Paper short abstract:

The collaborative filmmaking experience of "Lala", a hybrid film made with a community of paperless Roma teenagers in Italy, became the context in which a process of recognition of "othering" gaze dynamics and the invisibility erased from our society were collectively articulated.

Paper long abstract:

Integrating the documentary genre-specific approach with material archive and the use of staging, the film "Lala" investigates the grey areas of the laws regulating Italian citizenship for second generation Roma children. The attempt of staging a fiction film, becomes the pretext for involving a group of teenagers in a collective reflection on lack of citizenship rights and invisibility. The material archive related to the story of a paperless girl trying to obtain her documents in the passage to 18 years old, shot about ten years ago in MiniDV format, represents the red thread that holds the fictional elements sewn together with the issues addressed by the documentary material. Through the exploration of Boal's theatre of the oppress "forum" and the construction of Brechtian mechanism of dismantling of the "third wall", the film builds the relationship with the viewer on a familiarization/defamiliarization mechanism. This process is aimed at creating a displacement that reproduces the experience disorientation of those seeking to obtain documents in a bureaucratic labyrinth, at the same time, it becomes a disclosure of "othering" gaze dynamics and an experience of recognition of the invisibility erased from our society. The paper aims at discussing the ways in which this process took place collaboratively in the space of a 5-year project, how participation and co-writing dynamics were articulated and negotiated, how the challenges and the discoveries collected within in it were faced and integrated within the process.