- Convenors:
-
Caterina Sartori
(Goldsmiths (University of London))
Stephen Hughes (Royal Anthropological Institute)
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- Discussant:
-
Kwame Phillips
(University of Southampton)
- Format:
- Workshop
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 8 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
We welcome proposals from filmmakers who wish to receive feedback on a film work-in-progress at any stage of production. The selected participants will receive feedback from an expert and from their peers in a supportive environment.
Long Abstract:
We welcome proposals from filmmakers who wish receive feedback on a film work-in-progress at any stage of production. The selected participants will get a chance to screen and present their work to an expert: either a filmmaker or an academic drawn from the wide RAI film network who can comment on their work in a generative way. The sessions will be moderated by RAI Film Festival directors Caterina Sartori and Stephen Hughes, and they will be open to the festival audience. We aim to provide a creative and nurturing environment in which filmmakers will benefit from the expertise and sensibility of senior practitioners, scholars and fellow filmmakers. It is an opportunity to receive valuable feedback and encouragement, to think through issues and open questions, and to connect with a network of peers.
Each selected participant will have 30 minutes to present their work and receive comments.
In your proposal please provide:
- a brief summary of your project or a treatment
- information on what stage your project will be at (pre-production, production, post-production)
- an indication of what aspect you would like feedback on (for example but not limited to.: editing, sound design, narrative structure)
- OPTIONAL: a link to a sample of up to 5 minutes of your current project. This can be a trailer or a segment of a longer piece.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Wednesday 8 March, 2023, -Contribution short abstract:
Do desktop multi-modal documentary forms need decolonising? In February 2022 I shared the website www.falaminhairma.org with selected audiences in Mozambique, including content co-creators, participants and collaborators. The curated pop-up screenings and youtube channel were better received. Why? You can view the film here https://festival.raifilm.org.uk/film/sing-my-sister/
Contribution long abstract:
Speak My Sister (www.falaminhairma.org) is a web documentary based around a series of seven musical portraits of Mozambican women who draw on their creative voice to bring about social change. The portraits were researched, filmed, edited and exhibited in collaboration with filmmakers, musicians, exhibitors, activitsts and students from the Higher Institute of Art and Culture in Mozambique’s capital Maputo. In addition to these portraits there are musical performances, illustrated podcasts and short films from behind the scenes that explore participant's perspectives on their research and filming process, editing and exhibition. Together, through personal testimony, poetry, music and dance, the 20 short films offer a Mozambican reflection on the representation of women and the role of women in forming Mozambican cultural identity. During the workshop I will share some of my choices in the authoring of the website and play selected clips to illustrate the potential for dialogue between the films. The feedback I received in Mozambique from test audiences and content creators however has driven me to look further into ideas around multi-modality and 'polyphony'. I am currently exploring these within an i-Docs Polyphonic Documentary research group and will share extracts of work in progress of an alternative multimodal re-working of the 'Speak My Sister' material based on these new ideas. By bringing my experience and uncertainties to this work-in-progress workshop, I hope to provoke discussion around audience reception of multi-modal authoring, especially within the global context of decolonial content production and reception.
Contribution short abstract:
The exhibition project looks not at specific objects of a collection but at the emptiness. How does emptiness manifest itself in? What does it tell? The exhibition addresses different questions concerning the emptiness in a collection by exploring and conveying this through audio-visual media.
Contribution long abstract:
Within the framework of a series of exhibitions at the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, five questions are raised looking at different collections along the key topics of context, provenance, skill, contemporaneity, and reconnecting.
The exhibitions of the workspace series invite us to look closely at objects from different collections and aim to open a dialogue about and around these: What do we want to know? What did we use to want to know in the past - and what did we ignore? Where are the blind spots? What is- or should be - the focus of our work today?
In the framework of this exhibition series, I have the chance to curate an exhibition space. In my project, I have a closer look, not at specific objects, but at the emptiness: at what is missing and what the things not there/not seen can reveal.
My intent is to look closer at a collection/object by using audio-visual media. The aim is, on one side, to generate ethnographic knowledge. On the other, to create material that can be used in the exhibition space to convey different aspects around the topic of emptiness in a collection. By March, the project will be at the stage of elaborating a concept for the exhibition. I hope to get feedback and input on this. More specifically, on the possibilities which audio-visual media can offer in the exhibition space.
Contribution short abstract:
In this on-going project I explore if and how ethnography, audiovisual documentation, archival research, curatorship, and exhibition can make visible the production and circulation of racist images of Afro-descendent people without reinforcing racist social structures in Colombia.
Contribution long abstract:
In my work as anthropologist, curator and researcher, I have engaged in a methodological exploration looking for ways to use ethnography, audiovisual documentation, archival research, curatorship, and exhibition to show and make visible the ways that images of Afro-Colombian, Black, Palenquero and Raizal people have been and still are produced, accumulated and circulated without reinforcing racist social, geographic and knowledge structures in Colombia. Focusing the National Museum of Colombia, and its 2008 exhibition Velorios y santos vivos (Wakes and living saints), developed as an initial step for the inclusion of Black, Afro-Colombian, Raizal and Palenquero people in the museum’s narrative, collections and exhibitions, I investigate ethnographic and visual methods that make it possible for me, an anthropologist who is locally identified as white, or white-mestizo, to counter or question racism and invisibilization of people who have been racialized as “black”, “mulato”, “niche”, “moreno”, among other local denominations. A key issue in this methodological exploration, which is also an ethical one, and that is still unresolved, has to do with the fact that ethnography, archive work and museum exhibition have been instrumental in the production and reproduction of racist representations in Colombian society.