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Paper short abstract

Drawing on a seven-year autoethnographic film, this paper explores familial silence, bodily memory, and collective witnessing. It argues that dwelling with silence through embodied listening offers ethical possibilities for dialogue, care, and repair in polarised familial and social worlds.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on Liminality, a seven-year autoethnographic documentary project that emerged from an attempt to understand gendered violence, intergenerational suffering, and the politics of silence within my own family. What began as an outward-looking inquiry into gender liminality and queer life-worlds in Germany gradually turned inward, as the camera’s gaze came to rest on my own body, my sibling, and the intimate terrains of family history. This turn emerged through an encounter with the limits of representation, when pain, silence, and unspoken histories could no longer be positioned as external to the researcher.

Filmed across India and Germany, Liminality is a film I have lived through as much as one I made, where filmmaking itself mediates encounters that might otherwise have remained confrontational. The paper explores embodied storytelling as method, foregrounding how non-verbal, sensorial, and affective dimensions of familial silence can be engaged when language proves insufficient.

This paper attends to what unfolded after the making of the film at invitation-based community screenings in Berlin, Delhi, Goa, and Mumbai. In these intimate, non-public settings. These encounters transformed the film from a personal narrative into what I conceptualise as collective witnessing: a relational space in which silence is not resolved through revelation alone, but held through sustained, attentive listening. Thereby, I argue that autoethnography, when situated within collective and dialogic encounters, offers a fragile yet generative condition for dialogue, care, and collective repair across polarised familial and social terrains.

Trailer: vimeo.com/1128695996/56e1323e5c