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By Hannah Stewart (Comm’19)

The Mimesis Documentary Festival, hosted by the College of Media, Communication and Information’s Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media, will hold community film screenings, artist talks and more from Aug. 14 through 18. This year, they received nearly 300 submissions from more than 30 countries, and will feature more than 60 documentaries.

“Being five years in means that we’re fulfilling a need in the international documentary community—the need for a festival that’s really artist-focused and community based,” said Eric Coombs Esmail, director of the center.

Now that it’s a well-known annual event, the festival is attracting more community partnerships and sponsors. Cool Boulder, along  with the Endangered Species Coalition, subsidized artist submission fees for projects addressing nature-based climate solutions. These projects are part of a special category of films called that will be featured across two days in four different documentary and live performance blocks. Other sponsors include the City of Boulder and the Boulder Public Library.

Associate Professor Erin Espelie, who holds a joint appointment in both cinema studies and critical media practices, is also a filmmaker whose documentary, , will be featured as part of the block called The Tree Remembers. Emergent technologies and media art practices PhD candidates and will also have their works shown in a Moving Creatures block.

Two other particularly exciting pieces this year include the pre-festival screening of by Terra Long and by artist in residence Miryam Charles.

Long’s film was screened Saturday, Aug. 10, at the Boulder Public Library’s Canyon Theater, and was followed up with a live Q&A with the filmmaker. While this is not the first time Mimesis has hosted a pre-festival screening, Coombs said this was special because of the collaboration.

“We’ve done pre-festival screenings twice previously, but they’ve been under the radar,” he said. “This year, our partnership with the Boulder Library to make sure the festival is reaching the community beyond just the event itself. The library has gotten more funding and it’s opened up a lot more avenues for collaboration.”

Artists in residence are chosen by the programming team, and Charles was the perfect candidate because the team saw her as “someone who really works at the boundary of what documentary might become.” Her film, which reflects on the unresolved death of her cousin, will be shown at 8 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 16, and she will host a master class the next morning at 10; both will take place at the Boedecker Cinema.

“The main goal is to host something that is valuable not only to the artists, but to the broader Front Range community in general,” Coombs said. “We want to make Mimesis sustainable and something that can survive the test of time. We want to grow the community we’ve built and demonstrate to that documentary is for everyone.”