Documentary Media Studies - The New School

On May 21, 2026, students, alumni, faculty, friends, and family gathered at Tishman Auditorium for the 18th and final edition of Truth Be Told, the annual documentary film festival of The New School’s Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies. Thank you for joining us!

✨Meet the filmmakers who are showcasing their films at the upcoming Truth Be Told Festival on the 21st of May! It’s happening tomorrow at 6pm so RSVP if you haven’t already!

✨Mmabatho Makhene is a filmmaker form South-Africa. Born into the downfall of apartheid, then later migrating to Philadelphia, she brings a transnational perspective to her scholarship and creative practice. Her research examines the intersections of race, gender and representation, seeking to interrogate structures of power and expand space for marginalized voices.

✨PHL Loves You Back: Set in Philadelphia, one of the poorest major cities in the United States, this short film explores the systemic injustices that continue to shape everyday life, particularly for marginalized communities. Combining observational imagery with AI-generated and synthetic media, the film interrogates how inequality becomes embedded within the social, economic, and visual fabric of the city.

[doc studies, documentary, the new school, truth be told festival]

✨Meet the filmmakers who are showcasing their films at the upcoming Truth Be Told Festival on the 21st of May!

✨Mariana Giacobbe is an Argentinian journalist, editor, and emerging documentary practitioner based in New York. She holds an MA in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism from The New School.

✨To Bury a River: In Queens, New York, Flushing Meadows–Corona Park served as the stage for Robert Moses’s two World’s Fairs, spectacles of mid-century American optimism centered on progress, modernization, and global unity. Today, the site stands less as a monument to the future than as a landscape of erasure: polluted waters, abandoned fair structures, and ongoing development projects exposing unresolved histories of power, planning, and displacement.

[doc studies, documentary, the new school, truth be told]

✨Meet the filmmakers who are showcasing their films at the upcoming Truth Be Told Festival on the 21st of May!

✨Mia Gleklen (she/her) is a filmmaker from Washington, DC. She is interested in the intimacy of everyday life—turning her camera toward family, friends, and those who invite her into their world. Guided by curiosity, she asks questions that linger, often uncovering what sits just beneath the surface. Her work is an attempt to listen closely, learn deeply, and notice what might otherwise be overlooked.

✨Just Judy: Judy, an aging clown unable to have children of her own, has built a life shaped by humor and quiet acceptance. Through moments of performance, routine, and reflection, the film explores how fulfillment is constructed—and what it means to embrace a life that looks different than expected.

[doc studies, the new school, documentary, truth be told festival]

✨Meet the filmmakers who are showcasing their films at the upcoming Truth Be Told Festival on the 21st of May!

✨高胜寒 Shenghan Gao (b. Chengdu, China) forages across dance, history, and ecology, and cooks with mediums of film, performance, and participatory practice. Her work unravels the systems settler colonialism and capitalism have embedded in the mundane - the names we carry, the food we cook, the weeds we pass every day.

✨Invasive Kin 同在异乡为异客: A dream documentary weaves together the filmmaker’s experience as an immigrant in New York City with the planetary life of mugwort - an “invasive” plant that, like many immigrants, refuses to be contained. Moving through a naval cemetery, a Chinese-American chef’s kitchen, Moxa stick factory in China, Chinatown street markets, and a botanical herbarium, the film asks: what does it mean to belong, to cross borders, to thrive? Can we learn to root together?

[doc studies, documentary, truth be told festival]

✨Meet the filmmakers who are showcasing their films at the upcoming Truth Be Told Festival on the 21st of May!

✨Alexa Bakony is a filmmaker from Budapest, Hungary. Her debut feature documentary, Colors of Tobi (2021), received support and recognition from the Sundance Documentary Fund, HBO Europe’s Development Fund, and the Hungarian Film Critic’s Award, among others. Her upcoming feature documentary, Highways of Hope, is supported by Chicken & Egg Pictures.

✨The Upthrown Stone: Hungarian filmmaker Alexa Bakony chronicles her life in New York, caught between two political worlds. From Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral election to gatherings of the American Hungarian Citizens’ League, she explores identity and belonging. As Viktor Orbán’s unprecedented defeat reshapes Hungary, Alexa confronts what it means to witness history from afar, and questions where home truly is.

[doc studies, the new school, documentary film, truth be told festival]

Thank you to everyone who joined us for the screening of The Upper Room & Specular Fiction with Coleman Collins!

Our next and last event of the semester with be the 18th Annual Documentary Film Festival, Truth Be Told on the 21st of May!

Full program will be announced shortly.

Save the date! May 21st @ 6pm!

An Evening of Original Documentary Shorts:

The Graduate Certificate in Documentary Media Studies is proud to present Truth be Told, its eighteenth annual festival of original short films made by students in the class of 2026.

Each work is the result of a year of intensive study in documentary cinema production, history, theory, and aesthetics.

**Full program to be announced shortly**

The screenings will be followed by a faculty-led Q & A with the filmmakers and a light reception.

Admission is free and open to the public.

Registration is required.

Hosted by Amir Husak, Director of the Documentary Media Studies Graduate Certificate Program at The New School. Co-produced with Documentary Program Associates Arushi Kalia (Media Studies ‘26) and Guili Mikovicious (Media Management ‘26).