Grimonprez: A creative Workshop & Screening

Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026 - Ukrop Auditorium

4-5:45 pm  Workshop with Johan Grimonprez, Oscar-nominated film director & artist

6:30 pm Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Grimonprez’s award-winning documentary 

Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it not the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given and who can become a time-traveler of the imagination? Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once coined that we are not made of atoms as scientists say, but that we are actually made of stories. Stories are what holds us together, — or tear us apart, shaping our very idea of belonging. Ironically writer Maurice Blanchot called language an act of murder, because naming things would be identical to killing them. But novelist Alfred Döblin claims exactly the opposite: language, he says, is a form of loving others, language lets us know why we are together. But maybe a more pertinent depiction is Vietnamese filmmaker Trin-Min Ha’s idea of language as a ’leaking boat’. A lifeboat we are all stuck on together. It’s the disappearing meeting place, but also the same dire biosphere we all share.

By dialoguing about countercultural applications, including our own storytelling in our very art and/or film practice, in what writer Rebecca Solnit claims the "duty of delight’, to find new joyful ways of telling,” figuring out how we belong together while choreographing new stories we share. Not as victims of the future paralyzed by dystopian nihilism, but to garner new metaphors and untold stories generated by better questions that can invent new languages, "tools for the amazing wonderful possibilities for the terrible realities we face.”

Conversations with Film Professionals

TOBI AKINDE

Film Screenings + Q&A

Akinde is a Nigerian filmmaker, curator, and researcher currently working between Nigeria and New Orleans. He tells everyday stories of Africans and the African diaspora in a way that challenges dominant gaze and offers alternative cultural perspectives. His films combine variants of realism, direct cinema, archival practice, and mythology.

Akinde’s latest fantasy drama will be screened. Shot in New Orleans in December 2024 the film is in post-production and will be heading for this year’s film festivals in May. In the Q&A session, Akinde will draw on his experience in variety of roles, from cinematographer, writer, director, to film festival curator, and organizer of a filmmakers collective.

Alumni Film Showcase

Caroline Keene, Screenwriter & Co-Director

Join the Film Studies Program for a film screening of Merry Good Enough and Q&A with Caroline Keene, ‘08, received an M.F.A. in screenwriting from the University of Texas at Austin. Her biopic script, My Name is Lorena Weeks, was a top finalist for the Academy Awards Nicholls Fellowship. Merry Good Enough, a dark comedy written and co-directed by Keene, and starring Mad Men’s Joel Murray and Raye Spielberg in her breakout role, debuts in the U.K. this coming holiday season. Described as “deliciously gritty” by Film Threat, the movie won the best NH Feature at The New Hampshire Film Festival. Originally from Massachusetts, Caroline now lives in Los Angeles. She currently has two features in development.

Merry Good Enough is an indie, dark(ish) comedy about a dysfunctional family whose mom disappears on Christmas Eve and the lengths one daughter must go to bring her family back together again. 

Originally from Massachusetts, Caroline now lives in Los Angeles. Her biopic script My Name is Lorena Weeks was a top finalist for the Academy Awards Nicholls Fellowship. She currently has two more features in development.  A conversation with Keene about her career path will be enjoyed after the screening. Watch the Merry Good Enough trailer for a sneak peek.