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Project short description

This is an observational documentary exploring the deep bond between humans and cattle. Through four intimate stories—spanning dairy farming, sacred cows, leather craftsmanship, and ritual sacrifice—the film invites the audience to reflect on the interdependence between humans and cattle.

Project long description

This observational documentary explores the relationship between humans and cattle. Set in Italy and Nepal, the film sheds light on cattle’s experiences through birth, labour, reverence, and death, revealing the interdependence of humans and cattle across cultures.

Structured around four intimate stories, the film alternates between the two countries, examining cattle’s role in both the physical and spiritual realms of human life:

• In Italy, a small herd of dairy cows sustains a family farm dating back to the 1700s. Located on Milan’s urban-rural edge, the farm is a last defence against encroaching development.

• In rural area of Bhaktapur, three sacred cows live under the care of a Hindu woman who considers them family. Their milk provides essential income, helping the household navigate Nepal’s rapid modernization.

• In Bologna (Italy), an artisan transforms the hide of a once-living cow into handmade leather goods, preserving a fading craft challenged by ethical concerns and mass production.

• In a Hindu temple in Bhaktapur, a buffalo is revered and cared for by a group of men. Though he is seen as a demonic symbol in local beliefs and chosen for an annual sacrifice to restore cosmic balance, he receives daily devotion until the end.

Rather than defining the human-cattle relationship, the film observes, listens, and follows, leaving the audience to interpret its complexities. The film invites viewers to reflect on the deep bond between humans and cattle through the conflicting emotions of those who get through their daily lives with cattle.

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Project short description

Bharath Ananthanarayana is a PhD student at the University of Exeter. His research is a 'following' of ginger into its commodity-scape emerging out of the Western Ghats in India is an interactive documentary practice.

Project long description

Commodity chains have come of age. They no longer display a classic followability, like many studies that ‘follow-the-thing’ by tracing an object back to its source of production. The more one follows, the more one notices that certain sections of the system-of-provision become ‘mutable’ and ‘disposable’ (Hulme, 2016). My thing of following, ginger, similarly is constantly in a flux, shows traits of mobility and transience, and loves a rupture. I follow ginger beginning in the Western Ghats of India across multiple sites, to discover the often-overlooked processes, dynamics and connections between people, cultures, technology, and the 'gaps’ in its economy (Sodero et al, 2021).

I adopt a messy method to uncover the patchiness of the following, as an interactive documentary practice. It is an endeavour to develop expanded and open-space ways of thinking with and through the documentary. Following ginger across multiple sites, through this process, foregrounds the messiness of the tangle surrounding it, acknowledging the complexity and uncertainty in its ongoing-ness. The practice offers potential to work with documentary in ways that are collaborative, non-hierarchical, polyphonic, and unresolved. It affords ‘staying with the trouble’ as against seeking resolution and closure based on dramatic narrative and a linear causal thinking (Polyphonic Documentary, 2021). The resulting polyphonic documentary offers accessibility - to the missing sub-altern, and to an audience beyond the academic circles. The documentary emerges as a tool helping negotiate increasingly urgent challenges of ecological degradation and ideological polarisation.

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Project short description

This is a multimodal, material semiotic experiment in interweaving 3 storylines. The ethnographic footage draws from fieldwork in the Netherlands and Bhutan about interventions in personal, planetary, and pluriversal health. If agency is distributed, how to intervene in systems that generate harm?

Project long description

Over the last fifteen years, I've been interested in reimagining how health and development are done in settings that have not been directly colonized. In contrast to a growthist logic of intervention that targets individual bodies to increase productivity, the logic of tendrel (interdependent origination in Dzongkha) emphasizes that bodies emerge in an ecology of relations. But through this Vajrayana Buddhist cosmology, not all relations are liberatory. Some require delinking. And humans are not the only sentient beings wandering the planet. For example - disruptions in the flow of rainfall signal disrupted relations with land beings.

