News from the Carsey-Wolf Center | |
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The Coastal Media Project 2025 Student Film Premiere
Friday, August 22 / 7:00 PM
The Carsey-Wolf Center proudly presents the premiere of the 2025 Coastal Media Project student films. The Coastal Media Project is a nine-week intensive environmental media production and documentary studies program. Working in teams, students from a wide range of backgrounds collaborate to produce short films that tell vital and timely stories about the coastal environment.
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Panic!: Social Studies
Revisit the conversation!
This spring, we were thrilled to welcome acclaimed documentarian Lauren Greenfield to the Pollock Theater for a screening of the first two episodes of her recent TV series Social Studies. After the screening, Greenfield and documentary participants Ivy D’Ambrosio and Jonathan Gelfond joined moderator Miguel Penabella (Carsey-Wolf Center) for a discussion about the series, which follows a group of Los Angeles teenagers—including D'Ambosio and Gelfond—and their social media lives over the course of a year. The three discussed the impact of social media on every aspect of teenage social life.
The full video of this conversation is now available to watch on our website!
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CWC Docs: Monkey on a Stick
Video now available!
In April, we presented the hybrid documentary/drama exposé Monkey on a Stick, which charts the meteoric rise of the Hare Krishna movement in the 1970s and 1980s and its scandalous legacy. After the screening, filmmaker Jason Lapeyre and UCSB alum Nori Muster—who was member of the movement—sat down with moderator David Gartrell (UCSB Library) to discuss the development of the film, the shocking history of ISKCON, and how Muster and the UCSB Library contributed to Lapeyre's archival research for the film.
Revisit the conversation, now on our site!
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CWC Global: Captain Volkonogov Escaped
Now playing on our website!
Earlier this year, filmmakers Natasha Merkulova and Alexey Chupov visited the Pollock Theater to present their 2021 film Captain Volkonogov Escaped. Set in a city modeled on Stalinist Russia in 1938, the film follows a secret policeman (played by Anora star Yura Borisov) who goes on the run in order to escape his own execution. After the film, Merkulova and Chupov joined moderator Sasha Razor (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) and discussed the process of researching the historical period and updating it for contemporary audiences.
The full conversation with Merkulova and Chupov is now available on our website!
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CWC Presents: Connectivity
Announcing our 2025-2026 feature series
The Carsey-Wolf Center’s 2025-26 feature series Connectivityexamines the evolving meaning of connection in our contemporary moment. While the term "connectivity" often invokes our ever-increasing entanglement with digital infrastructure and social media networks, this series reimagines the term not only as a technical feature of media, but as a humanistic value and a condition of social and public life. This series embraces connectivity as a framework for thinking critically about the ways in which people use media to connect with ideas and with one another, from the shared experience of moviegoing to the collective bonds forged through storytelling and public dialogue.
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