It’s true. 
Less than two weeks to go before the 2022 NYU Orphan Film Symposium commences at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke, a.k.a. Montreal. An opening screening with 9 short films on Wednesday, June 15, will be followed by three days of presentations and nights of more screenings and. Two panels each morning, two each afternoon; screenings nightly.
It’s also true: registration remains open for this live-in-a-theater event.
We will again have (as since 1999, save for the OMG of 2020) food and drink at hand, returning to the ritual of convivial, symposiastic conversation over meals — where learning continues and collaborations begin.
It’s true that classical Greek symposia (and Roman convivia) blended the pleasures of drinking with the intellectual stimulation of debates on philosophy, poetry, and politics. There’s much about that overly-idealized world created by Mediterranean men we don’t need to re-create. Time to construct dialogue that acknowledges how limited patriarchal, ethnocentric discourses have been. That’s why we say we gather in Tiohtià:ke, the place named in the Kanyen’kéha language spoken long before colonizers arrived. But putting the food, wine, and song — pleasure — back into the process of learning and debate is something to which we are amenable.
Cheers! Here’s to healthy happy symposing among the symposiasts at this edition of the Orphan Film Symposium. Seats remain.
Or as the influential American librarian and curmudgeon* Frederic Beecher Perkins had it, to sympose is to present.
* Michael D. Murray, “Frederick Beecher Perkins: Library Pioneer and Curmudgeon,” MA thesis, San Jose State U, 2009.