Documentary Magazine Spring 2024 Issue

We’re the global IDA community united by our passion and love for all things documentary.

We are a growing international community with members in 80 countries, there’s a place for you no matter where you are.

We are non-fiction thinkers, filmmakers, journalists, academics, industry professionals, and field practitioners — whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting, there’s room for you at IDA.

Become a member today and enjoy*:

• Complimentary subscription to the Documentary Magazine

• 80+ free film screenings annually in Los Angeles and virtually worldwide

• Monthly member gatherings + member-only workshops and talks

• Access to the IDA Membership Directory

• Voting rights at the IDA Documentary Awards

• Fundraise through the IDA Fiscal Sponsorship Program

Join the global IDA community today— wherever you are, you belong! documentary.org/membership

*Benefits might differ for different membership levels. Who? Where? What?

• Discounts for Getting Real conference, IDA Documentary Awards, and more!

DOCUMENTARY MAGAZINE (ISSN # 1559-1034) is the publication of the International Documentary Association, a nonprofit organization established in 1982 to promote nonfiction film and video and to support the efforts of documentary makers around the world.

Magazine Staff

Marlene Head / Copy Editor

Maria Hinds / Art Director

Janki Patel / Advertising Manager

Abby Sun / Editor

Zaferhan Yumru / Production Manager

Brian Graham / Graphic Designer

TEL: (213) 232-1660

FAX: (213) 232-1669

EMAIL: magazine@documentary.org

Dominic Asmall Willsdon / Publisher

L.A. Publishing / Printer

3600 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 1810, Los Angeles, CA 90010

T: +1 (213) 232–1660

F: +1 (213) 232–1669

info@documentary.org documentary.org

IDA Staff

Alaa Altabbakh / Accounting & Finance Associate

Colin Arp / Finance & Administrative Coordinator

Catalina Combs / Marketing & Communications Manager

Brian J. Davis / Director of Development

Melissa D’Lando / Grants Manager

Mary Garbesi / Director of Finance

Anisa Hosseinezhad / Membership & Individual Giving Program Manager

Katy Hurley / Grants Coordinator

Terence Johnson / Marketing & Communications Coordinator

Keisha Knight / Director of Funds & Advocacy

Janki Patel / Advertising Manager

Gabriella Ortega Ricketts / Artist Programs Manager

Maria Santos / Funds Program Officer

Cielo Saucedo / NAI Funds Program & Access Coordinator

Ranell Shubert / NAI Program Manager

Lilla Sparks / Fiscal Sponsorship Program Coordinator

Abby Sun / Director of Artist Programs

Bethany Weardon / Fiscal Sponsorship Program Manager

Dominic Asmall Willsdon / Executive Director

Zaferhan Yumru / Director of Marketing, Communications, & Design

Armando Zamudio / Public Programs & Events Coordinator

IDA Board

Ina Fichman / Co-President

Michael A. Turner / Co-President

Chris Albert / Secretary

Maria Agui Carter / Treasurer

Hallee Adelman

Grace Lee

Orwa Nyrabia

Chris Perez

Alfred Clinton Perry

Amir Shahkhalili

Marcia Smith

Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land (dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor). (p.58) Courtesy of Berlinale

Kirsten Johnson. (p.36) Courtesy of Janus Films

Cover image: Stills from

and the Time. (p.17) Courtesy of the Victor Jara Collective

Still from The Terror and the Time. (p.17) Courtesy of the Victor Jara Collective

Dear Readers,

This print issue of Documentary comes right before IDA’s biennial industry conference, Getting Real. In the tradition of past magazine issues that immediately precede the conference, this issue previews the conference’s themes of “Strategy, Networks, Access” through interviews with speakers whose work will be featured at the conference. At this point, however, I should show my hand. I’m not only the editor of this publication but also the conference director of Getting Real. These pieces illustrate the heterogeneous and earnest quality of the dialogue we hope to model at the conference—and model the actions we hope these conversations will inspire toward a more just and distributed documentary ecosystem.

Two keynote speakers are interviewed for our conference preview section. Jemma Desai, who was invited because of her longitudinal research into and engagement with institutionality in the film world, is interviewed by Arta Barzanji in the aftermath of widespread disillusionment with recent market film festivals. Cinematographer and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson is in conversation with Stephanie Jenkins in a wide-ranging treatise on the opportunities and threats of newly digital- and machine-based image-making. Jenkins is also a co-founder of the Archival Producers Alliance, whose other co-founders, Rachel Antell and Jennifer Petrucelli, speak with Williams Cole on the necessity for guardrails for the use of generative AI in documentary archival images. We will catch up with the conference’s other two keynotes, the masterful Cameroonian director Jean-Marie Teno, and the curator and institution-creator Jesse Wente, via online coverage in the coming weeks.

The cover feature is from Victor Guimarães, who returns to Documentary with a deeply researched discourse on a little-known, U.S.-based film collective, the Victor Jara Collective, and its many connections to Third Cinema. Filmmaker and journalist Julian Rubinstein and attorney Robert S. Gutierrez alternate perspectives in their explication of how an anti-SLAPP statute saved Rubinstein’s film, The Holly. And we close out our features this issue with a trio of festival dispatches—from Sudipto Sanyal, Sevara Pan, and new contributor Matazi Weathers—which interrogate the promises of recent editions of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival, Berlinale, and Sundance, respectively, before spotlighting a bevy of standout films.

Our regularly published strands and columns return as well. The “Making a Production” strand continues with Alex Lei’s lengthy profile of an extraordinarily prolific indie production company, Memory, whose two co-founders have built a cult following out of essayistic and hybrid documentaries. The “Field Recording” for this issue is a first-person account from Moses Bwayo, whose personal life has been indelibly altered by his work on the Oscar-nominated Bobi Wine: The People’s President. And “Screen Time” continues with capsule-length reviews, written by a formidable group of film critics, on notable new releases.

Drop us a line at magazine@documentary.org if you have suggestions, notes, pitches, questions, jokes, feedback, or kind words. Everything is appreciated.

Thanks for your continued readership and support.

Until the next issue,

Editor, Documentary Magazine

Abby Sun

Abby Sun

Abby Sun

In these first couple of months as IDA’s executive director, a few lines by the cultural thinker Paul Gilroy have been on my mind. They indicate, for me, something of the purpose of documentary filmmaking.

We are drawn to the realization that it is imperative to remain less interested in who or what we imagine ourselves to be, than in what we can do for one another both in today’s emergency conditions and in the grimmer circumstances that surely await us.

So much in society drives us to sameness. Our media separate us into mutually exclusive information spheres. They reflect what we think we know and reward us for how we feel. This is part of our predicament as a global society, as a planet. At its best, the art of documentary—not uniquely, but distinctively—enables us to encounter other realities. By making those realities aesthetically compelling, it demands that we do so, and then makes us ask ourselves what our responsibilities should be. In this way, documentary filmmakers are swimming against the current of contemporary culture and doing something necessary. We might not think in such terms every day, but deep down, this may be why we support documentary films.

I am meeting as many people as possible across the field, hearing about the needs and interests of filmmakers, and asking what IDA can do. When I ask why IDA matters, I get a range of answers. There are the financial and professional opportunities that IDA provides. There is IDA’s role in advocacy, both for filmmakers at risk and in relation to structural and policy issues. And there is IDA’s work to open and maintain a space for critical dialogue.

