including the development of emergency contraception. With abortion restrictions and bans going into effect, Coeytaux and her team of providers established Plan C — a grassroots organization dedicated to expanding access to medication abortion.
Tracy Droz Tragos (co-director of Rich Hill, U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize, 2014 Sundance Film Festival) accompanies the team as they look for ways to distribute abortion pills while following the letter of the law. Unmarked vans serving as mobile clinics distribute medication to those who cannot get help in their own states. Countless calls are coming in daily from women desperate to be “un-pregnant.” The team of Plan C works tirelessly to make sure they are not alone.
PLAN C feels like essential viewing, not just because it’s timely and diligent. It’s a call to action that has the power to motivate and replace fear with hope.
DOP
Directed by Derek Howard, Emma W. Howes & Justin F. Kennedy
Cannibalizing the Conductor is a hybrid film that combines experimental dance with narrative and documentary filmmaking techniques to create a deep observation of trance choreography. Each performer moves and is moved by the camera, engaging with the filmic gaze to seduce and antagonize, while disrupting the monocular focus of the camera eye. This film is a ritual transgressing of the ethnographic gaze by encouraging everyone to partake in every role: the camera becomes a dancer, the filmmakers dance with the performers, and the performers have agency to pick up cameras and redirect their focus. Both filmmakers and performers share in this ongoing, long-duration visceral experience of improvised trance choreography. Cannibalizing the Conductor becomes a collective and individual unearthing of shifting knowledge in the forms of music, dance, sound, and ultimately the eye of the camera, questioning and problematising the power relations intrinsic in capturing a subject on film. The film features an original score composed and performed by Anand Wilder, formerly of Yeasayer.
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Filmed deep in the Peruvian Amazon jungle, Venda Los Ojos is a verité portrait of motherhood. A mother and her young son observe the sights and sounds of wildlife in an intimate twilight moment. An elderly blind mother transfers her knowledge to her daughter as they prepare a meal in their rural home. Tranquil and unhurried moments create a tender atmosphere that favors atmosphere over story in this visually striking tribute to feminine energy and nature.
This project was filmed as part of the Playlab Filming in the Amazon led by Apitchatpong Weerasethakul. 50 filmmakers had 9 days to scout, shoot, and edit a film working alone in a remote jungle location.
Additional Cinematography
directed by Sarah Gibson & Sloane Klevin
Sprung from San Francisco’s tech bubble and hailed by top health & wellness outlets as a path to fulfillment, OneTaste was a sexual wellness company that gained global notoriety through the teaching of a practice called “orgasmic meditation.” This investigative documentary employs access to 15 years of never-before-seen footage and interviews with former members to pull back the curtain on the organization and its controversial, enigmatic leader.
D.O.P.
directed by Trish Adlesic
In Pittsburgh in 2018, a white supremacist opened fire at the Tree of Life Synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. The survivors recount the harrowing experience and detail how their lives have fundamentally changed. Academy Award nominated, Emmy-winning director Trish Adlesic confronts the “moral decay of humanity” and takes a larger look at the hate-based crisis stemming from the political climate to pose the ultimate question: what kind of nation does America want to be?
D.O.P.
Directed by Emelie Mahdavian
Bitterbrush is a bittersweet, quietly modern portrait of women’s work, following the skilled and unflappable Hollyn and Colie, hired hands who herd livestock through the solemn mountains and wide-open plains of the American West, over a summer on the range. Spare and measured, the film picks up on the friendship that bonds the young women in a rugged way of life. As they contemplate their futures, the magnificent beauty of their momentary home in remote Idaho subtly reveals the effects of an American industry in peril.
click here for more info
Additional Cinematography
Directed by Sam Green
An immersive documentary and profound sensory experience from filmmaker Sam Green that explores the elemental phenomenon of sound. The film is a meditation on the power of sound to bend time, cross borders, and profoundly shape our perception of the world around us.
It exists in two unique and equally exciting forms: one for a live audience, complete with individual headphones for each audience member and featuring live narration by Sam Green and live original music by JD Samson; and another specifically designed for a completely immersive at-home or theatrical experience.
click here for more info
DOP
Directed by John D. Sutter
Four locations. Between now and 2050.
