Film short abstract:

Transforming Voices: Selection is a selection of short films examining women vulnerability. The films combine experimental imagery, music, sounds and the testimonies of Mexican and Spanish women who shared their experiences of and/or views on gendered vulnerability.

Film long abstract:

Transforming Voices (www.transformingvoices.com) is a research platform using experimental collaborative filmmaking to examine narratives of women organisational vulnerability. Developed during the Covid 19 pandemic by an interdisciplinary team of ethnographers, social scientists and audio-visual artists, Transforming Voices utilises an original filmmaking methodology based on decentred authorship, non-physical (digital) collaboration, and the voice (spoken utterance) as the primary locus of meaning and affect.

The project’s methodology involves four stages. Firstly, social scientists conduct and record conversations, interviews, and focus groups with participants. Secondly, excerpts from the recordings are carefully selected and edited into short (2-5min) narrations. Thirdly, musicians and sound designers from around the world compose music and design effects that are used to transform the narrations into soundscapes. Finally, international filmmakers add visuals to the soundscapes to turn them into short films (3-5min).

The project’s methodology based on digital co-creation eschews individual film authorship in favour of modes of participation, collaboration and accessibility unavailable in more conventional filmmaking processes. Similarly, the project’s focus on the disembodied voice challenges the privileging of observation that underpins common filmmaking and social research techniques such as the long take, observational documentary and thick description, among others.

Film short abstract:

In the Wake of Loss is a documentary portrait that illuminates the intimate and small in the wake of unresolved loss in post-transitional Gambia.

Film long abstract:

In the Wake of Loss presents an ethnographic account of twenty-year-old Amie Lowe, whose father disappeared when she was only three. Amie’s father, Lieutenant Ebou Lowe, was one of the many victims of enforced disappearance during former President Yahya Jammeh’s 22-year-long dictatorship in The Gambia. After Jammeh was forced from power, the current president established a Truth, Reconciliation, and Reparations Commission (2018 - 2021) to investigate his human rights abuses. Since its final report, however, few of the commission’s recommendations have been implemented. This documentary portrait examines how a now-adult child of the forcibly disappeared, in the "post-truth commission era" deals with the ramifications of this violent past after the official channels of mourning have stalled. The personal portrait between Amie in front of the camera and Amie behind the camera illuminates the intimate and small in the interminable wake of unresolved loss.

Film short abstract:

This sound-centric piece evokes part of a ritual cycle in rural Burkina Faso, using experimental strategies of asynchronicity and black screen to undo the primacy of the visual and stress the relevance of the acoustic.

Film long abstract:

Every year men from Karangasso Sambla, Burkina Faso, practice a form of communal hunting that is part of an ecological ritual cycle of renewal of the relationship between humans and the bush environment from which they draw their subsistence. Sound plays an important role both in the mythical origin of this ritual and in the workings of communal hunting. Participants make noise in order to flush animals and communicate with each other via shouts and whistles to signal the presence and direction of prey – in other words largely hunt by ear. After a brief, nocturnal sonic evocation of the myth of the hyena, which forms the starting point for this annual cycle, this film transitions to dawn and immerses the listener in the acoustic environment of a collective hunt from the perspective of a participant. Like many collective rituals characterised by shouting, noise and racket, the hunt is a liminal moment of inversion of an established order necessary to redraw the relationship between humans and the environment on which they depend.

The piece is primarily structured around a composition of sound recordings, with images and text playing a secondary role, following the lead of an emergent series of works in anthropology that treat images as almost “extradiegetic” (Larcher 2022). By breaking the traditional documentary principle of synchronicity between image and sound, or by taking away the visuals entirely, these sonocentric multimedia pieces adopt “sensory incompleteness” as a strategy to involve the imagination of viewers/listeners (Murch 1994, xix–xx).