From April 29 to June 3, Sesc Avenida Paulista promotes the “Maya Deren Program”, an exhibition with film screenings on the Terrace and free in-person and online training activities.

Born in Ukraine, Maya Deren was an American filmmaker and film theorist of the 1940s and 1950s, also acting as a choreographer, dancer, poet, writer and photographer. Deren is a pioneer and reference in the field of experimental cinema, influencing artists such as David Lynch and creating the foundations for the new experimental cinema in the USA in the 1960s . the Afternoon (1943).

The Maya Deren Program begins with a live online masterclass taught by French filmmaker, critic and curator Yann Beauvais . Also noteworthy is the course “Maya Deren: The cinema of women in motion”, taught by Tainah Negreiros , master and doctor in Audiovisual Media and Processes at the University of São Paulo, in addition to four conversation cycles , short film screenings on the Terrace and performance by artist Kanezlumuka .

For Maya Deren, a film was never finished, it was just “abandoned”. Show with abandoned works by Maya Deren and a short by Barbara Hammer that reflects on recurring themes in the filmmaker’s work.

Maya Deren’s Sink (Barbara Hammer, USA, 2011, 30′, color/bp, digital archive display)

Upon discovering in the Anthology Film Archive a sink that belonged to Maya Deren, Barbara Hammer decides to delve into the universe of the filmmaker, considered the “mother of American experimental cinema”. She visits and films the homes where Deren lived, in Los Angeles and New York, and where she has directed some of her films. Through imagery speculations and interviews (among others, with Judith Malina, Carolee Schneemann and Ross Lipmann), she explores issues such as space, time and form in Deren’s work.