The BASELINE documentary series is an unprecedented look at the climate crisis, checking in with four locations every five years until 2050. Think of it as the environmental “Seven Up!” The goal: combat “shifting baseline syndrome,” a term coined by Daniel Pauly, an advisor on this project, to refer to “a phenomenon of lowered expectations in which each generation regards a progressively poorer natural world as normal.”
click here for more info
DOP
Directed by Emelie Mahdavian
Alonzo King and his dancers return to the dance studio to make a new work. A portrait of the creative process of one of the visionary voices of our time.
co-Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
co-Directed with Early Labyrinth
A music video for Early Labyrinth’s “Suicided”
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Music-film for Anand Wilder’s new single “Fever Seizure” off the album “I Don’t Know My Words”
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Music-film for Anand Wilder’s new solo album “I Don’t Know My Words.”
Stereogum article click here
D.O.P.
Directed by Brett Story
Set in a sizzling New York City, The Hottest August is Brett Story’s visionary look at a culture on the precipice as both climate change and disaster capitalism eclipse our future. Despite an edgy undercurrent of anxiety, the film locates a warm humanity in interactions with a cross section of New Yorkers expert at “rolling with the punches,” as one Staten Island couple says outside of their garage. The rich set of characters includes a futuristic Afronaut, Hurricane Sandy holdouts, a Zumba instructor, and 1920s-style dancers who could be deckhands on the Titanic. While this smart, incisive essay taps into passages by Zadie Smith, Karl Marx, and Annie Dillard, Story’s presence can be felt strongly throughout: she acts as free-ranging poet/meteorologist with a farsighted ability to forecast our uncertain destiny.
click here for more info
D.O.P.
Directed by Corinne van der Borch and Tone Grøttjord-Glenne
Sisters on Track is a coming of age story following the three Sheppard sisters, Tai (12), Rainn (11) and Brooke (10) from the 2016 media storm that propels them into the national spotlight, when all three are chosen to be the Sports Illustrated Kids of the Year, into their final years of Junior High. The film offers a rare intimate glimpse into a tight-knit Brooklyn family’s journey to recover from trauma and tragedy moving away from their life in a shelter. Guided by coach Jean Bell, who inspires them to beat the odds, dream big and aim for higher education the girls are finding their voices as athletes, as students and as young adults. At the heart of the story is the bond between sisters and a whole community of women, passing the baton of self-empowerment through track and field, from generation to generation of hopeful young girls.
click here for more info
2nd D.O.P. & Assistant Director
Directed By Victor Kossakovsky
Aquarela is a unique and truly visual journey into water, the very substance that is making all life forms on earth possible. In this film, the magnificent, artistic documentary-maker Victor Kossakovsky, plunges into the ‘spirituality’ and essence of water and takes audiences on a visually poetic and dramatic journey reflecting their own personal connection to water at every level.
click here for more info
D.O.P.
directed by Yung Chang & Annie Katsura Rollins
PANDEMIC19 is a poignant document of the factual and emotional details of Covid-19 as seen through the eyes of three American frontline doctors. Smartly utilizing the doctors own video testimonials, this film feels alive and immediate while we remain so disconnected.
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Movi / Steadicam Operator
Directed by Ted Passon, Yoni Brook, and Nicole Salazar
A groundbreaking inside look at the long shot election and tumultuous first term of Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s unapologetic District Attorney, and his experiment to upend the criminal justice system from the inside out.
watch here
D.O.P.
directed by Tracy Droz Tragos
A long-form documentary that follows A.J. and his 16-year-old mother, Sarah, in the first five years of A.J.’s life, living on the edge of poverty in the Heartland of America. Perhaps Sarah’s story was written before she became a mother, or perhaps she will chart her own course. This film explores her challenges, choices and options as A.J. moves through his toddler years and starts kindergarten and Sarah turns 21.
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D.O.P.
directed by Jeremy Shaw
Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw presents his first major museum exhibition in France with a groundbreaking project, Phase Shifting Index opening at the Centre Pompidou Feb 26th, 2020. This immersive sound installation is part of his Liminals trilogy, which revealed him at the Venice Biennale in 2017. It consists of seven video screens showing seven groups of people from different periods and styles, evoking the 1950s to the 1990s.