Documentary Magazine and Getting Real are the two pillars of that work. It has been wonderful to see the relaunch of this magazine, and we are wholly committed to the direction that it is taking under the brilliant editorship of Abby Sun. I joined IDA toward the end of the planning for Getting Real ’24, and I am very impressed by the care, rigor, and creativity of the programming team—Abby, Meghan Monsour, and Lisa Valencia-Svensson—and the dedication of everyone working to produce the event. We look forward to welcoming you to Getting Real in person if you can be there or online if you cannot. This issue of Documentary Magazine is a thought-provoking companion to the conference. Moving forward, I expect that our publishing and our programming will become increasingly intertwined.

In the coming years, across all that IDA does, our task is to become as open and inclusive as we can be. IDA must be able to work with anyone, anywhere in the world, who cares about documentary filmmaking and its contribution to the wellbeing of everyone. Everyone. Documentary crosses boundaries, and shows us lives, worlds, that are not ours. In today’s emergency conditions, nothing is more important than enabling us to see one another across differences.

Dominic Asmall Willsdon

We Are Removing a Dictator

Why I am now seeking political asylum in the U.S.

By Moses Bwayo

What would life be like in America? By the time we fled Uganda, there had been two attempted kidnappings of my wife, Nulu. I had been shot in the face at close range while filming, arrested, thrown in a crammed police cell, and denied access to a lawyer. A week after my arrest, I was produced in court, charged with unlawful assembly, and sent to Luzira Prison. My lawyer had tried to visit me while I was in police custody. Still, he was ordered to leave the police station at gunpoint after being assaulted, kicked, and beaten; Nulu narrated this ordeal to me after I was released from custody.

Bobi Wine: The People’s President (2022) is an observational documentary that took us five years to film, amassing about 4,000 hours of footage, including archival footage. We follow the main protagonists, Bobi Wine and his wife, Barbie, on a dangerous journey to bring democratic change in Uganda. This film has been a deep labor of love, and through excellent collaboration with incredibly talented filmmakers, we managed to bring it to the world. My co-director and producer, Christopher Sharp, decided to make this film after meeting Bobi and Barbie in Europe. He then traveled to Uganda to

assemble a crew to start filming. I was hired as a third camera operator on the project and quickly became the only camera operator following Bobi; it had become dangerous, forcing the other crew members to leave the country. Christopher and I were born and raised in Uganda and are deeply connected to Uganda and its people. We know what our home could be if it is well managed.

We wanted to tell this honest story in a contained way. That’s why we focused on Bobi and Barbie, through whom we could tell the broader story of the nation. We couldn’t have done this any other way; I was mainly on the ground in Uganda collecting the material as Christopher was in the edit. This collaboration enabled us to protect the footage since I had to send it outside the country every few days. After following Bobi for two years, we were introduced to our producer, John Battsek. John helped us assemble a postproduction team and was heavily involved in the edit to bring this story to life.

Making this film has been a great sacrifice, as my wife and I have had to flee from our home in Uganda to now seek political asylum in the United States. The United States has offered us a second chance to live again. We are forever indebted to this country and its people for welcoming us. The stakes have been extremely high while telling this story. However, to be a vehicle of change

Moses Bwayo is a Ugandan journalist and the co-director and one of the cinematographers of the documentary Bobi Wine: The People’s President.

Still from Bobi Wine: The People’s President. Courtesy of the writer

or part of a vehicle of change, you must put yourself in challenging, sometimes life-changing situations. I believe cinema can change the world; I hope this story will bring some change back home. This story is significant not only to Uganda and Africa but is a universal story that resonates with current world issues today.

March 2020: I was arrested while filming a scene for the documentary; in the scene, Bobi was being filmed at a rooftop bar in Nsambya, a Kampala suburb, for a music video for a song he had just released, titled “Ballot or Bullet,” about the upcoming election. By this point, I had followed Bobi Wine for about two years as he led the fight for social justice, constitutionalism, and a return to democracy from Museveni’s dictatorial regime, which has been in power since 1986.

March 2022: My wife Nulu and I arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on a sunny afternoon. We were anxious. Nulu was seven months pregnant, and I have heard that sometimes, even after arriving in the U.S., you could be denied entry and put back on a plane. We were fleeing a dictator whose regime wanted us dead. But there was relief as we deplaned and walked through the airport to immigration. I had been singled out as we went through security and left Uganda. The man asked me where we were going and for what purpose. I told him we were going on a honeymoon. They opened my carry-on bag and combed it. A mustached man in a suit filmed the whole thing. I remained calm; I had nothing illegal, and there should be no reason for this. I was eventually allowed through. While we waited in the boarding area, I was anxious about being called out over the loudspeaker. I was also nostalgic while we sat waiting to board; I had many feelings simultaneously. As the plane left the tarmac at Entebbe Airport that evening, I looked out the window; the lights below faded as the aircraft climbed away from the runway. I wondered how long it would take

to see Uganda again, the family we were leaving behind. It was hard, not knowing what lay ahead.

March 2020: Following my arrest and consequent detention, fellow journalists, filmmakers, and civil society in Uganda and around the world launched an online campaign demanding my release. As the pressure mounted, the foreign embassies in Uganda joined the campaign, with tweets and posts demanding my unconditional release and charges against me to be dropped. I was released after spending four days and three nights in Luzira Prison. I felt like a new person coming out of jail, even though I had only spent four days in a crowded prison cell. It felt like a lifetime; I wondered how I, being a law-abiding citizen, had gotten myself into that place. However, I quickly corrected myself; it was not my fault but the system’s. What was intended to break my spirit further encouraged me to continue the film.

At that point, I knew why Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, aka Bobi Wine, had given up his comfortable life as a successful musician in Uganda and East Africa to lead the fight against the dictatorship. I saw firsthand why telling this story was urgent and essential. This story is of my dear country, Uganda, with a population of more than 45 million people, with over 75% under age 35; Uganda is the second youngest country in the world. The Ugandan people have not seen another president since 1986, when Museveni took power after leading a five-year-long, brutal guerrilla war that left half a million Ugandans dead. The war was majorly waged in the central region famously known as the Luwero Triangle, a densely populated area. Since independence from the British in 1962, Uganda has never had a peaceful power transfer. During the first 24 years, Uganda saw coups and military takeovers, some governments lasting only a few months, which culminated in the 1981–86 bush war led by rebel leader Yoweri Museveni.

Moses Bwayo while filming Bobi Wine: The People’s President. Courtesy of the writer

On taking power in 1986, General Museveni promised a fundamental change and a return to democratic governance. The early years of his regime were successful, making him a darling to the West because of his progressive and democratic policies, like overseeing the adoption of Uganda’s fourth constitution in 1995, one of the best constitutions in the world at the time. His government seemed on the right path until 2005, when his political party (National Resistance Movement or NRM) introduced a constitutional amendment that would essentially remove presidential term limits, leading to an exodus of some close political allies, with many fleeing Uganda on falling out with the regime. The NRM successfully removed the presidential term limits from the constitution, and Museveni ran again after completing the stipulated two presidential terms. In 2017, as he neared 75, he removed his final barrier to a lifetime presidency, repealing the president’s constitutional age limit, despite vocal opposition in parliament led by Bobi Wine.