This multimodal experiment seeks to embody the relational cosmology of tendrel - to make it sensible and relatable. I experiment with this in the research process itself by working with colleagues and former students in Bhutan. In the storytelling, I weave between a personal account of menstrual disruption due to the covid-19 pandemic, the tale of a planetary movement seeking climate justice in the face of floods and uncertain futures in the Netherlands, and pluriversal approaches to treating a dry spell that threatens humans and multiple species in Bhutan.

These stories share a preoccupation with uneven flows, though they convey different symptoms, causal models, and intervention technologies. What might intervening in future health and development sound like, look like, taste like, if animated by the logic of tendrel? Who to hold accountable for uneven flows in an interdependent pluriverse? The project seeks to stimulate this line of speculation and sensation among heterogeneous audiences.

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Project short description

"Telescope" is an ethnographic film exploring memory, community resilience, and multispecies relationships along the rapidly eroding Telescope Beach in Grenada. Through collaborative filmmaking, this film documents how community members defend their shoreline against the impacts of climate change.

Project long description

The coastal community of Grenville, Grenada are facing the rapidly worsening impacts of climate change, which threaten their homes and livelihoods. "Telescope" is a multimodal ethnographic film which uses collaborative storytelling to explore memories and imagined futures of Telescope Beach. Through documenting coastal conservation efforts with local community members-- including fishers, farmers, and marine biologists-- this film navigates environmental loss, colonial legacies, and more-than-human coastal resilience in the face of global climate change.

This film was created over four months of field work as part of the director's MA dissertation in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, and was made possible through the generous contributions of local collaborators, Anthony Joseph, Naomi Andrews, and Olando Harvey. "Telescope" examines how coral gardening projects, mangrove restoration, and local histories work together to shape multispecies relatedness in coastal ecosystems. Combining observational footage of the eroding shoreline with collaboratively produced scenes of community members, the film prompts insights into local experiences of climate change, and creates nuanced portraits of more-than-human ecopolitical sovereignty. The film is in editing stages and seeks to refine a balance between the observational and experimental techniques, integrating local testimony with sensory immersion, in preparation for future festival submissions.

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Project short description

This film is the research of James Dunlop MBE, a documentary filmmaker currently undertaking his PhD in ethnographic documentary filmmaking. Utilising two-cameras while self-shooting, this short pushes the technological and filmmaker boundaries of modern, original documentary filmmaking today.

Project long description

Participatory documentary emerged from the traditions of the 1960s cinéma verité revolution with Jean Rouch, the French filmmaker and anthropologist. The mode showcases the filmmaker playing a dominant role within the documentary, typically ethnographic, with one popular method of the director speaking with contributors while holding the camera, alone, and never seen on screen - the styles of Molly Dineen or Marc Issacs. But what happens if the lone filmmaker, holding the camera, is also on camera for the first time? How does the filmmaker film themselves and what are the implications for the audience as, for the first time, they can jump into a first-person journey in the shoes of the filmmaker?

This film, along with others, is the research of James Dunlop MBE, a documentary filmmaker currently undertaking his PhD specialising in this field under Dr Pete Turner. Utilising two-cameras while self-shooting, this short truly is pushing the technological and filmmaker boundaries of modern, original documentary filmmaking today as it explores an experimental cinematographic format tool for use in documentary. Created and pioneered as the ‘SMARTI Format Tool’ - "simultaneous, multi-angle, behavioural-aesthetic, perspective" - the cinematographic technique explores the filming of multiple camera angles simultaneously, capturing behaviour on camera, from a single perspective.

Designed for ethnographic documentaries that delve into microcultures and communities, the format's aims include to increase the audience’s perceived perception of both ‘truth’ as well as intimacy in documentary.

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Project short description

This project is based on my ongoing PhD ethnomusicological research on Karen refugees along the Thai-Burmese border. The sensory ethnography consists of an ethnographic film as a visual ethnography and soundscape compositions as a sound ethnography, which I could present.