As part of “Mutations / Creations”, the exhibition presents an original immersive project, flirting with science fiction and alternative cultures. Shaw’s business is situated at the conjunction of several contemporary questions which are just as agitating philosophy, anthropology and sociology, the sciences, in particular cognitive sciences and neurosciences, and finally, the latest technological advances such as bionanotechnologies. His work asserts itself as a plastic and sound attempt to account for these multiple developments in research, while propelling them into a fictional field, flirting with science fiction and alternative cultures.
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co-D.O.P.
directed by Sam Green
Sam Green’s intimate portrait of pioneering experimental composer and musician Annea Lockwood gives a glimpse into the enthralling world of sound that she has been creating and exploring for many years.
watch here
2nd D.O.P.
directed by Todd Chandler
Bulletproof observes the age-old rituals that take place daily in American schools: homecoming parades, basketball practice, morning announcements, and math class. Unfolding alongside these scenes are an array of newer traditions: lockdown drills, teacher firearm trainings, metal detector inspections, and school safety trade shows. Bulletproof weaves together these moments in a cinematic meditation on fear, violence, and the meaning of safety, bringing viewers into intimate proximity with the people self-tasked with protecting the nation’s children while generating revenue along the way, as well as with those most deeply impacted by these heightened security measures: students and teachers.
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2nd D.O.P.
directed by Chelsea McMullan
“The Boyz II Men Effect” (Saturday, March 27 at 10 p.m. ET) – Before Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and 98 Degrees, there was a “boy band” from Philadelphia called Boyz II Men that ruled the charts. With their incredible vocal harmonies and preppy-cool style, Boyz II Men became the “soundtrack to our lives” with hits like “End of The Road”, “I’ll Make Love To You”, “Motown Philly,” and “One Sweet Day” – heard at weddings, proms, karaoke bars, and funerals alike. Going back to the band’s humble beginnings in Philadelphia, this episode pays homage to the influential R&B group who set the template for ‘90s boy bands. Featuring interviews with band members Nate Morris, Wanya Morris, Shawn Stockman, GRAMMY® AWARD-winning producer and musician Babyface, and Nick Lachey.
“The Brill Building in 4 Songs” (Saturday, April 10 at 10 p.m. ET) – New York City’s Brill Building and pop music go together like bread and butter, or in this case, like King n’ Goffin, Leiber n’ Stoller, or Barry n’ Kim. In the 1950s and 60s, songwriters, record producers, and wannabe pop stars flocked to 1619 Broadway in New York with dreams of churning out the next big hit. Full of small rooms with upright pianos, The Brill Building was labelled a “song-factory”, but its true spirit grew out of a community that collaborated and challenged each other to achieve greatness. The result would culminate in an incredible musical era known as “The Brill Building Sound” and would define pop music to this day, delivering hits like “Leader of The Pack,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” and “Sugar Sugar.” Featuring interviews with singer Andy Kim, Neil Sedaka, Steven Van Zandt, and singer-songwriter Linda Perry.
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2nd DOP
directed by Sam Green
“Don’t Call Me Gay Zelig” is a 30 minute live cinema portrait that debuted at the Whitney Biennial in August 2019. The film is about gay activist Jim Fouratt who played central roll in the Stonewall uprising. Live score by JD Samson.
click here for more info
Additional D.O.P.
directed by Brian Johnson
THE COLOUR OF INK is a film about the first, and maybe last, analog medium. Ink has always been with us. It’s the liquid currency of secrets and scripture, literature and legislation: civilization’s carbon fingerprint. This documentary feature explores ink’s ancient bloodline by following a contemporary alchemist who harvests pigments from the urban wild.
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Additional Cinematography
directed by Ursula Liang
A nuanced look at how two communities of color navigate an uneven criminal justice system, anchored by one polarizing New York City case.