October 2017: When I first began filming Bobi, I asked myself, why him? In the film’s first act, Bobi says, “It is not because I’m the smartest or most knowledgeable; it is maybe because of the music that I

have done that projected our plight, so when the people asked me to stand, I agreed.” For over five years, I followed Bobi Wine and saw firsthand his integrity and unwavering courage in leading the fight against authoritarianism. Some of his close political allies have sold out to the regime. Some have disappeared—to this day, we don’t know if they were murdered or are still incarcerated in unknown detention centers—and some to this day are still being kidnapped. I have seen supporters killed by the armed forces, and I have also witnessed the Ugandan population’s hope in Bobi and the NUP/People Power movement. I have heard Bobi insist on nonviolence—including telling his supporters to remain nonviolent even while being brutalized by the army and police. On multiple occasions, he has come out to condemn violence and preach peaceful means to change.

October 2023: Bobi made international headlines when he was forcefully pulled from a plane by plain-dressed men and shoved into an unmarked vehicle while one of his party members filmed the entire ordeal. He was later escorted home by a heavy military presence, placed under house arrest, and his home

communications were jammed. Traumatic and unpredictable events like this are risks Bobi and his family take every time they choose to leave their home. Bobi has stated more than once that if it weren’t for the existence of this film and the threat it poses to Museveni’s violent dictatorship, he would likely not be here.

January 2024: The morning of the Academy Awards nominations announcement, Bobi, his wife Barbie, and their three children had been under house arrest for over a week; as the news of our film’s nomination spread throughout the country, the military and police withdrew from their home. This is how far any attention to this film goes to protect him and those close to him. Since the nomination, we have seen the police in Uganda act more consciously because now they are aware the world is watching.

I hope the world will do what is moral and stand on the right side of history with the oppressed people of Uganda. Bobi often says, “Injustice anywhere threatens justice everywhere.”

Today, Bobi Wine leads the largest opposition party in Uganda. They stand for democratic values, for matters of humanity, respect for human rights, the rule of law, and constitutionalism.

In a world that is becoming increasingly totalitarian, where more and more countries have given up democracy and democratic values and are heading toward a more hostile world, Bobi continues to call upon his supporters to find peaceful means to change. He has built a political party from an organic mass movement and embodies the fight for freedom and democracy. The youth see their future leader in him, and he is the hope for a new Uganda. Please don’t ignore the Ugandan people’s struggle..

Moses Bwayo while filming Bobi Wine: The People’s President. Courtesy of the writer

Making a Production: In depth profiles featuring production companies that make critically acclaimed nonfiction film and media in innovative ways

Memory

Sebastian Pardo and Riel Roch-Decter’s dream factory persists so filmmakers can pursue passion projects

By Alex Lei

When Emily Mackenzie and Noah Collier premiered their debut documentary feature, Carpet Cowboys (2023), at Baltimore’s New/Next Film Festival, it was the result not of a dedicated film festival strategy but a longstanding web of personal connections. Carpet Cowboys begins as an early Errol Morris-esque film about the changing nature of the American dream as seen through the world of industrial carpet manufacturing in Dalton, Georgia, and ends up focusing on one peculiar Scottish businessman, Roderick James, whose personality inflects the film’s form.

Production was scrappy—one co-director held the boom and the other the camera—but the results are sleek. The film’s producer, Memory (sometimes stylized MEMORY), originally planned to bypass the festival circuit with Carpet Cowboys in favor of a DIY theatrical roadshow. Then the film’s publicist, Kaila Sarah Hier of Exile PR, informed the film team that former Maryland Film Festival director Eric Allen Hatch—and frequent selector of Memory’s projects—was putting on an alternative fest in Baltimore. That connection led to the film’s premiere. This spontaneity that is born from a foundation of longstanding relationships is a signature of Memory’s operation.

Like Carpet Cowboys, there’s a scrappiness behind Memory’s sleek exterior and dedicated cult following. The L.A.-based production company has only two full-time employees: its founders Sebastian Pardo and Riel RochDecter. The duo sought to create both a low-budget dream

factory for passion projects and a sustainable network of filmmakers working in the DIY ethos of the 2000s, but with the stylistic inclinations of tidier, higher-budget productions. While they’re best known today for their boundary-pushing documentary projects—the essayistic films of Theo Anthony, Zia Anger’s cinematic performance My First Film (2018–2020), and Dean Fleischer-Camp’s narrativization of found footage in Fraud (2016)—Memory’s founders weren’t sure 10 years ago about the kind of product they’d be putting out, only the ethos behind it.

Early in Memory’s studio days, Pardo slapped a piece of paper on their office wall: “NO OSCARS! (NO SUNDANCE).”

Ten years in, their films now have premiered at the latter, a pragmatic upsetting of their more youthful aspirations. Yet when talking with Pardo and Roch-Decter, they still seem to have in mind an ethos built around working against the grain of outside validation and its attendant conventions. In a world of contracts, Memory is a company based on handshakes.

“Should we just do it, should we just start a company?”

In the same year A24 was launched, Pardo and Roch-Decter committed to starting their own production company, and by January 2014, Memory was official. They had met a few years earlier on the set of Mike Mills’s Beginners, with

Alex Lei is a writer and filmmaker based in Baltimore.

Early in Memory’s studio days, Pardo slapped a piece of paper on their office wall: “NO OSCARS! (NO SUNDANCE).”

Ten years in, their films now have premiered at the latter, a pragmatic upsetting of their more youthful aspirations. Yet when talking with Pardo and Roch-Decter, they still seem to have in mind an ethos built around working against the grain of outside validation and its attendant conventions. In a world of contracts, Memory is a company based on handshakes.

Sebastian Pardo (L) and Riel Roch-Decter (R) in the Memory office. Courtesy of Memory

Pardo coming from the Directors Bureau, Roman Coppola’s stylish multimedia production company, and Roch-Decter working hands-on as an assistant for Olympus Pictures’ Leslie Urdang. By 2013, both had produced features—Gia Coppola’s debut Palo Alto (2013) for Pardo and M. Blash’s The Wait (2013) for Roch-Decter—and were starting to identify new stylistic trends in the independent space that weren’t being capitalized on by the existing modes of production.

Some of Memory’s first unconventional approaches would bear fruit, like Pardo contracting out his design skillset to make eye-catching, if minimal title sequences and posters for better-financed independent features. Meanwhile, other areas they thought the company would grow into more—namely, the music video world—would become a footnote from their early days. While most of their output in 2014 was producing shorts, they also picked up Eva Michon’s music documentary Life After Death From Above 1979 (2014) as well as going into production on animator Carson Mell’s live-action feature Another Evil (2016). Over the next couple of years, they started to program shorts, playing their blocks at independent theaters like the Royal Theater in Toronto or Cinefamily in L.A., art spaces like PHI Center in Montreal, or even hotel venues like the Wythe in Brooklyn. These became the seeds of relationships that started to sprout.

Celia Rowlson-Hall, best known as a choreographer and dancer, had her 2013 short The Audition included on Memory’s first touring shorts program, and it was around this time that she approached Roch-Decter with a feature she had shot but needed help getting through post—Ma (2015), a modern reworking of the Virgin Mary’s journey, set in the American Southwest. It turned out to be the exact kind of personal, aesthetically confident film Memory had been looking for. Rowlson-Hall’s wandering yet destined road movie had naturalist landscapes that gave way to her impressionistic, interpretive-dance–influenced movement from the actors. The film was released by Factory 25 in the U.S., and being attached to this project led Memory to more fruitful collaborations.

