It was created by Francis Flaherty, widow and collaborator of the celebrated American documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty. While its name may suggest an academic event, that’s not actually what it is. I like to think of Flaherty as an immersive filmic experience that has had a commitment to learning and pedagogy from the beginning. Thought of as a kind of collaborative forum centering independent works, the Flaherty Seminar has established itself as a place that opens up new ways of thinking about film and the processes of curation and programming.

Over the course of one week, artists, filmmakers, curators, critics, academics, and lovers of film culture gather on a university campus to watch films and have conversations. Central to Francis Flaherty’s conception of the seminar is the idea of “non-preconception”: participants are not told anything about the films ahead of time, and they learn of each program only at the beginning of the screening. Participants arrive knowing only what the curator has shared as their chosen theme for that year’s session. For Francis, non-preconception was essential for creating a mental state of discovery and reencounter. The presence of the artists whose works are being shown is also fundamental to the concept, and for this reason, each year’s curator generally only shows the work of living filmmakers—with the exception of Robert Flaherty, whose legacy is recognized every year with a screening of one of his films.

Glissant writes that he will “claim the right” to opacity. The modern Western norm excels at the sort of decoding and explaining and exposing that robs us of the possibility of opacity. By demanding the right to opacity, Glissant paves the way to possibilities beyond transparency, rejecting the sort of classification and categorization that the Western world has used to exoticize the Global South and reduce the vastness of other cultures to stand-ins for difference. Opacity allowed all of us to encounter these works without forcing our understanding onto them.

It was almost insane to even think about creating an online universe for Flaherty, which in its sixty-six years has been anchored by the idea of physical presence and all the participants being in one place together. I believe that the way my curatorial practices developed in the Global South helped me a lot in this process. I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, and it was from here that my cinematic itinerary began and evolved into what resulted in the program.

The etymological origin of the word curatorship (from the Latin curare) is frequently mobilized in reflection about this kind of work. The idea of “curatorship as care” is something that is often heard now. But care for what and, above all, with whom and for whom? I ask these questions because my experience as a Brazilian moviegoer has not been one of care but one of traumas caused by ongoing colonialist subordination, negative stereotypes, cultural appropriations, and absences—what one does not see and who one does not see in a movie theater. I initially started programming films as a gesture of intervention and a form of resistance to these traumas. These experiences gave me the urgency to think of care as a problem for film curation. A curatorial practice is more than the development of a concept or the selection of films or the logistics of an online seminar. The task also involves creating the foundation for spaces, dynamics, and interactions that can make care possible.

The whole program consisted of nineteen distinct sessions that spanned ten days. While the seminar is normally only one week long, we extended it to align the different time zones. We had 400 people attending from forty-two countries. We also wanted to leave some breathing room, since everyone was experiencing screen exhaustion in the second year of the pandemic.

Something I said a few times throughout was that I was not developing a linear argument with an objective to “understand” what opacity is. On the contrary, like a spiral movement, every session brought the same statement about opacity from a different perspective—that is, Glissant’s proposal of refusing the reductionism of transparency as a way of relating to films, and his defense of singularity. In that sense, each session was always the same but different. This was one of the primary keys to the way I shaped the program.