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Additional Cinematography
directed by Kim A. Snyder
After a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School claims 17 lives, a number of students rally themselves around the tragedy as an opportunity to speak out against the national gun-violence epidemic. As their adrenaline propels a dive into full-on activism, their movement catalyzes, and students impacted by gun violence nationwide join in, giving voice to a generation of traumatized but determined youth.
Director Kim A. Snyder (Newtown, 2016 Sundance Film Festival) returns to the Festival with a film that carefully chronicles 18 pivotal months in the development of the March For Our Lives movement through a deeply personal lens. With extended access to the young activists not only on stage but in their homes and among their friends, Us Kids allows us to see them through one another’s eyes—as “normal-ass kids” bravely dealing with the weight of their traumas. Snyder tells the touching coming-of-age story of this group of driven, resilient, empathetic individuals all navigating the personal consequences of their remarkable choice to dedicate their own lives to honor the fallen and take back democracy.
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Every day in New York City, packed subways provide a veil of anonymity for unwanted invasions of personal space. Carefully composed imagery of the labyrinthine train tunnels immerses the viewer inside an unsettling industrial world. Faces of queer, straight, and cis women and men of all backgrounds are seen reflected in train windows, surveillance monitors, and glossy digital billboards, transforming this bustling space into a chorus of intimate traumas. The ghostliness of the faces mirrors how these attacks go largely unnoticed in the crowd – an absence “Underground” attempts to address.
D.O.P.
directed by Chelsea McMullan
“In the Making” is an immersive journey inside the creative processes of Canada’s leading artists. The award-winning CBC Arts documentary series, now in its second season, features groundbreaking and iconoclastic artists from across the creative spectrum as they realize provocative and poignant works of art.
Host and series creator Sean O’Neill meets the artists at pivotal moments of reflection and change, taking viewers across the country and around the world to gain rare access to the intimate lives and powerful work of eight visionary artists.
The scope of In the Making is multidisciplinary, and features artists working in visual art, music, theatre, dance and comics. Each episode follows a single artist, often over a period of several months and in multiple locations, through periods of risk and realization.
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2nd D.O.P.
directed by Chelsea McMullan
Beauty Mark is a weekly series by Shopify Studios that explores women, beauty and entrepreneurship from around the world. Hosted by Rachel Hale and Jess Sanchez.
click here to watch full episodes
co-DOP
directed by Dara Kell
We Cried Power is a documentary film that tells the story of a bold new social movement to end poverty in the United States, led by Rev. Dr. William J. Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign, Reverend Barber, a pastor from a small town in North Carolina, joined other clergy to launch a national movement led by poor and working people. During the Summer of 2018, thousands of people – Black, white, Latino, First Nation, Asian, Jewish, Muslim and Christian, people not of faith, gay, straight, young and old – work together, picking up the baton from the freedom fighters of the Civil Rights Movement.
The documentary We Cried Power is an intimate account of a “season of resistance,” told through his eyes and the mothers, veterans, preachers, and students who are the voices and founding members of this new “fusion” movement. The film bears witness to the profound process by which those without power decide not to accept their powerlessness. Instead, they claim – through protest, dance, song, and poems, through testimony and tears – their birthright: to live decent lives in the United States of America.
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2nd D.O.P.
In Chelsea McMullan’s documentary-musical, My Prairie Home, indie singer Rae Spoon takes us on a playful, meditative and at times melancholic journey. Set against majestic images of the infinite expanses of the Canadian Prairies, Spoon sweetly croons us through their queer and musical coming of age. Interviews, performances and music sequences reveal Spoon’s inspiring process of building a life of their own, as a trans person and as a musician.
D.O.P.
Directed by Jeremy Shaw
Under the guise of nonfiction, Shaw’s vérité-style trilogy imagines a dystopian—and increasingly familiar—social order in which marginalized societies strive against extinction. Through transcendental experiments and cathartic rituals, these future humans seek feelings of desire and faith that have been expunged from the species’ capacities. The medium-length Quickeners (2014), Liminals (2017), and his latest, I Can See Forever (2018), redefine the bounds of archival cinema, conveying sci-fi narratives through various retro-analogue formats and clinical voiceover narration.