While showing Ma at Rotterdam, they were approached by Theo Anthony, whose short doc, Peace in the Absence of War (2015), about the growing surveillance state in Baltimore in the wake of the 2015 uprising, was also screening. When Memory expressed interest in working with Anthony, he had two pitches for the company: (1) a straightforward documentary about “the strongest teenager in the world” who lived in Glen Burnie, Maryland, and (2) a film he couldn’t quite explain in a simple logline, something about rats, redlining, and the psychogeography of urban environments. It was that latter, more ineffable pitch that piqued Roch-Decter and Pardo’s interest, and they set about finding funding to complete Rat Film.

The finished film premiered at Locarno soon after Memory was named one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Film” in 2016. Rat Film not only was a critical consensus favorite but also recouped Memory and

Anthony’s personal financial investment, paying back deferred fees through a combination of foreign sales, revenue from handling the film’s own theatrical release that generated US$35,000 in U.S. box office receipts, Cinema Guild’s downstream digital sales, and a US$90,000 broadcast license fee for Independent Lens (PBS). Notably, Memory’s DIY ethos was supplemented by traditional distribution paths, instead of relying on them.

It produced hopes for a growing and solvent future for Memory. They immediately got to work on Anthony’s next project, what would become an essay film on the power dynamics of images, All Light Everywhere (2021), as well as collaborating with ESPN on Subject to Review (2019), Anthony’s 30 for 30 episode on the instant replay systems in tennis and the nature of justice. There was still serious optimism when Subject to Review played on TV (Anthony likened it to a “coup”). But as Memory planned the release of All Light Everywhere as another massive milestone, their aspirations met their limit.

Marquee of the Vista Theater for the “Memory Presents Program No. 2” screening on December 7, 2016. Courtesy of Memory

“ This new model that was more direct-to-audience.”

“We did everything right,” Roch-Decter stated confidently, on how they set up the release of All Light Everywhere Anthony’s second feature premiered at the biggest festival they thought they could get it to, the previously off-limits Sundance, and got picked up by what they thought would be the biggest distributor that would consider it, Super LTD, an arm of Neon. But their hopes were quashed by the actual box office returns as one of the first films released in theaters after COVID lockdowns: US$37,000, which barely beat Rat Film’s performance despite costing a heftier (though still relatively cheap) US$450,000. The vast majority of its funding came from a handful of private investors and Sandbox Films. Pardo said that when they were starting out, they thought, If we could continue to make a certain level of film, market them in certain ways that are pleasing to us, put on events that would find an audience, then we would find a community of filmmakers that could one day be sustainable, and that there could kind of be this new model that was more direct-to-audience. What All Light Everywhere proved to Memory was that while working with a major distributor provided new opportunities, the lack of control over marketing and the film’s distribution strategy meant that neither the size of their audience nor its actual financial returns might scale with it.

Taking the lessons learned from All Light Everywhere and seeking a more Rat Film–like path, Memory took Carpet Cowboys on a road show. According to RochDecter, Carpet Cowboys was not only similar in budget to All Light Everywhere but also garnered similar box office returns through an entirely different release structure. Whereas All Light Everywhere had a conventional, if small, theatrical window through Super LTD, Memory distributed Carpet Cowboys themselves. They booked screenings with individual theaters and scheduled Q&As with the directors and the film’s executive producer John Wilson, trying to tap directly into local niche audiences from Albuquerque to Akron. This time, too, there was no expectation that Carpet Cowboys would be able to pay past the off-the-top expenses. It’s a characteristically Memory style of horizontal growth—they are confident in the films and willing to shift which roles the company plays, all the way from pre– to postproduction, in order to give the movies the best lives possible.

Memory is made up of businessmen: Roch-Decter rounded out his upbringing across Canada’s Laurentian Corridor by getting a degree in economics at Concordia, and Pardo has prided himself since his stint at Chapman for his ability to get projects in under budget and made as inexpensively as possible while still maintaining the highest levels of craft. When it comes to Memory, Pardo said that conventionally growing their company would have placed limits on the creative ability they sought for themselves and their artists: “I think growing would have meant being more compromised in terms of the level of

What All Light Everywhere proved to Memory was that while working with a major distributor provided new opportunities, the lack of control over marketing and the film’s distribution strategy meant that neither the size of their audience nor its actual financial returns might scale with it.

artistic ambition, only because there almost seems to be a linear relationship to artistic ambition and money—and it’s not a positive linear correlation, it’s a negative linear correlation. The market just won’t yield things that I find rewarding, and that’s the ultimate barrier to our ability to scale.” While A24 moves away from its independent roots, selling more and more “safe” products to subsidize smaller, riskier pieces, Memory keeps its branding tight by only taking on the projects they think will be creatively and artistically fulfilling. Even if their niche genuinely was too small to leave the company more solvent than subsidized, after the releases of All Light Everywhere and Carpet Cowboys, Memory is more secure in their ability to tap into latent artistic networks.

Memory’s broader community of collaborators is also showcased on their website under the “Releases” label (formerly “Presents”), which sometimes hosts virtual screenings or announces curated programs. Some of the programming is their own, such as highlighting two Robert Eggers shorts with their own pages; Hayley Garrigus’s exploration of the memetic internet underworld, You Can’t Kill Meme (2021); and Alex Tyson’s multilayered, experimental narrative concerned with crises in both image making and their afterlives, The Registry (2021). “People look to Memory to find work they would never encounter in normal streaming channels or normal screenings,” Tyson said. Having The Registry up on Memory’s site rather than just running the festival circuit or being a museum piece was a boon for audience engagement, especially with Memory’s releasing the soundtrack alongside it.

The most exceptional section of the “Releases” page is its masthead, “DEEP,” a series of “transmissions” curated by Chris Osborn from the recesses of online video. Osborn started the series in 2014 while doing content moderation for Vimeo, noticing a host of odd, surreal, and beautiful digital

works by both clear craftspeople and apparent outsider artists. In 2016, Osborn approached Pardo and Roch-Decter at the Maryland Film Festival after a screening of Fraud. “They really saw a vision for [DEEP] to beam out on their website and through their connections at other festivals and other film organizations … across the United States and globally,” Osborn recounted. From 2016 to 2018, Osborn’s DEEP transmissions became a staple of Memory Presents, playing 24 hours a day for a month. The series selections and most recent transmission are meticulously archived.

Just before the pandemic, Memory was also exploring additional multimedia and expanded cinema possibilities. In the summer of 2018, Zia Anger pitched Roch-Decter a live cinema idea she had after being invited to present some of her “abandoned” works at Spectacle, a volunteerrun storefront microcinema in Brooklyn. In the My First Film (2019) performance, Anger types live notes from her laptop while showing excerpts from her DIY first feature, Always All Ways, Anne Marie (2012), which was rejected by every festival she sent it to. She knew Memory was “risky and excitable” because of their work with Theo Anthony, her now-fiancé, and contacted Roch-Decter the same day after that presentation at Spectacle. This turned into a series of live performances at Metrograph, which was given a glowing writeup by Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Capitalizing on the momentum, and getting Cinema Guild onboard for further support, Memory put Anger on the road, doing performances at festivals, small theaters, performing arts centers, and universities. The harrowing, deeply personal, and intimate multimedia performance by Anger reflecting on the film industry’s unrealistic expectations and ethics attracted a dedicated audience.

