Artistic Differences returns with a conversation featuring filmmaker Dane Komljen, whose latest film The Garden Cadences continues his poetic exploration of collectivity, intimacy, and impermanence. Hosts Cíntia Gil and Christopher Allen reflect with Komljen on a work that unfolds between reality and reverie — an evocation of a Berlin garden where friendship, love, and artistic labor entwine against the backdrop of a disappearing communal space.

Komljen shares the film’s origins in the city’s transient communities and its quiet attention to care, routine, and coexistence. The discussion moves fluidly between the philosophical and the personal, touching on ideas of paradise and exile, the fragility of utopian spaces, and the bittersweet beauty of endings. He speaks about the film’s haunting voiceovers — one drawn from a friend’s poem, another from his own WhatsApp messages written in a moment of heartbreak, revealing how private language and loss become collective expressions within the film’s delicate structure.

Throughout, the hosts and filmmaker consider the relationship between continuity and rupture, between tenderness and distance, and how a garden can hold the traces of both. As Komljen notes, recording his own voice became a way to "be there in the film, you know, to inscribe myself.”Listen in for a gentle yet piercing exchange on the politics of care, the poetics of community, and the quiet persistence of beauty in a world of endings.And don’t forget! You can watch The Garden Cadences too! It’s now streaming on the UnionDocs Membership.Big thanks to our incredible team:

Editor: Alison Rodgers

Mixer: Pedro Castro

Music: Andres Simoes

Production Support: Tara Aliya Kesavan, A.S.M Kobayashi

This is a production of UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES is co-curated and co-organized by Cíntia Gil, Christopher Allen & Jenny Miller.

In this month’s episode of Artistic Differences, hosts Cíntia Gil and Christopher Allen speak with Argentine filmmaker Maria Aparicio about her stunning third feature, Undefined Things, winner of the Cinema Tropical Award for Best Latin American Film.

A delicate meditation on cinema, memory, and mourning, the film follows Eva, a film editor in Córdoba. Eva is working with her assistant on a documentary about people living with blindness, while also grappling with the recent death of Juan, a filmmaker friend whose films she once edited. Her days are divided between sorting through fragments of Juan’s unfinished images and the more immediate task of shaping a project with her assistant, blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary and asking what it means to carry the work of others forward.

Blindness, both literal and metaphorical, emerges as a central thread. Eva’s encounters with the blind people she meets reshape how the film listens, looks, and attends to the everyday. The vivid conversations they have form a counterpoint to Eva’s solitary editing, suggesting another way of perceiving the world. “I sometimes think that cinema is very connected to faith,” Aparicio reflects, “like believing in something.” In Undefined Things, blindness is not a limit, but an opening—a reminder that there are forms of experience and knowledge that exceed what is visible.

Aparicio turns to Borges, whose writings on blindness open a way of thinking about cinema not as pure vision, but as a medium of transformation and relation. She reflects on the practical conditions of making films in Argentina — from the support of public film funds to the constant challenges of sustaining independent cinema. She also tells us about the more intimate forces that shape her work: friendship, teaching, collaboration, and the necessity of love and play. Taken all together, she threads a vision of cinema as both fragile and inexhaustible, a space where blindness, doubt, and wonder can coexist, and where images continue to create bonds between people.Big thanks to our incredible team:

Editor: Alison Rodgers

Mixer: Pedro Castro

Music: Andres Simoes

Production Support: Tara Aliya Kesavan, A.S.M Kobayashi

This is a production of UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES is co-curated and co-organized by Cíntia Gil, Christopher Allen & Jenny Miller.

Artistic Differences returns with an introspective and resonant conversation featuring filmmaker Masha Chernaya focusing on her daring debut feature, The Shards, which was the winner of the Doclisboa Film Festival's International Competition and the recipient of the Doc Alliance Award for Best Feature Film. This prestigious award was just announced at this year’s Cannes Film Festival where the jury praised the film “for its unique cinematic qualities” and honored its “cinematic language that is quiet, resistant to classic narrative structures, and develops a striking ability to merge personal and collective mourning.”

Hosts Cíntia Gil and Christopher Allen unpack Chernaya’s poetic yet unsparing style, which centers on a young woman as she is saying goodbye to her homeland and follows her attempt to process a cascade of personal losses — including the death of her mother and the escape of her partner from military conscription — within the silence and surveillance of contemporary Russia. Chernaya opens up about her hybrid creative process, blending scripted scenes with documentary footage, private phone videos, and moments of raw improvisation. The conversation traces the intimate making of the film, shot over seven years on minimal resources and maximal instinct. She also speaks about the larger forces that shaped it: state repression, systemic grief, and the unstable architecture of memory.Throughout, Chernaya speaks candidly about performing her own pain for the camera. “I am not just a crying girl with grief and anger,” she says. “I’m also a big manipulator—I’m crying, but I’m calling the camera.” Together, the hosts and filmmaker examine how The Shards reclaims fragmented narratives and contested personal histories through aesthetic experimentation and performative vulnerability. Chernaya reflects on finding strength in ambivalence, wielding her own image as both shield and weapon, and embracing contradiction as a radical formal strategy.

Listen in for an atmospheric and emotionally charged exchange on image-making under pressure, resisting closure, and documenting oneself as both witness and artist.

And don’t forget! You can watch The Shards too! It’s now streaming on the UnionDocs Membership.Big thanks to our incredible team:

Editor: Alison Rodgers

Mixer: Pedro Castro

Music: Andres Simões

Production Support: Tara Kesavan, A.S.M Kobayashi

This is a production of UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art.

ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES is co-curated and co-organized by Cíntia Gil, Christopher Allen & Jenny Miller.