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Additional Cinematography
Directed by Penny Lane
What kind of religious expression should be permitted in a secular nation? Holy hell, something is brewing! Just a few years old, the Satanic Temple has risen from the depths to become one of the most controversial religious movements in American history. Hail Satan? bears witness as the temple evolves from a small-scale media stunt to an internationally recognized religion with hundreds of thousands of adherents. Naked bodies writhe with snakes on altars as protesters storm the gates of state capitols across the country. Through their dogged campaign to place a nine-foot, bronze Satanic monument smack dab next to the statue of the Ten Commandments on the Arkansas State Capitol lawn, the leaders of the temple force us to consider the true meaning of the separation of church and state.
Brandishing their sharply honed cinematic swords, director Penny Lane and producer Gabriel Sedgwick strike a cunning balance between cheeky, brazen entertainment and defiantly serious storytelling in this wickedly topical documentary that bares its horns to speak truth to power.
Additional Cinematography
Directed by Alison Klayman
Around the world, far-right leaders and political movements are gaining ground—from Trump to Duterte to Le Pen to Bolsonaro. To what extent does disseminating their stories create a platform for their views? The Brink raises this question as it follows Steve Bannon, after he has left his perch as Trump’s White House chief strategist and as he continues galvanizing what he calls the “global populist movement.”
Filmmaker Alison Klayman’s deft and vigilant fly-on-the-wall camera records everything, from hotel-room meetings with Trump-supporting midterm candidates looking to kiss Bannon’s ring, to intimate convenings with far-right leaders from France, Hungary, Belgium, and Britain, all plotting their next move. When journalists arrive, we witness their attempts to puncture Bannon’s facade of disarming charm and challenge his beliefs. What is most fascinating—and instructive—is the way Klayman subtly reveals patterns in Bannon’s rhetoric and behavior, searingly capturing the way he states one thing but means something entirely different. As we watch him operate, we slowly learn how to deconstruct his methods, which have proven central to his foothold in political life—chilling as they are.
“The Harvesters” is a short observational documentary about three Maasai men harvesting honey in the Mau Forest in Kenya. Without any dialog and with a pensive camera, “The Harvesters” is a carefully composed portrait of often invisible labour in a now extinct forest.
“Passion Play” is a short documentary that thrusts the viewer inside the middle of a visceral re-enactment of the last hours of Christ’s life, as portrayed by the local towns people of Angles, Philippines. Every Easter the town organizes a passion play that culminates in a procession and crucifixion of the same person who feels it is his pentane to by nailed to the cross after surviving a near fatal fall some twenty years ago. This dialog-less mediation on religious traditions and spectacles gradually separates itself from reality and embraces a bombastic “Hollywood” style orchestral score to emphasize the performative and theatrical aspects of worship. The subjectively of shock and delight, worship and sacrilege, meet in a tense document of passions not for the squeamish.
watch a shorter version of the film below
1st Assistant Director & 2nd D.O.P.
Directed by Victor Kossakovsky
With this film Victor Kossakovsky grants himself a childhood wish. Haven’t we all asked ourselves as children where we would come out if we dug a tunnel right through the centre of the earth? Haven’t we all wondered at some point what was happening just at this moment beneath our very feet at the other side of the planet? In this film those reveries turn into reality. In breathtaking images and a stunning montage we go on a trip to the world’s rare inhabited land-to-land antipodes. We discover the wonders and contradictions of nature and people around the globe. With unprecedented camera movements and exhilarating new perspectives our conventional view of the world is challenged. On the evocative title follows a revolutionary film, that gives three cheers to our planet and its people in all their antagonisms and commonalities: Vivan las Antipodas!
D.O.P.
filmmaker Chelsea McMullan gets the low-down with legendary American poet, essayist and one-time presidential candidate Eileen Myles, perambulating and talking poetry through the streets of their adoptive home of New York.
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D.O.P.
Directed by Jeremy Shaw
Originally premiered at this year’s Venice Biennale, the 20-minute film is set against a 1970s cinema vérité aesthetic, and draws parallels between the experimental spiritual gatherings of the ’70s and the effect-laden release of contemporary hedonistic subcultures. It follows a group of 8 dancers as they enact ecstatic rituals in an attempt to access a new realm of consciousness with the potential to save humanity.