“I’ve always had a really hard time identifying as a filmmaker,” Anger told me. “I was slightly Googleable, but it felt disingenuous to the fact that I wasn’t working 60 hours a week as a filmmaker, I was working 60 hours a week as a nanny.” My First Film was the first time Anger was able to support herself full-time through her artistic work, through its unconventional form and release model that had more in common, financially speaking, with being a touring musician rather than a director. Still, this did not translate into a self-sufficient career as a filmmaker. While redeveloping My First Film with Memory and MUBI into a fiction feature, she worked as a gardener in upstate New York with Anthony and their Australian shepherd, Holly. Since the release of All Light Everywhere, Anthony has been primarily working as a carpenter while slowly getting back into developing future film projects.

“We constantly reevaluate where we’re at. We’re not making the kind of money [other] people our age working [in the industry] are making,” Roch-Decter told me.

“We just have to take a lot of time.”

After Carpet Cowboys wrapped its roadshow in early December 2023, I sat in on a post-mortem call with RochDecter and Carpet Cowboys co-directors Mackenzie and Collier as they rounded up the successes and tribulations of their roadshow, started work to close up the accounts, and talked about the possibilities of the film’s afterlife (VOD, streaming, Blu-rays) to best keep connecting with the audience. The film’s funder, XTR, also came up. XTR’s streaming service and FAST channel Documentary+ was discussed as an expected landing place if another streamer

Photograph from the shoot for Dean Fleischer-Camp’s webseries David (starring Nathan Fielder) in 2016. Courtesy of Memory

My

First Film was the first time Anger was able to support herself full-time through her artistic work, through its unconventional form and release model that had more in common, financially speaking, with being a touring musician rather than a director. Still, this did not translate into a self-sufficient career as a filmmaker.

didn’t pick it up. A week after this conversation, Filmmaker released a critical piece on XTR, in which Roch-Decter was quoted diplomatically saying he had “a great experience” working with XTR amidst a sea of claims by filmmakers alleging they were basically hoodwinked into thinking the company was going to help them get funding.

While Memory has a host of successful, long-running collaborations, as with other production companies, not everything has worked out. For instance, according to Roch-Decter, Memory worked with Leilah Weinraub in the postproduction process on Shakedown (2018), a documentary shot by Weinraub primarily over the eightyear run in “a utopic moment” of the titular Black lesbian strip club in ’90s Los Angeles. “[Memory] came in the edit and helped the director, Leilah Weinraub, complete the film ahead of its world premiere in Berlinale and U.S. premiere at True/False. Beyond post and the first few premieres, Leilah wanted to handle the sale and distribution of the film on her own,” Roch-Decter explained. Weinraub would go on to partner with Grasshopper to release the film on Criterion Channel and PornHub simultaneously, including a live chat element on the latter’s platform.

Relationships relying on handshakes, be they financial or personal, are always going to be delicate. But Memory is not alone in this camp, as much of the documentary world moves at the speed of trust, pointing to a larger problem in the ad hoc organizing of the wider world of nonfiction filmmaking. What is unique to Memory is how they have made a name for themselves by overdelivering on the presentational quality of their films compared to their low budgets. However, Pardo and Roch-Decter claim this quality has created inflated expectations of their existing

financial resources; because their films look polished, potential funders and colleagues assume that they don’t need money.

Their actual solution strikes a contradiction within the utopian aspirations of Memory to build a space where filmmakers can pursue passion projects. “We don’t have a lot of money, so we just have to take a lot of time with the films,” Roch-Decter said. This leads to long production processes filled with constant revision by the filmmakers that has tended toward a redundant self-reflexivity, which Memory readily acknowledges.

“You spend the film being like, ‘This is a construction, I’m in control of this.’ How many times do you want to do that? Eventually, you just go make a fiction film,” RochDecter joked. While their statements about reaching the end of documentary form are hyperbolic, they belie a desire to break from their currently established brand. Pardo and Roch-Decter told me they’ve had people approach them about wanting to make their own “Theo Anthony film.” But they’re not looking for another Theo Anthony—they’re looking for something new..

Victor Guimarães is a film critic, programmer, and teacher based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He is currently a columnist at Con Los Ojos Abiertos (Argentina). His work has appeared in publications such as Cinética, Senses of Cinema, Kinoscope, Desistfilm, La Vida Útil, La Furia Umana, and Cahiers du Cinéma.

Dreaming to Change the World

Considering the Victor Jara Collective’s The Terror and the Time as part of Third Cinema’s legacy

By Victor Guimarães

Imagine the hallways of Cornell University, a quiet, comfortable campus in upstate New York, in the mid-1970s. Now imagine, in one of the Ivy League rooms, a Marxist reading group that brings together students and professors from different generations, ethnicities, and countries. They are united by an urgency to make revolutionary art and contribute to the dismantling of imperialist capitalism. This is the origin story of the Victor Jara Collective, a coalition of artists and activists named after the revolutionary Chilean musician assassinated during the Pinochet regime.

Guyanese writer Rupert Roopnaraine was a sort of mentor for the other members of the collective. In 1976, he resigned from his very comfortable position as a professor at the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell, teamed up with Ray Kril, Susumu Tokunow, and Lewanne Jones, and went to Guyana to make The Terror and the Time (1978), one of the most beautifully political—and politically beautiful—films of the last century. It was intended to be a three-part film on the struggles of the Guyanese working class and their repression by imperialist forces and the local bourgeoisie. Or, as Jones would put it in program notes, they went to Guyana “to make film, forge cultural alliances, and activate revolution.”1

For a few months between 1976 and 1977, the Victor Jara Collective collected archival material, recorded interviews and poetry readings, gathered sounds and images of workers’ struggles in the Caribbean country, and then came back to the editing facilities of Third World Newsreel in New York. The completed film is a masterpiece in which counterinformation and lyric poetry are not opposed, but rather contaminate each other—where rapid-fire montages of popular revolutions all around the then-called Third World and slow-motion depictions of Guyanese faces and landscapes harmoniously coexist.

Decades after its release, The Terror and the Time has resurfaced in recent years, including in October 2023 at the Valdivia International Film Festival in Chile, the home of Victor Jara. That’s where I had the chance to watch a well-preserved 16mm copy in the presence of Lewanne Jones, a member of the Collective who is now responsible for taking care of its legacy. According to Jones, the film was an internationalist endeavor from the beginning, but it was nonetheless dreamed, prepared, composed, finished, and distributed “in the belly of the beast,” the U.S., where the film’s current obscurity hides its true radicality. In Chile, all the screenings were packed. The postscreening conversations were intense and continued in the streets of Valdivia. Maybe that’s why many festivalgoers considered The Terror and the Time to be the highlight of the festival— its struggle was urgent both in 1978 and now. We must also reconsider the film within the legacy of Third Cinema.

