The Flaherty Film Seminar, the USC Center for Ethnographic Media Arts (CEMA), USC School of Cinematic Arts, and Los Angeles Filmforum present: The 2025 Los Angeles Flaherty Pod.

Entering its 70th year, the Flaherty Film Seminar is revered as one of the most significant convenings around non-fiction cinema. Each year filmmakers, scholars, students, curators, critics, archivists, and cinephiles gather for an immersive, week-long program of film screenings, in-depth discussions, artist talks, installations, and/or performances around a theme.

Of course weirdo art film languishes on the periphery of conventional film, but why has one James Otis, clearly brilliant yet oddly invisible, languished on the periphery of weirdo art film? Some fault lies in the stars, some in Otis himself, the confessed worst promoter of his own work. Contradictions emerge almost immediately with Otis, a polymath educated in math, sculpture, computer science, film studies and artistic practices he calls “gesturing” and “finger twiddling.” He’s a lucid dreamer of the mundane, a timeless anachronism, and a skeptic of certainty. Otis displayed remarkable perceptual abilities at an early age. Concerned about the seven-year-old’s description of binocular vision, his parents took him to a doctor who prescribed a series of eye exercises—exercises that only heightened his acuity. At the age of 19, too aware of his reliance on vision, he blindfolded himself for 9 days.