MASTERCLASS 2025
FROM THE ARCHIVES TO THE SCREENS
CREATIVE APPROACHES IN WORKING WITH ARCHIVAL MATERIAL IN DOCUMENTARY CINEMA
BILLY WOODBERRY
SATURDAY, 10.05. | 2–4 pm
ZIMMER | Piaristengasse 6–8, 1080 Wien
FREE ENTRY
Please send an informal registration with your name to: registration@ethnocineca.at.
Registration deadline: 9.05.2025
Director Billy Woodberry will talk about the different techniques and approaches he uses to deal with and interweave archival and film material. His recent films masterfully demonstrate how he uses audiovisual and photographic archives in an artistic and precise way as raw material for his work and how he assembles them into new narratives. Most recently, Woodberry released the film MÁRIO, which tells the extraordinary story of Mário de Andrade, a pan-African intellectual and activist who dedicated his life to the struggle for a sovereign Africa.
Billy Woodberry is one of the founders of the Afro-American film movement L.A. Rebellion from the 1960s to the 1980s and was a long-time lecturer in film and video at the California Institute of the Arts.
Masterclass held in English.
In cooperation with
Filmscreening:
MÁRIO
BIOGRAPHY
Billy Woodberry is one of the founders of the L.A. rebellion film movement. His first feature Film Bless Their Little Hearts (1983) is a pioneer and essential work of this movement, influenced by Italian neorealism and the work of Third cinema filmmakers. The film was awarded with an OCIC and Interfilm award at the Berlin International Film Festival and was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2013. His latest feature film And when I die, I won’t stay dead (2015) about the Beat poet Bob Kaufmann was the opening-film of MoMA’s Doc Fortnight in 2016.
Woodberry has appeared in Charles Burnett’s When it Rains (1995) and provided narration for Thom Andersen’s Red Hollywood (1996) and James Benning’s Four Corners (1998). His work has been screened at Cannes and Berlin Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Harvard Film Archive, Camera Austria Symposium, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou. He received his MFA degree from UCLA in 1982 where he also taught at the School of Theater. Since 1989 Billy Woodberry is a faculty member of the School of Film/Video and the school of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.