The Terror and the Time’s very first seconds start with flames emerging from a black screen to the drumming and singing of the Guyanese group Yoruba Singers. The beginning reminds us of the prologue of The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’s Third Cinema classic that became an ineludible reference for filmmakers all around the Third World during the ’70s, including the Victor Jara Collective. After the opening of pure sonic and visual energy, we see a well-known quotation by Frantz Fanon, which is also cited in Aloysio Raulino’s O Tigre e a Gazela (The Tiger and the Gazelle), a Brazilian film also released in 1978. But in The Terror and the Time, Fanon’s text is decisively fragmented. At first, only three words are shown. It’s a declaration of intent by not only the choice of words but also the way they appear onscreen:

The breaking of the original quotation transgresses the regular reading and creates a new one, demanding and engaging. Viewers have to work, to read against the grain, to contravene their expectations. Contrary to so many militant films, we are treated not as students enlightened at a movie theater converted into a classroom, but from the very beginning as active participants in a collective process. Roopnaraine’s idea of what a revolutionary film should be was a very particular one, deeply connected with his vision of education. In an interview published in Guyana in 1978, Roopnaraine explains why they rejected using a voiceof-god narrator, despite its being a very common device in political documentaries:

Part of what we reject when we reject the device of the objective narrator who explains and clarifies everything is precisely this master/slave notion of pedagogy. Instead of abolishing the freedom of the spectator, we have chosen to emphasize that freedom, to assert it at every level. Consequently, we have organized the film in such a way as to insist, as a prerequisite for understanding and action, on the active participation of the viewer in the production. The film, considered now as a process whose completion is achieved only in the act of consumption, relies on the viewer to perceive connections and relations. It invites practice, not acquiescence and passivity. The imposition of a narrator would have violated this principle.

Instead of using a narrator, The Terror and the Time alternates between—and sometimes superimposes— essayism and poetry, counterinformation and lyricism. The deconstruction of Guyanese recent historiography to retell it from the point of view of the working-class movements coexists with a transfiguration, as opposed to an illustration, of the Poems of Resistance by Martin Carter. Each poem, read by the poet himself, gives way to a sequence in which the images blend between document and allegory, between realism and surrealism. In the first poem-sequence (“Cartman of Dayclean”), the flame we

All images, unless otherwise indicated, are stills from The Terror and the Time Courtesy of the Victor Jara Collective

saw at the beginning returns as a lamp in a cart, while the driver slowly crosses rural landscapes during the night to get to the urban market by dawn. His journey is portrayed in carefully crafted shots, at a slow and delicate pace, of the cartman and the landscapes. In those sequences, the film is constantly stretching between documenting the precarious reality of workers in Guyana and composing highly elaborated visual and sonic allegories, which borrow their strength from the imagery already present in the verses and multiply it in unsuspected directions. The relations between the literary and the cinematic materials are never predictable. In a political film, the clarity of ideas is as important as the consistency of darkness.

Carter was a model for the film, not only because his verses counter the dominance of a more traditional narrator that substitutes limpidity for evocation, explanation for immersion, but because his attitude toward art and politics was also symbolically important for the Victor Jara Collective. Carter was a popular, engaged artist and an intellectual committed to the struggles of Guyanese working people.

What we now know as The Terror and the Time is only the first part of the original project, centered on the historical facts of 1953. That year, after decades of struggle, the Guyanese workers’ People’s Progressive Party (PPP) won the majority of Parliament chairs in the first universal suffrage elections in the country, tried to keep a progressive government for four months, and then was taken out of power by a British military invasion. Carter wrote most of Poems of Resistance during that same year, in which he was persecuted and imprisoned by the illegitimate government. Following the repression, Guyana would remain a colony until 1966.

Inspired by the tripartite structure of The Hour of the Furnaces, the original intent was to make two more features, but history got in the way. In 1977, the PPP was again in power but far away from its roots. The party’s government, led by Forbes Burnham, initially supported the project by providing film stock, equipment, processing

laboratories, and access to the archives of the Guyanese Film Center. But after watching a preview, they asked the Collective to remove the interviews with Cheddi Jagan and Eusi Kwayana, former members of the PPP who were now in the opposition. Tellingly, Burnham had refused to be interviewed for the film. The terror of British colonialism in 1953 was now the terror of censorship and media control by a nominally progressive government, but a repressive one in reality. Refusing to do what the government wanted, some members of the Collective returned to the U.S., smuggling the film cans in a cricket player’s unsupervised luggage, and continued the work at Third World Newsreel in exchange for distribution rights. To be able to finish at least the first part, they organized screenings and events where the work-in-progress was shown, and raised money for survival and to continue editing.

In The Terror and the Times, the historical context of 1953 comes in an intense collage of archival material mingled with imagery generated in 1976/1977: old still photographs, fragments of films (taken from colonial British and imperialist U.S. newsreels), advertising, and newspaper clippings coexist with the Victor Jara Collective’s own contemporaneous footage. The images intersperse past and present because the conditions in 1977 were not that different from 1953. Instead of a boring, expositive analysis, intense reframing, juxtapositions, and dynamic recombinations of various sources keep everything in perpetual motion. Suddenly, a still image begins to tremble. Another one rotates. Throughout the sequence, joyful melodies bring irony and dissonance to the facts.

The voice of Cheddi Jagan, who takes on the task of a historian in the film, is not a singular sovereign but one element among others. Anticommunist hysteria comes through a series of movie posters. A rapid collage of images of white women (including a Miss British Guyana) contrasts with slow, beautiful portraits of working people, mostly of African or Indian descent. The film embraces what Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez called documentalurgia (“documentalurgy”) to define his composing methods in films such as Now (1965), LBJ (1968), and 79 Springs (1969). It doesn’t matter if the basic material is a still photograph, a shot from a colonial newsreel, a page from an ideological newspaper, or even a scene from a Hollywood fiction feature. All that matters is the act of appropriation, the particular use of these heterogeneous materials, the dramatic effects of combining documents, and the new emotions and meanings generated by intense cinematic procedures.

In intense dialogue with the Latin American militant film tradition, the Victor Jara Collective shares with filmmakers like Santiago Álvarez, Mario Handler, Carlos Álvarez, Octavio Getino, and Fernando Solanas the belief that revolutionary art should use cinema as a weapon, but that doing so does not mean trying to reduce it to a simple vehicle for ideas fabricated somewhere else, thereby underestimating its powers. To use cinema as a tool in a

revolutionary struggle means exploring its potential to the fullest, embracing its visual and sonic possibilities and its poetic drive in a formally radical way. Solanas and Getino were well aware of that, as in their manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” published in 1969:

Instead of a boring, expositive analysis, intense reframing, juxtapositions, and dynamic recombinations of various sources keep everything in perpetual motion.

The effectiveness of the best films of militant cinema show that social layers considered backward are able to capture the exact meaning of an association of images, an effect of staging, and any linguistic experimentation placed within the context of a given idea. Furthermore, revolutionary cinema is not fundamentally one which illustrates, documents, or passively establishes a situation: rather, it attempts to intervene in the situation as an element providing thrust or rectification. To put it another way, it provides discovery through transformation.2

To discover through transformation is to also trust the viewer. In the film, Eusi Kwayana, who serves as a sort of literary critic commenting on Martin Carter’s poetry, says that the task of the poet is to “make reality clearer to the rest of us,” but not by overexplaining things. Instead, Carter was “taking the people’s experiences, refining them, giving them back to the people, nurturing them.” Later in the film, to the sounds of drums and a flute, Carter reads,

Rupert Roopnaraine conducts an interview for The Terror and the Time Courtesy of the Victor Jara Collective

“I come from the n****r yard,” while we see gorgeous slow-motion tracking shots of the slums of Georgetown, mostly in reversed positive.

