Both projects were conceived and executed in a class called The Cinematic Place, taught by the late Deanna Kamiel, who passed away on June 16th. There has been an outpouring of heartfelt tributes from students who were touched by Kamiel’s dedicated service as a professor, and these two projects are products of one of her last classes. Both films illuminate an immigrant perspective of New York City, and specifically look at the day-to-day migration that happens in working-class New York.

Mexico City native, Gilda Garcia, holds degrees from Berklee College of Music and Vancouver Film School and has focused her career on doing sound design and re-recording mixing for visual media. She has worked as a sound designer on more than 50 projects from several areas of the globe. In 2016 she ventured to New York City to pursue an MA in Media Studies at The New School where she ventured into documentary filmmaking. In 2017 Gilda produced and directed award-nominated documentary shorts and her passion for the genre led her to explore different avenues like experimental documentary. Capturing the intensely personal aspects of a daily commute in one of the most bustling cities on earth, The Subway is a lyrical film essay, set to the Joyce Kilmer poem of the same name.

Victor Plank Harms is a New York-based TV producer, with almost a decade’s experience working as an international, multilingual director and producer in Europe, Asia, North America, and South America. He has created and produced stories for television about female inmates in overcrowded prisons in the Philippines, the torn youth of a suicidal Greenland, female liberation in the U.A.E, Italian men living with their moms, and many more. Between Two Islands takes place on one of the lesser documented forms of public transit, the Staten Island ferry. This piece contrasts with Garcia’s personal take, and instead utilizes a more voyeuristic and neutral tone that serves the interesting and diverse clientele of the ferry well.

https://vimeo.com/268412054