Film short abstract

The film offers an immersive and nuanced exploration of the environmental issues surrounding the potential opening of a lithium mine in France. Through a filmed ethnography, the documentary examines how energy transition policies are perceived and experienced locally.

Film synopsis

Échassières, in the Allier department: four hundred inhabitants, a few shops that are holding out, and a subsoil rich in resources. After tungsten and kaolin mining, lithium is now in the spotlight. For some, the extraction of this mineral, which is essential for electric mobility, will be the key to the region's demographic and economic survival, as well as an important step towards securing the national supply of critical raw materials. For others, intensive exploitation of the subsoil would be a reckless rush forward, generating major environmental impacts and anachronistic at a time when planetary boundaries are being exceeded. By presenting the contrasting positions of the inhabitants, the film highlights the uncertainties associated with energy transition policies in a region directly affected by their implementation.

Film short abstract

An autoethnographic journey to the outskirts of the city where I spent my childhood in northern Chile.

Film synopsis

The film is an autoethnographic journey to the outskirts of the city where I spent my childhood in northern Chile, between the Atacama Desert and the Pacific Ocean. It's an attempt to address the question of how do we remember those times and places we no longer inhabit, and where do we position our subjective memories within a broader context of national history, local geography and ruins of industrial architecture.

Film short abstract

Chinese Gender Studies students abroad navigate tensions between Western theory and lived experience, examining their position as "outsiders-within" global academia through cross-dialogue in Mandarin, challenging linguistic hierarchies and proposing decentering as critical practice.

Film synopsis

This project explores how Chinese Gender Studies students abroad navigate tensions between Western gender theory and their lived experiences in Chinese society, while negotiating their position as "outsiders-within" in global academic spaces shaped by racial, linguistic, and epistemic hierarchies.

Using documentary practice as both research method and theory-making, the film draws on visual narrative inquiry and feminist standpoint epistemology. Through in-depth interviews with 13 Chinese students across the Europe, United States, Australia, and Asia, it examines how gender knowledge travels and transforms across borders. A cross-dialogue editing method allows voices to respond to and contradict one another, foregrounding collective experience embedded within broader institutional and geopolitical structures.

Three themes organize the documentary: motivations for choosing Gender Studies within Chinese educational contexts; struggles and possibilities of being "outsiders-within" Western classrooms marked by language barriers and racialisation; and the ambivalent experience of privilege, where elite education abroad coexists with guilt and uncertainty about political responsibility.

The documentary is filmed in Mandarin Chinese—a deliberate epistemic choice that preserves affective nuance and challenges English as the default medium of academic knowledge. This linguistic decision contributes to decolonial debates on multilingual knowledge production.

Drawing on feminist standpoint theory, the project treats marginalized experience as critical for mapping institutional power rather than extractable data. It contributes to scholarship on transnational education and feminist pedagogy while advancing cross-dialogue editing as a decentering research strategy. Rather than offering solutions, the film proposes "de-centering" as an ongoing practice of unsettling fixed centers of language, theory, and authority.