Founded in 2016 by Sol Calero, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Derek Howard, Christopher Kline, and Dafna Maimon, CONGLOMERATE explores the potential of the Television Network model, utilizing the organizational structure and output format of “television” while building a collectivity-focused network. While the overall project is conceived of as a Gesamtkunstwerk, each video segment ties into and utilizes a different artistic practice or gesture. At times these segments form an entire TV show or video work, while at others they appear as a structural element facilitating a greater whole, without hierarchical division. Through the multiple ways the different elements and modes of collaboration are woven together, the Blocks form a kind of network of voices, perspectives, relations, skills, and collective affective labor. The varying degrees of involvement of CONGLOMERATE’s makers and contributors create platforms within platforms, or artworks within artworks, where one artist’s practice can be featured within another’s. This flexibility and continuous shifting of vision and responsibility from maker to maker offers a new potential model for the sustainable and independent realization of larger art projects.
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2nd Unit Director & 2nd D.O.P.
Directed by Chelsea McMullan
Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John tells the story of the five children (whose names comprise the title) of John Hanmer, a Canadian police officer who lived a troubled life before suffering a tragic death. The film explores how the children, scattered around the world, have each been forced to resolve their father’s troubled past without him.
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Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Breathing Room is a personal visualization of how strands of memory saturate a specific space. A continual tracking shot travels through an elderly man’s home, exploring the dilapidated domestic space in it’s owner’s absence and presence. A disappearing boy, a frightening dog, a ghostly book, and a bursting furnace animate the rooms and personify the layers of history that have settled here over a lifetime.
Directed & DOP by Derek Howard
Shot in five countries across two continents, this experimental film is a mythologically inspired exploration into the genesis of ancient storytelling archetypes and symbols.
D.O.P.
Directed by Chelsea McMullan
Music Video for the first single Ocean Blue off of Rae Spoon’s new album I Can’t Keep all of our Secrets.
D.O.P.
Directed by Chelsea McMullan
Following the fragments of Federico Fellini’s most famous unfinished film, Il Viaggio di Mastorna, this short meditative documentary cinematically reveals how Fellini’s story of a man wandering through the afterlife became a graphic novel. Told by Milo Manara, the illustrator who brought Fellini’s vision to life, this richly textured documentary is a tribute to the legacy of a master filmmaker.
Additional Cinematography
Directed by Chelsea McMullan
Deadman’s tranquil pacing and glorious vistas gently build to a climactic, clever and moving showdown between two opposing camps, between an ancient, peaceful way of life and the seductive yet violent mythology of the Wild West.
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D.O.P.
Directed by Kathleen Hepburn & Meghan Armstrong
“It’s not as if we haven’t been here for a while” is a self-portrait of an artist struggling to accept the fluidity of her own nature. Filmmaker Kathleen Hepburn paints herself into a filmic landscape, whose narrative structure and cinematography is both ethereal and exact, allowing her and her audience to understand the truth of the present moment while recognizing the impermanence of all things
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Derek Howard is a director of photography and director currently based in New York City. After graduating with honors with a BFA from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, he moved to Berlin, where he began assistant directing and shooting for renowned filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky (“Vivan Las Antipodas, Varicella, Aquarela”). Immersed in the world of creative documentary, video art, and hybrid formats, Derek established himself as a risk taking, energetic, and innovative filmmaker with a focus on LGBTQ+ representation, dance, extreme nature, and climate change stories. His collaborations have led to premieres at many A-list film festivals, and prestigious art institutors such as the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and MOMA PS1. He has participated in the IDFA Summer School, IDFAcademy, Reykjavik Trans Atlantic Talent Lab, Berlinale Talents program, and the Filming in the Amazon residency led by Apichatpong Weserthat. Most recently, Derek shot award-winning filmmaker Emelie Mahdavian’s debut feature “Bitterbrush (Telluride 2021), celebrated visual artist Alison O’Daniel’s debut feature “The Tube Thieves” (Sundance 2023), and award-winning filmmaker Tracy Tragos’s “Plan C” (Sundance 2023).
Email: derekshoward@gmail.com