Project long description

The Karen are an ethnic minority group primarily based in Burma; many have been persecuted by the Burmese military junta for several decades and have migrated to border areas of Thailand. I am studying Karen music through the theoretical lenses of identity, diaspora, and war, specifically investigating how it shapes and expresses Karen ethnic identity, constructs cultural memory, and engages with themes of war, trauma, and resilience. While studying Karen traditional music, I primarily focus on Karen youth rap.

This research produces a multi-sensory ethnography: an ethnographic film and soundscape compositions. I am currently in the field collecting footage and experimenting with various ways of editing.The film will center on oral stories and Karen music documentation, such as incorporating eight to ten interwoven individual narratives interspersed with related Karen music videos. These narratives, based on participant interviews, explore the senses of the Karen people (hearing, vision, imagination, memory, fear, and hope).

The sound ethnography will incorporate field recordings of Karen music, environmental sounds, and self-reflexive narratives to explore the relationship between sound, environment, senses of place, and researcher's reflexivity.

In general, this ongoing project focuses on multi-sensory representation, oral stories, and music documentation of the Karen refugees along the border.

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Project short description

The film shows an analysis of multiple materials presented simultaneously. Using Multimodal Anthropological Videography (MAV), it focuses on the disconnect between urban digitalization and everyday practices in urban spheres and will promote an argument about the uncodability of urban life.

Project long description

By 2050, more than two-thirds of the world's population will live in cities. This scenario, issued by the UN, is widely presented as the raison d'être of the "smart cities" field, where digitalization is perceived as the solution to concerns arising from speculated population growth.

The film will describe how smart city entrepreneurs legitimize their entry into urban spheres using the following axiom: To cope with an increase in their population, cities must be made more intelligent by digital technology.

Using a method of Multimodal Anthropological Videography (MAV), the film will present an analysis of the disconnect between "city smarters" and everyday practices in urban spheres and will promote an argument about the uncodability of urban life.

The film uses materials from my multi-sited fieldwork in various urban locations and in locations where city smarters meet: exhibitions, conferences, meetups, and hackathons. It also integrates media materials such as news reports and advertisements. The film will present and analyze these materials based on a neo-Bourdieusian approach (Wacquant, 2023) that unveils the trialectics of symbolic space, social space, and physical space.

Methodologically and analytically, the videography is aimed to propose a multimodal approach for the presentation and analysis of multiple materials presented simultaneously. The attached link presents an abstract for the film (sent to ISA's Forum in Rabat, July 2025), and it still doesn't show an implementation of the MAV method, which I am currently developing and would love to discuss and receive feedback on.

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Project short description

90 - 120 minute tapestry of community voices which locates itself at the intersection of power and lived experience through the lens of militarism, slow violence, and hegemonic masculinities, using a combination of ethnographic and autoethnographic film approaches.

Project long description

The village of Garelochhead sits in the middle of a triangle of nuclear submarine and armaments bases in Argyll on the west coast of Scotland. It is part traditional highland village, part service community, built up in parallel with expansion of the bases since 1945 to house Polaris, Trident and the forthcoming Trident replacement submarines and nuclear weapons.

The local economy depends on the lifeline of the bases in a symbiotic relationship built on supply and demand. In reality it is a relationship of ‘reciprocal exclusivity’ (Fanon, 2001). An uneasy relationship which resides at the intersection of a military permanently on a war footing – a nuclear war footing - and the civilian communities. This ‘acceptable’ friction, reified over the years, reflects a patriarchal hegemony and masculinity at work, which defines and shapes people’s direct experience and the level of ‘acceptable’ experience.

My research seeks to elucidate how power operates within this, how it extends itself into the very fabric of the community and impacts on the everyday experience of people (The MoD declined to take part in the study). It seeks to find a connection between how sexual predation is built into a system which is supposedly about protection, security, work opportunities and mutual benefits.