Screening

MFA Photography, Video and Related Media presents a screening of Mary Patierno’s Requiem for a River (2023) followed by a conversation with director, filmmaker and artist Shelly Silver.

Requiem for a River explores the iconic but endangered New Mexico stretch of the Rio Grande in a time of climate change and amidst calls for environmental justice. Through lyrical imagery and in-depth interviews with a diverse range of residents—Native, Latinx, Indo-Hispanic and Anglo—this visually poetic documentary reveals the once-mighty river’s role as a lifeline in the desert and asks whether the keys to a more sustainable, equitable future lie in New Mexico’s ancient past.

Mary Patierno is an award winning documentary filmmaker and editor whose most recent film, Requiem for a River, is a documentary that uses the Rio Grande as a vehicle to explore the most pressing issues of our time; climate change, water rights, indigenous rights, environmental injustice and the future of agriculture. Her last film, the Ford Foundation funded, Nothing Without Us: The Women Who Will End AIDS (2017), screened throughout North America, Europe and Africa, including Hot Docs, DocNYC, Cineffable Paris and the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa in 2016 and Montreal in 2022. Previous work includes Vieques: Worth Every Bit of Struggle and The Most Unknowable Thing, which was selected as part of The New Documentaries (2000) series at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. It was nominated for a 2000 International Documentary Association (IDA) Achievement Award and was awarded Outstanding Documentary Feature in the Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Washington DC Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals.

Her collaborations include Abigail Child (Origin of the Species, A Shape of Error, On the Downlow and Surf and Turf), Starfish Media Group (Revisiting Haiti and Heroin County USA), Tania Cypriano (Grandma Has a Video Camera), the PBS News Hour, Diller + Scofidio, Asia Society, 651/Brooklyn Academy of Music, Vanguard Films, Univision, University of Massachusetts and USAID.

Mary is a 2021 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and a two-time recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was also a cofounder and Executive Producer of the ground-breaking public access cable show, DYKETV.

Shelly Silver is a New York based filmmaker and artist working with the still and moving image. Her work explores contested territories between public and private, narrative and documentary, and—increasingly in recent years—the watcher and the watched. Spoken and written language, collaged narratives, framings in time and space, all become clues into shifting locations of power, identity and desire. To speak and to listen, to look and let oneself be seen, is, or should be a pleasure, and like all pleasures, tinged with ambiguity and risk. Silver’s practice is a labor of attention.

She has exhibited worldwide, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Contemporary Art/LA, the Yokohama Museum, the London ICA, and the London, the Singapore, New York, Moscow, and Berlin Film Festivals. Her films have been broadcast by BBC/England, PBS/USA, Arte/Germany, France, Planete/Europe, RTE/Ireland, SWR/Germany and Atenor/Spain. Silver has received numerous fellowships and grants from organizations such as the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, the Japan Foundation and Anonymous was a Woman and has been a fellow at the DAAD Artists Program in Berlin, the Japan/US Artist Program, Cité des Arts in Paris, and LMCC/NY, TOKAS/Tokyo, Macdowell, Yaddo, Bogliasco and Montalvo Residencies. Silver is Professor and Director of Moving Image, Visual Arts Program, School of the Arts, Columbia University.