The inverted colors emphasize the opacity of images, while the narrative poem tells us of a man “moving in darkness stubborn and fierce.” The sequence gathers circular pans inside the huts, blurred shots of the ghetto landscape, a collection of textures—bumpy ground, wooden walls, stone paving—fragmented spaces, highly contrasted colors, irregular shapes. Distorting, disfiguring, to reach another form of clarity. Or, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten said, “Clarity implies, here, a kind of darkness, a radical complication of tint, a pigment suitable for grounding, yes, an opacity whereby we see the real with and through the real.”

In a sequence dedicated to the second letter from prison by Carter, we see bars on windows, barbed-wire fences, high walls, and tiny holes. The film collects barriers to sight but insists on seeing against all odds. The cinematography incorporates the difficulty of seeing into the vision itself, creating exquisite compositions of blinding lights and profound darkness—until we see a fluid moon among moving shadows, and the film becomes pure experimental abstraction. The oneiric quality of The Terror and the Time makes us think that the Victor Jara Collective was not dreaming of changing the world but dreaming to change the world. For them, dreaming is an action. It is a meaningful, even an urgent political act,

as a task for poets and filmmakers alike. Composing those dreamlike images and sounds is a way of struggling not only through cinema, but with cinema, in the sense that only a film could fight that way. For the viewer and listener, The Terror and the Time is neither a historical lesson nor a political statement, but a material, living experience that swallows our whole body and makes us dream together. Not dreaming of changing the world. Dreaming to change the world.

Interviewing Rupert Roopnaraine in Guyana, Monica Jarine and Andaiye allow him to elaborate a brief theory of revolutionary cinema, in tune with Solanas and Getino:

JARDINE/ANDAIYE: Do you think that the working class will find this film difficult to understand?

ROOPNARAINE: Undoubtedly. In terms of what we have been saying about the films shown in the commercial cinemas, how can it be otherwise? The film will be difficult and unusual because the Guyanese and Caribbean working people have been denied exposure to films of this kind. We are struggling against film-viewing habits and expectations formed over decades. It is a question of making available to the public alternative types of film language. And what we’re talking about will involve many long years of work. You know, even after the Cuban revolution had become a fact and the Cuban people were becoming conscious of what socialism was, they went right on seeing the Mexican and Hollywood films until the blockade in 1961. We are hoping that this film will contribute to the cultural struggle here in Guyana by opening the possibilities of different types of film language, by demonstrating what a cinema in the service of the working class is capable of.

The Terror and the Time is a constantly changing film, with interspersing rhythms, tones, and camera and editing styles. It is as if the essayistic, violent, furious rhythm of the first part of The Hour of the Furnaces could coexist—sometimes indistinguishably—with the poetry, lyricism, and contemplative pace of The Sons of Fierro (Fernando Solanas, 1972–78) in the same film. A film where, as film theorists Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni wrote, “politics is not the enemy of beauty.”3 At times, the juxtaposition is extreme, as in a much-celebrated sequence wherein archival material of luxury-products advertising is edited together with a butcher cutting meat, and another of a man lying in the street and asking for help while his fellow citizens pass by. In engaging these three different sources of imagery, turbocharged by sound, we struggle with what we see and hear, moving together, changing with the velocity of the film.

In another sequence, a sort of musique concrète reminds us of the strange soundtrack of the first Comunicado Cinematográfico del Consejo Nacional de Huelga, a superb counterinformation short made by film students on strike alongside workers in Mexico in 1968. To this tune, soldiers march on the street, and suddenly an image from another time flashes for one second on the screen. It’s Escrava Anastácia, the representation of an enslaved woman with a punitive iron facemask, who is venerated in Brazil as a popular folk saint.

The Terror and the Time’s associations are internationalist at its core. As Eusi Kwayana says in the film: “It’s one thing to be teaching the theory of the international working class in terms of political theory and historical terms. But it’s another thing for working people to feel a link with other people and other fighters in other lands.” That’s why we see, in another tumultuous sequence, African people dancing and raising arms, then bats, then machine guns. Then Vietnamese people dancing, holding hands on a march, smiling, carrying cannons. Dancing, smiling, holding hands with a comrade or a gun to defeat the imperialist enemy. To the sound of a repetitive, heavy African drumming, everything is part of the same struggle.

Defined by programmer Jonathan Ali as “a sui generis triumph of anti-colonial cinema,” The Terror and the Time—from the project to the film to the process of distribution—is a late blooming of Getina and Solanas’s conception of Third Cinema. In recent decades, the Global North has misinterpreted Third Cinema as all political cinema made in the so-called Third World. But the term is much more restrictive and demanding—it is a revolutionary concept, not a broadly descriptive category. Solanas and Getino referred to a global reorientation of militant filmmakers who were making films as direct interventions in a given historical situation around 1968.

Reflecting on the process of making and distributing The Hour of the Furnaces with Grupo Cine Liberación, Getino and Solanas’s “Towards a Third Cinema” manifesto states that the passage from Second Cinema (auteur cinema, all the “new waves” around the globe, Cinema Novo in Brazil, Generación del 60 in Argentina) to Third Cinema would encompass a radical alteration in every aspect of cinema, from production to exhibition. They advocated for change in the following:

1. How we conceive authorship (from individual auteurs to collective processes)

2. Technical aspects (using “amateur” 16mm instead of “professional” 35mm)

3. Filmmaking (every project should now be an alliance between filmmakers and social movements)

4. The film itself (no longer a complete and closed object, but an open work for the workers to use, which could mean, for instance, the reordering of the 16mm reels of The Hour of the Furnaces to serve specific purposes)

5. Distribution (not the commercial and festival circuits, but a series of autonomous, even clandestine projections organized by the same group who produced the film, or by their allies, in spaces like unions, universities, and militants’ backyards)

6. Exhibition (every projection of Third Cinema should be a political act, involving the choice of the film for particular goals, and including deep conversations during each reloading of the projector)

7. Audiences (the intended audience is not the regular moviegoer, but people involved in the struggle, who now become “actors-participants”)

This is what they call “the film act”:

Each projection of a film act presupposes a different setting, since the space where it takes place, the materials that go to make it up (actorsparticipants), and the historic[al] time in which it takes place are never the same. This means that the result of each projection act will depend on those who organize it, on those who participate in it, and on the time and place; the possibility of introducing variations, additions, and changes is unlimited. The screening of a film act will always express in one way or another the historical situation in which it takes place; its perspectives are not exhausted in the struggle for power but will instead continue after the taking of power to strengthen the revolution.4

Upon completion, The Terror and the Time went to festivals like Rotterdam, Leipzig, and Cinéma du Réel, and had public screenings in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. Third World Newsreel distributed it throughout the U.S. Although sparse in frequency, numerous screenings followed, engaging audiences with the film and in anti-imperialist campaigns in various countries. In Guyana, due to heavy censorship, it was nearly impossible to show it. A few years later, the conditions in the country deteriorated, with government censorship, persecution of opposition leaders, and brutal control of the media. The situation would culminate with the

assassination of Walter Rodney, an extraordinary historian, academic, and political activist, who was by that time a member of the Working People’s Alliance, the same party of Eusi Kwayana, Cheddi Jagan, and Rupert Roopnaraine.

