My name is Brandon Kaufman and I'm currently a fourth year student at McGill working on a Joint Honours degree in History and Cultural Studies. My main academic interests are in cultural and intellectual histories. My work mostly focuses on interfaces between film and modernism in Eastern and Central Europe in the twentieth century, and the American cinematic avant-garde that emerged in New York in the 1960s.

Outside the academy, I write for Cult MTL, Montreal's alt-monthly newspaper, and do some freelance writing on film elsewhere. My main passion, though, is filmmaking, and I plan on pursuing an MFA in directing after I complete my degree. My project for B21 is concerned with the future of experimental cinema, namely the diary film. This rather unique form seems to me an important nexus between self-expression and personal/collective histories, and especially how those two are mediated by technology and media.

My investigation into what the diary film will look like in 2050 will, I hope, take the form of a creative film project, one which utilizes archives and historical research to look into the future.