THE ACTOR IN HIS LABYRINTH / Film Screening & Filmmaker, Seth Fein Q&A.

Event Sponsored by #CityArtistCorps.

Film by SETH FEIN & Seven Local Film.
32 minutes.
Original version multilingual / Subtitled in English

Synopsis:

THE ACTOR IN HIS LABYRINTH (32 mins. 2021) considers the journey of Cali-born Sebastián Ospina –– from Colombian TV star to “nomadic” theater actor –– as he promotes and performs his play about Simón Bolívar in NYC. Much of this film was shot in Elmhurst, including inside Terraza 7, where Ospina has frequently performed. Preview.

OLMSTED & MOSES, AL & ME (short work-in-progress sample) maps the overlapping legacies of the 19th-century city Frederick Law Olmsted planned and the 20th-century one Robert Moses built in dialogue with the filmmaker’s life and work in Moses’s Queens and his childhood in Olmsted’s Brooklyn, where he grew up in a cityscape dominated by his father’s work as an Olmsted scholar.

About Seven Local Film Series:

SEEING SOCIAL GLOBALIZATION IN QUEENS / A series of documentaries by SETH FEIN.

Three different programs, October 23, 24, and 30 @6:30 pm.

This series screens three recent documentaries by Seth Fein that differently contemplate immigration in Queens. Each also connects to this series’ home – Terraza 7 – which, Fein notes, “is an audiotopia that exemplifies the immigrant-driven cosmopolitanism that has sustained the arts across Covid Time in the part of Queens my films document – and where I live – an area fundamental to NYC’s global identity and actuality.”

• THE ACTOR IN HIS LABYRINTH (Oct. 23) is a portrait of Sebastían Ospina’s professional and personal journey –– his decades-long struggle “to be meaningful” –– between Colombia and the United States, as refracted in his own portrayal of Simón Bolívar in Queens today.

• BETWEEN NEIGHBORHOODS (Oct. 24), contemplates in split-screen the present and past of imperialism and immigration that orbit the largest rendering of the world in the world –– Unisphere –– to essay the contemporary contest between corporate and social globalization in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park and across Queens between the age of Robert Moses and that of AOC.

• SMALL KITCHENS (Oct. 30) is an observational tone poem about food and labor between two restaurants and cuisines in one neighborhood under the 7 train. Shot in 2019 in Elmhurst-Jackson Heights, it screens with the premiere of its 2021 EPILOGUE about the same places today, featuring music performed at Terraza by Abare (Ari Hoenig. Chico Pinheiro and Eduardo Belo).

A short work-in-progress sample of OLMSTED & MOSES, AL & ME, Fein’s new video essay about the intersection of personal and public histories across NYC –– also screens at each event.

About Seth Fein:

SETH FEIN is a filmmaker and historian who lives in Jackson Heights, where he operates Seven Local Film. He’s been a fellow in multimedia history at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies have supported his projects. In addition to making films, Fein has published widely about the audiovisual history of the Americas, and he’s taught history and film at Barnard, Columbia, CUNY, and Yale. He discusses how his filmmaking grows from his work as a historian, in an interview in Jump Cut.

A City Artist Corps Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and NYC’s Department of Cultural Affairs, assisted by the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and the Queens Theatre, supports this series.