2020 PRESS RELEASE

For more information: April G. Joffee, info@city-film.org.

The City College of New York presents the 22nd edition of Cityvisions, the annual international showcase of new thesis films from its MFA Program in Film. This year, Cityvisions will be held online on Wednesday and Thursday, June 24 and 25, and ends with an award ceremony online on Friday, June 26 at 7 pm.

“The MFA program at the City College of New York is one of the most diverse and international film schools in the world, which makes Cityvisions a truly international film festival, showcasing innovative work by promising filmmakers from around the globe,” states MFA Program Co-Director Andrea Weiss. This year, the 18 films being showcased represent work by directors from 9 different countries, including the U.S., Egypt, China, India, Denmark, Indonesia, Taiwan, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic.

The Cityvisions 2020 line-up is a diverse mix of fiction and nonfiction work. Documentaries include “A Month of Sitting In,” which examines an ancient Chinese birthing ritual transposed to modern day New York City; “Don’t Lose the Lesson,” an insider’s look at what happens to a championship women’s basketball team when its coach pleads guilty to embezzlement; and “Dry Rain,” a portrait of a rain shaman who is hired to control the weather for film crews shooting in his native Indonesia. Short fiction pieces include “Amend,” in which a father, unable to save his young daughter, gets a sudden chance to save a stranger; “I am Yours,” which follows a Chinese-American granddaughter as she struggles to honor and respect familial ties despite the personal cost; and “Microbus,” set in Cairo, where an 18-year old girl takes a microbus to work and is changed forever by an incident that happens en route.

The longest running and most established public film school in New York City, the MFA Program in Film at the City College of New York is a small, boutique two-year program focusing on independent filmmaking. We are a culturally diverse filmmaking community, with ready access to the finest talent, locations, and production facilities of New York City. Unlike other film schools, we equally emphasize documentary and fiction filmmaking genres as vehicles for original storytelling that reflects the human experience.

Previous thesis films from CCNY’s MFA program have gone on to win, in Student Categories, four Oscars, six Oscar nominations, as well as four Emmys. MFA films have also been invited to prestigious films festivals including Sundance, Cannes, Berlin, Edinburgh, Moscow, Munich, Venice, and South By Southwest.

This year’s Cityvisions Film Festival jury is comprised of three prominent film industry professionals: German film director Wieland Speck who for 35 years curated the Panorama section of the Berlin Film Festival; Ann Bennett, a film producer whose many credits include the award-winning PBS feature documentary, Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People; and Bogdan Apetri, a Romanian director based in New York City whose first feature film “Outbound” was acclaimed at the Locarno and Toronto Film Festivals and included in MOMA’s prestigious New Directors/New Films series.

Admission to Cityvisions 2020 is free. For more information about the event, films and filmmakers, please visit: http://ccny-cityvisions.org/.

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