Edit Your Way Through Life with Joe Bini and Maya Daisy Hawke
All of us are editors. Explore upskilling your storytelling tools to make cinema from the everyday.
In this day and age, we may not know it, but we are all editors. We capture, gather and combine images and audio across technology as easily as we breathe. But what if we thought about it a little more, expanded our capabilities, harnessed the tricks of cinema outside the constraints of the movie theatre to deepen our ability to express ourselves? The language of cinema is available to everyone, the tools are in our hands.
Joe and Maya specialize in do-it-yourself filmmaking: making something out of seemingly nothing—from the stuff of memory and imagination—using only consumer tech and scavenger skills. The class is designed for anyone interested not only in live cinema but also in alternative filmmaking and storytelling forms. It promises to be a performance in and of itself.
Maya Daisy Hawke (Navalny, Sugarcane) and Joe Bini (Grizzly Man, We Need to Talk About Kevin) are renowned film editors who, in recent years, have brought their fiction and non-fiction storytelling expertise to other forms of storytelling. One example is Little Ethiopia, a live cinema piece performed as a dialogue between the couple speaking to each other through their own forms of cinema language. The project emerged from social media performance pieces Maya made (Box of Birds, Currency of Despair) and it led to Joe’s current project (Burden of Other People’s Dreams), which he describes as a "book-film".
You will learn cinema techniques that can be used by anyone, anywhere, to tell your own stories using your own voice, for very little money. Live cinema bypasses traditional distribution methods and gatekeeping - bringing stories to audiences in new, deeply personal forms.
Joe and Maya specialize in do-it-yourself filmmaking: making something out of seemingly nothing—from the stuff of memory and imagination—using only consumer tech and scavenger skills. The class is designed for anyone interested not only in live cinema but also in alternative filmmaking and storytelling forms. It promises to be a performance in and of itself.
Program
Part 1
Maya and Joe will run through different techniques and approaches in making live cinema, tracing their ten year journey of storytelling in the space.
Part 2
Attendees will break into groups to workshop ideas that could take the form of live cinema. Maya and Joe will rotate around the room to offer feedback on storytelling tools and approaches.
Facilitators
Maya Daisy Hawke is credited as editor on Oscar and double Sundance Audience Award-winning Navalny, and Oscar nominated Sugarcane, which won the Directing Award at Sundance 2024. She co-edited Cave of Forgotten Dreams for Werner Herzog. Supervising and Consulting Editor credits include Oscar nominee Black Box Diaries (Sundance 2024), Joonam (Sundance 2023), The Dating Game (Sundance 2025), River of Grass (HotDocs 2025), After a Revolution (IDFA 2022), A Photographic Memory (True/False 2024), Band (2022 HotDocs) and many others. She has also edited documentary series’ for the BBC and commercials for Apple. She was an assistant editor on eight films with Werner Herzog, including Grizzly Man. Her own experimental films have been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Moving Image NYC; Sundance Film Festival; ICA Frames of Representation London; LACMA; Camden International Film Festival and IDFA. She is the co-director, with Joe Bini, of Little Ethiopia, a live documentary. She has been an advisor at seven Sundance labs since 2017, a fellow at the 2018 Sundance Nonfiction Directors Residency, and a Sundance Interdisciplinary Fellow in 2020. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She is a New Zealand-American living in London.
Joe Bini is an award-winning filmmaker, editor, and writer who has collaborated on acclaimed fiction and nonfiction films with renowned filmmakers including: Werner Herzog (for 19 years), Lynne Ramsay, Andrea Arnold, Ross McElwee, Laura Poitras, Nick Broomfield, Gianfranco Rosi, and Alexander Payne. Among numerous awards these films garnered is a Primetime Emmy award he won for nonfiction writing.
Bini’s work as a filmmaker and live cinema creator (Little Ethiopia, A Thousand Thoughts) playfully crosses the boundaries between mediums, mixing cinema and live performance and, now with Burden of Other People’s Dreams, cinema and the written word.
Zara Meerza is an Emmy award-winning journalist, screenwriter, producer and chaos agent who will facilitate the masterclass. Her work can be found on HBO, VICE, Conde Nast, BBC, We Present, Air Mail, The Fence and more. She is the Editor in Chief of best-selling documentary Substack Documentary Minus.
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Media Release Clause
By attending this event, you consent to being photographed, filmed, or recorded, and grant Index Space and the facilitators permission to use this content for promotional or informational purposes.