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In the summer of 2024, Tara worked as an instructor for SFFILM’s Youth Filmmaker Camp. She assisted in the design and implementation of the camp curriculum as well as logistics, preparation, and inventory of equipment, materials, and resources. Tara managed a team of interns in assigning roles and tasks, and managed guest visits and lecturers including an amazing lineup of guests — Searit Huluf, Estevan Padilla, Elivia Shaw, Florencia Manovil, Daniel Freeman, and many others.
In production, the campers took turns being the director, cinematographer, doing sound, lighting, acting, and more. In post-production, their group film was then broken down into smaller groups allowing students to have more hands-on time with Premiere Pro and to make their own unique editing choices such as color, transitions, and music.
In October 2024, workshop participants embraced their dark side in a scratch paper workshop—a popular ninth-century reproduction technique from Great Britain and France. In this workshop, Tara led the process of bringing abstract self-portraits to life using assorted collage materials on the black paper.
In June 2024, Tara led a Tikar-Inspired Mat Making workshop at BAMPFA. Borneo-based Malaysian artist Yee I-Lann uses the traditional tikar, or woven mat, to tell a collaborative story of the colonization of her native land and culture. Working with the artist, girls and women in her community wove numerous tikar to express cultural resilience and to consider the climate crisis. After an interactive tour of Yee I-Lann’s Art Wall, TIKAR/MEJA/PLASTIK, participants wove a personalized table mat using paper and mixed-media materials to tell a story of their origins.
Tara Baghdassarian worked in SFFILM’s education department during theor 67th annual Film Festival. Her role as the Education Coordinator included:
- Coordinating with educators and schools throughout the Bay Area to manage filmmaker visits for SFFILM’s “Schools at the Festival” 2024 program.
- Working closely with other SFFILM departments to plan visits, transportation, and other logistics for filmmakers and their teams.
- Facilitating discussions and Q&A’s between filmmakers and K-12 classrooms — making sure students remained inspired and engaged in conversations.
- Working with a range of celebrated filmmakers including Farah Nabulsi, Searit Kahsay Huluf, Eric Rosales, Mark Decena, Charles-Olivier Michaud, Travis Ratcliff, Brody Carmichael, and many more.
In January 2024, workshop participants created images through the power of sunlight in a chlorophyll printing workshop where images on transparencies are naturally transferred onto organic matter. This process was pioneered by Binh Danh, the child of Vietnamese refugees, who used this technique to transfer archival images of the Vietnam war and genocide victims onto leaves indigenous to places where those experiences occurred. In this workshop, we created messages to the land that examine themes of nature, memory, and ephemerality.
At the 2023 Tumanyan Storytelling Festival, Tara led a workshop "Letter to the Land," where art merged with nature, inviting introspection on our connection to the world around us. Participants were invited to collect plants and apply a special chlorophyll print technique to transfer images onto the plants.
At the Francophone Center in Goris, Armenia, Tara worked with students from Goris as well as refugee children from Artsakh on a mural quilt that symbolically fused together landscapes that reminded them of home. Over 100,000 indigenous Armenians were forced to flee their home of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh).
Tara also led a separate class on surrealism, teaching André Breton’s concept of the exquisite corpse.
This was the product of a four week shadow puppetry theater workshop I led at TUMO Gyumri. The theme: history meets technology. The short play recounted the story of the old Gyumri legend of Alek and his faeton as they navigate through a city encountering changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution and later, the Digital Age. The curriculum included storyboarding, scriptwriting, hand drawn and cut puppet creation, and lengthy rehearsals with a live musical band. The students were able to explore an old folktale under a modern light.
Check out TUMO’s quick snippet of the performance here: https://www.facebook.com/tumocenter/videos/1493953037309524/UzpfSTUxNjE5NjkzMzozMDYwNjExMjk0OTk0MTQ6MTA6MTQ4MzI1NzYwMDoxNTE0NzkzNTk5OjQ5MzAyNjQzODE5NTY1NjEyMzY/
This was the product of an intensive five week shadow puppetry theater workshop I led at TUMO Yerevan. The theme: history meets technology. Three Tumo students begin playing an innocent Armenian folklore video game, but suddenly find themselves falling into the old legends and needing to navigate through history by advancing to each game level. The performance interwove the famous Armenian myths including the legend of the Duduk, the legend of Lavash with King Aram, and the legend of Akhtamar. The curriculum included storyboarding, scriptwriting, hand drawn and cut puppet creation, painting, and lengthy rehearsals resulting in a live performance with a 50 member audience. The students were able to explore an old folktale under a modern light.
This was the final product of an eight day stop motion film workshop at the Gyumri Tumo Center in Armenia. Each student was given one word for inspiration and encouraged to collaborate with classmates in order to create a cohesive and exquisite dream sequence. This was every student's first time experimenting with stop motion and it was a blast!
