Storytellers Institute to welcome documentarian Evan Roberts

Family stories are not always easy to tell, but working through them can be transformative.  On Friday, June 19 award-winning documentary filmmaker Evan Roberts presents his 2014 film Arvind at 7 p.m. in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public.

Roberts is a fellow at Skidmore’s Storytellers Institute this summer. The institute is a program of the John B. Moore Documentary Studies Collaborative at the College.

Arivnd is a powerful story about how queer Texas teenager Arvind Hathaway documents his life and experience of family through play writing. Roberts explores the impact of a mother's mental illness, long absence and later attempts to contact her children through social media, as Arvind revisits old family wounds by writing a play from his mother's perspective. Dan Swinton, a fellow documentary filmmaker and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) graduate who is vice president of production at WMHT, will moderate discussion after the screening.

Roberts' work has crossed the border between fact and fiction-based storytelling, drawing on personal connections. Asked how he came to make this particular film, Roberts said, "Before making Arvind, I wrote and directed two narrative short films based on real stories from my youth. I decided my next film would follow someone through this same creative process. I wanted to see how they fictionalized themselves and the other people in their life. I had met Arvind on the set of my previous film and we had a good connection. When we started working together, we had no idea that his mother would come back into his life after a 12-year absence and that this event would play such a huge role in his subsequent creative work. I was really impressed that Arvind chose to write the film from his mother's point of view—a woman he had no memory of and saw only once in a courtroom." 

A documentarian and educator raised in Rochester, N.Y. and currently based in Austin, Texas, Roberts brings a deep and multi-disciplinary range of skills and ideas to the Storytellers Institute. His experience as a director and producer of films, photographer, and audio documentarian coupled with genuine curiosity and engagement have led to informal mentoring of institute participants working in a variety of documentary media as well as a more formal master class on dissecting narrative structures. He knew just what questions to pose during student project pitches to help initiates tackle the tricky task of marrying story to technique in the institute's first few days.

Evan David Roberts received a B.A. from RIT, studied at the SALT Institute for Documentary Studies, and received an MFA in film production from the University of Texas in Austin in 2014. He is the writer/director of award-winning short films that have screened internationally, including 33 Teeth (narrative) and Arvind (documentary), which received an Austin Film Society grant. Roberts is the founder of Audio Heirlooms, an oral history production company, and facilitates screenwriting workshops on adapting life stories into fiction films. He has spent 15 years in the communications industry directing and producing documentary and narrative films as well as working in audio documentary, sound design, interview, oral histories and photo editing. 

The Storytellers Institute welcomes documentary professionals, Skidmore students and faculty, and the broader Saratoga Springs community for five weeks of lively and thought-provoking conversation, workshops and inspiration. Institute screenings, performances and presentations welcome the public. The 2015 inaugural institute focuses on the theme of family.

For more information on the institute and MDOCS, please click here.  Institute Fellow Jonna McKone's exhibition "An Incomplete History" will be open from 1 to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday, June 24-28, at Case Gallery in Skidmore’s Case Center. Meet the artist at a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. June 26.