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Charles de Agustin makes films that scavenge at the boundaries of institutional critique. Based in Brooklyn, his practice is mutually informed by experiences as an educator, organizer, and nonprofit worker.
2023-25 solo screenings include Arts + Literature Laboratory (Madison), Film-Makers’ Cooperative (NY), Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), Maysles Documentary Center (NY), Millennium Film Workshop (Brooklyn), Montez Press Radio (NY), Spectacle (Brooklyn), Vox Populi / South Philly Autonomous Cinema (PHL), and XINEMA (Vancouver).
2021-24 group presentations include Alternative Film/Video (Belgrade; Significant Achievement Award), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan), Athens Film + Video Festival (Ohio), Depot Kunst und Diskussion (Vienna), Film Diary NYC, ISFF Nijmegen (NL), Kassel Dokfest (Germany), New Contemporaries at South London Gallery (England), Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival (Chicago), Revolutions per Minute Festival (Boston), Rhode Island School of Design (US), and Saigon Experimental Film Festival (Vietnam).
de Agustin has received support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2025), Conditions Online Programme (2024-25), New York State Council on the Arts (2024), Brooklyn Arts Council (2024), Locarno BaseCamp Academy (2023), Center for Book Arts’ Fine Press Seminar (2023), The Elephant Trust (2021), and Mansfield-Ruddock Art Prize (2021). Writing about his work has appeared in Filmmaker Magazine, cinemóvil nyc / Printed Matter, and Screen Slate. de Agustin received a BFA in filmmaking and philosophy at Rutgers University and an MFA in studio art at the University of Oxford.
Recent select works:
The works available in full below are online for personal and classroom consumption. If you teach at a university, please consider asking your library to purchase an educational license copy. Reach out here to request links for other works that aren’t public yet, or to pursue institutional presentations.
Sunset Seduction, 2024, US. 45-minute film (color, sound, audio description, open captioning) with artist contract and extended discussion.
trailer here, contact for a screener and further info
Sunset Seduction stars a liberal philanthropist yearning for his next fling with radical politics. Made as the Palestine solidarity movement escalated in 2024, the work unfolds in essayistic fragments considering ideas of freedom, violence, and the seductive capture of revolutionary ideology. Sunset Seduction is an evolving project centered on a 45-minute film alongside site-specific contracts and discussions, together aiming to materialize the particular responsibilities of cultural workers in the global north.
Mission Drift, 2023, US. 13-minute video (b/w, sound) with extended discussion. Audio description and open captioning.
excerpt here, contact for full version
zine by Emily Rose Apter published by cinemóvil nyc and distributed via Printed Matter
Mission Drift follows a nonprofit art gallery worker who tries to stay afloat when a horny sadomasochistic philanthropist infiltrates the organization. The work surveys insufficiencies across commercial, nonprofit, academic, and DIY institutions, its tragic narrative taking aim at the seductive nature of contemporary philanthropy, pointing toward the need to constantly reinvent strategies against mechanisms of capture. The medium of Mission Drift is described as “video and discussion:” the work may only be publicly presented if it is followed by a robust audience discussion on the issues at hand.
Interior Shot, 2023, US. Video, color, sound. Audio description and open captioning. 9 minutes.
Interior Shot is composed of my own surgery footage and breathing exam audio, alongside poetry on grief, work, luck, and time.
Hook, 2023, US/UK. Paperback book, 5x8 inches, black and white, 103 pages.
Available for purchase here, or contact for NYC pickup
At a used bookshop in Oxford, England, I found a tattered relic of local tourism/imperialism published in 1850. I liked the dismal state of the book, so I digitally scanned and deep-fried it. I’ve spent a lot of time with one particularly destroyed image, where I can still feel the spirit of a book; a line, a gesture; it looks like a hook. A hook is the part of a song that usually sticks in your head; what pierces a fish on the line to be reeled in. A hook is a method of capture.
Hook is a book of poetry and images by Charles de Agustin mostly written at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford starting in 2020, followed by a period in London and a long stretch of editing in Brooklyn, completed in 2023.
Exaggerations, 2022, US/UK/NL. Video, color, sound. Audio description and open captioning. 20 minutes.
A supernatural road trip in the Scottish village of Foyers, the American hamlet of Grovers Mill, and reading breaks in an Amsterdam film library. We try to pick at belief and clarity. Difficulties between loving your work, working at loving, making a living. Language piles up, crashes down, and maybe becomes something else.
Audio description and open captioning are inseparable parts of this work. The film intends to dwell on accessibility through an audiovisual and socioeconomic lens, presenting a central question halfway through: “what does it mean to have a complete experience?” It’s difficult to embrace the messy ambiguities of this goal.
Two main characters emerge from the two voices. They both grow sleepy and impatient with the film but still work through it alongside the viewers, playing with their authority, ethics, and dogmatic forms of artistic/political expression. The narration text appropriates diverse sources such as Orson Welles, Carolyn Lazard, monster sighting websites, a Twitter thread by a depressed rich person, and more threaded into my own poetic writings.
supported by The Elephant Trust and Mansfield-Ruddock Art Prize
Reading Time (minimum 17 minutes), 2021, UK. Video, sound, text.
Video, sound, text. Seminar room, bullet points. Narrator, gestures, QR code. Distance from white guilt, malaise. Scales of death, datedness. Zoom out, in, out (as nobody is pure, the contradictions in striving toward an ethics of practice are insurmountable). Big drop. Scream.
in Mansfield College permanent collection, Oxford
Dramatic Narrative, 2020, 64 minutes, video (color, sound). Elegy (2020-22), 18 minutes, video (b/w, sound).
excerpt here, contact for full version
Grand ambitions and failures; cinema, fraternity, whiteness, consent, appropriation.
thank johnson i’m woke, 2019, US. Video, color, sound. 12 minutes.
Part essay, part diary, part panic attack. A narrator attempts to attribute the gentrification of New Brunswick, New Jersey since the 1970s to the longtime stature of Johnson & Johnson’s world headquarters in the American city, but is possessed by the past civic-corporate figures in question through the urban space. The voice escapes from these appropriated reflections into personal anecdotes, emerging as a caricature of the white gentrifier, perpetually anxious about their useless wokeness. I aim to dwell on the impossibilities between whiteness, complicity, and a radical praxis through the unclear relationship between “the narrator” and myself as the artist.