PROGRAMMING

As the lines between digital and traditional media continue to blur, social platforms have become powerful launchpads for storytelling, comedy, and creative careers across entertainment. This panel explores how creators are turning short-form content and viral moments into pathways into film, TV, stand-up, writing rooms, and beyond. We’ll unpack the creative and logistical realities of co-productions, building audiences across platforms, and translating digital momentum into lasting impact. From TikTok to the writer’s room, panelists will share how they’re reshaping the entertainment industry—one post at a time.

In this workshop, filmmaker Salem Daniel explores the power of cinema as a tool for archiving memory and bearing witness to histories that might otherwise be lost with the passing of a generation. Using her upcoming short film When I Was a Child, as a case study, Salem will guide participants through both the theoretical and practical aspects of transforming lived experience into cinematic storytelling.

Topics include understanding film as an archival tool, recording and preserving oral histories, adapting stories into scripts, and expanding personal archives. Participants leave with practical tools, resources, and inspiration to document and translate oral histories into their own projects.

“Yesken” in Amharic refers to the pause as coffee grounds settle in the jebena (clay pot), a moment that cannot be rushed. This gathering invites reflection on memory and non-conventional archives—coffee, food, immigrant restaurants, and elders—through a performative screening of the work-in-progress film Empress Taytu. Centering the filmmaker’s family’s Cleveland restaurant as a site of belonging and counter-archive, the film revisits its role in the first Ethiopian diasporic community in Ohio and the 1990s African immigrant experience. The screening opens space for conversation at the intersections of memory, archives, decolonial filmmaking, and new storytelling technologies.