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Paper short abstract:

What is co-production, if not a form of amateurism? This paper takes inspiration from KinoKlub Zagreb’s commitment to amateur filmmaking in reflecting on two recent co-production projects, in London and in Zagreb, and looking forward to new research in the area.

Paper long abstract:

“An amateur film is a film that is made out of love…” So states Vedran Šuvar, onetime president of KinoKlub Zagreb, a group that has been making experimental and all other varieties of films since 1928. What is co-production, if not a form of amateurism?

This paper will discuss two participatory filmmaking projects: For the first, COVID Chronicles, I worked closely with a small number of migrants and local activists in the London borough of Haringey to co-create three short films about their experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, I worked to make the process as collaborative as possible but was ultimately responsible for the results. The second was far more open, in that I acted as a workshop leader and co-mentor to teams of local amateur filmmakers at KinoKlub Zagreb. The topics addressed in these films varied widely. What we primarily shared across projects was a lack of time and expertise to make the films we wanted to realize.

In this talk, I sit with these frustrations – common concerns of incompetence – not in hopes of overcoming them, but to reflect on the value of participatory and multimodal practice, as a way to embrace and expand principles and practices of amateurism for new communities, and as a possibility for re-envisioning visual anthropology.