The New Jewish Culture Fellowship is excited to present a screening of three short films by Brooklyn filmmakers Daniel Terna (NJCF Fellow, 2018), Ellie Lobovits (NJCF Fellow, 2020), and Adam Golfer (NJCF Fellow, 2022) that explore what it means to remember, to forget, to gather the pieces and refashion them into new narratives. Using family as subject matter, the filmmakers each grapple with anxieties around mortality and the fallibility of generational memory, employing elements of home movies, found interviews, visual diaries, photographs, and reenactment.

The screening will be held in the sanctuary of the Union Temple House of CBE, a space originally built in the 1920s as a theater for Brooklyn’s flourishing Jewish community. The screening will be 70 minutes and followed by a conversation between a journalist and podcaster Avery Trufelman and the artists.

Daniel Terna’s My First Wife Stella (33 mins, 2013/19), is a still and moving image project inspired by the discovery of slide pictures that his father, Fred Terna, a Holocaust survivor and artist, made in 1967 while on a west coast road trip with his first wife, Stella, also a survivor. In the film, Terna retraces the route Fred and Stella took together and recreates compositions at the same locations the couple visited 45 years prior. In Terna’s yearning to see the past, the film documents the relationship he has with his father through the process of Fred’s retelling.

In Ellie Lobovits’ Miss You (10:30 min, 2020), the artist documents her mother as she records her favorite answering machine messages, a ritual her mother began over a decade ago. Layering 16mm family home movies with archival home movies from strangers, this film asks: What happens if we don’t let go of the past? What does it mean to remember? And, is Gertrude Stein right, that when we return to places of the past, “There is no there there”?

After the passing of his father in 2006, Adam Golfer found a cassette tape among his father’s belongings, containing an interview between his Lithuanian-Prussian grandfather, Eddie, his American wife Bea, and their Ghanaian-American teenage neighbor, Esi. In listening to the recording, Adam came to realize that Esi was visiting his grandparents’ home to fulfill a homework interview assignment, but that she did not know, at first, that Eddie was a Holocaust survivor. A Matter of Opinion (26 min, 2022) reimagines this conversation from Esi’s point of view and looks at the awkwardness, stilted pauses, and missed signals that unfold across a single Saturday morning in Brooklyn in 1995. It is a multi-directional memory; an incomplete re-telling of a re-telling, looking at the ways that language can sometimes fail us when we try to connect with those around us.

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Daniel Terna (b. 1987, Brooklyn) is a Brooklyn-based artist working in photography and video. Terna’s work focuses on family and inherited trauma, blending autobiographical narratives with a tourist’s approach to exploring sites, be they memorials, cities, personal archives, or the body itself. He has exhibited and screened his work in solo and group shows at galleries and venues throughout the US and abroad. Terna is a recipient of fellowships and residencies at The Workshop (2021); the Asylum Arts Small Grant (2019); Asylum Arts’ International Jewish Artist Retreat (2018); the New Jewish Culture Fellowship (2018); the Cuts and Burns Residency at Outpost Artist Resources (2013); and the Collaborative Fellowship Program at UnionDocs (2011). danielterna.com

Ellie Lobovits (b. 1980) is a visual artist, writer, and midwife-in-training. Ellie’s practice spans diverse media, including photography, film, and text. Self-portraiture, imagery of the natural world, and first-person narratives are recurring elements in her exploration of the intersections of feminist identity, the body, land, loss, and memory. Interweaving autobiographical elements with current socio-political issues, she explores what occurs in the space of juxtaposition between the so-called private and public spheres. Her work has been featured in Jewish Currents, Mother Tongue magazine, Mutha Magazine, and in film festivals across the country. ellielobovits.com

Adam Golfer (b. 1985, DC) is an artist and filmmaker based in New York. His practice combines elements of photography, personal essay films, and installations, and resides in the slippery space between history and memory, often exploring multiple, overlapping narratives. Exhibitions of his work have been shown at the MoCP in Chicago, Nurture Art, Hunter College, Brooklyn, the Goethe Institut, and the 92nd Street Y. His short films have been featured as Vimeo Staff Picks, at festivals across the US and in BOMB. The golfer was awarded the Snider Prize in Photography and a grant from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation to complete his book, “A House Without a Roof,” which was shortlisted for the Aperture Foundation — Paris Photo First Book Award. adamgolfer.com

Location: 17 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY 11238, United States

Time: 7:00 PM — 10:00 PM EST

Free!

Registration