After Rodney’s death, Lewanne Jones went back to the unused material of The Terror and the Time and composed a short film called In the Sky’s Wild Noise (1983) to tell Rodney’s story from the point of view of the working class. The short was the second and last piece signed by the Victor Jara Collective. In 1978, Roopnaraine became the leader of the Working People’s Alliance. This recalls what Colombian filmmaker and critic Carlos Álvarez wrote, in an article titled “El tercer cine colombiano” (“Colombian Third Cinema”), published the same year: “Today we fight with cinema in our hands. Tomorrow the conditions change, and we will fight with another thing. We are not immutable. That is to say, this cinema, like all activities in Latin America, will have to be extremely dialectical.”5

Near the end of the film, a title card says, “End of Part 1 – Colonialism,” but there are still five minutes until The Terror and the Time really ends. Initially intended to be a teaser for the other parts, this last sequence now shines as a raw, angry, beautiful deployment of pure cinematic energy, made of flames and slow tracking shots; the leisure of the white bourgeoisie and the struggle of the working people; sudden stillness and dynamic motion; a woman working the fields and another woman fixing her hat by the pool. Guyana’s contradictions explode against each other in heavy percussion music and fast montage. The drumming comes and the dreaming starts over. And it will never stop, unless we let this incendiary oeuvre sit still in a vault somewhere—or remain unseen in a forgotten corner of the internet..

Notes

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from this essay come from the extraordinary brochure On the Films of the Victor Jara Collective, a collection of texts by members of the Collective and other writers, edited by Lewanne Jones and published by Autonomedia in 2023.

2. Solanas, Fernando, and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World.” In Scott MacKenzie, ed., Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology. University of California Press, 2014, p. 360.

3. Comolli, Jean-Louis, and Jean Narboni. “Nos années Cahiers.” Catalogue du Festival International du Film La Roche-sur-Yon, 2011, p. 46.

4. Solanas and Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” p. 370.

5. Álvarez, Carlos, “El tercer cine colombiano.” Cuadro 4, primer trimestre de 1978, Medellín, 48.

Julian Rubinstein is a journalist, author, and documentary filmmaker. His most recent nonfiction book and documentary, The Holly, was reported over eight years in a gentrifying community in Denver. The book was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the 2022 Colorado Book Award. The film won three awards at festivals and is streaming on Prime and Apple Plus.

Robert S. Gutierrez is an entertainment litigator and member of Ballard Spahr’s Media & Entertainment department. He represents writers and publishers in all media, and content creators, producers, and distributors in the entertainment and music industry, on both prebroadcast clearance and related issues and postbroadcast claims and litigation.

How an Anti-SLAPP Statute Protected The Holly

By Julian Rubinstein and Robert S. Gutierrez

Section 1: Julian

When I began the lengthy process of reporting and directing my feature documentary, The Holly (2022), there were plenty of indications of potential pitfalls. The story involved a gang shooting case, possible police corruption, and a historic community on edge from a rash of shootings, an ongoing effort to gentrify it, and decades of mistreatment by powerful forces in Denver.

Still, I didn’t imagine that just as we were preparing to launch the film’s festival run that my entire team would be served legal papers at their homes in a defamation lawsuit that threatened to derail eight years of work and undermine the explosive revelations we had uncovered.

When I began the project in 2014, I was primarily a print journalist living in New York. I read a provocative news story about a prominent activist and third-generation resident of his Denver community, Terrance Roberts, who had shot someone at his own peace rally. Roberts was a former gang member who’d spent nearly 10 years in prison before returning to his neighborhood and winning awards for an antiviolence program aimed at at-risk youth.

I’d grown up in Denver, and I flew home to look into the story. Almost from the beginning, many things about what I was learning on the ground didn’t match with media reporting on the case. I drafted a book proposal, accepted a deal with FSG, and permanently moved back home to work on it.

Soon afterward, several factors led me to start filming. Mostly, I realized I had access to a story unfolding in front of me that was potentially explosive. It appeared possible

that Roberts had been attacked on the day in question by active gang members, some of whom worked for law enforcement. Those men, whom I had come to know, were then hired by the city of Denver to replace Roberts as “antigang” workers in a federally funded antiviolence effort that the city was hailing as a “model for the nation.” But my reporting showed that shootings were sharply rising, and community members were fearful of these men and angered by what they saw as yet another case of police corruption that would further weaken and traumatize the community just as developers sought to solidify new projects there.

I followed leads and filed open records requests for court and police documents, as well as for financial documents that could show who was involved in law enforcement and community efforts in the community. From my past investigative journalism work, I knew that I would need a lot of material to protect myself in case of a lawsuit.

As I began seeking funding for the film, some in the documentary industry felt strongly that I needed to make Roberts a producer on the film. I was a white man doing a story about a Black community, and he was the Black protagonist. I resisted because I still wasn’t sure if I trusted Roberts, and I didn’t see the film being well-served by any of the participants having decision-making roles on the film. I believed journalistic independence was critical.

I did, however, take advantage of Roberts’s offer to give me access to his meetings with his public defender. “People need to see what’s happening to me,” Roberts said. Of course, his public defender didn’t agree. Ultimately, we

found a workaround. Roberts’s lawyer offered me a contract to film the meetings for his client’s trial preparation. If Roberts wanted to share the material with me, it would be up to him.

I also faced a legal scare regarding releases. One person integral to the story had not signed one, and by the time I realized this, I also knew that he probably would not like the film, and that approaching him at that point might backfire. Fortunately, a legal evaluation found that his stature as a public figure and an expert on the case would protect my right to use the material, particularly since I had approached the story journalistically.

At last, in spring 2022, we finished editing and were ready to bring out the film. I braced myself for what might come. My book’s publication the previous year had been met with critical acclaim, but also direct threats to me from a community member who called himself an activist. Also, an ocean of falsehoods were spread about me and the project by people with good reason to want to undermine the project. Among the lies: I hadn’t interviewed anyone from the neighborhood. I wasn’t from Denver. I did drugs with gang members. I paid Terrance.

Though festivals don’t require E&O insurance, I decided to get it. Fighting a lawsuit, even if I were to win it, could sink the project. This was an independent operation. In the spring of 2022, we accepted a premiere as the opening night film at Mountainfilm in Telluride. Days

after Mountainfilm’s lineup was made public, I received a letter at my office at the University of Denver, where I was a visiting professor of documentary journalism, demanding that I not release the film. Before I could think about how to respond, I was on the phone with Michael Roberts, a reporter from Westword, Denver’s alt-weekly, who was interviewing me for a story. I made sure not to mention the irksome letter I’d received. But at the end of the interview, Roberts told me he had just one more question. “Do you have any comment about the lawsuit?” he said.

Lawsuit? I told him honestly that I had no knowledge of it, and asked if he would send me a copy. He did. It had just been filed in Denver County court. It was a defamation lawsuit filed by two people I knew well. Within days, my whole team, including Adam McKay (The Big Short [2015]), who had come on as an executive producer, reported to me that they had been served papers at their homes or businesses.

Terrance Roberts during filming for The Holly. Courtesy of Julian Rubinstein

The film was covered by E&O insurance, which was a relief. Not all films have it, and it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to defend against a suit, regardless of whether you win.

Section 2: Rob

I was at my L.A. office one day when a colleague sent me a copy of a lawsuit filed by two men against Julian and others who had made The Holly, an independent documentary that had yet to be released. The lawsuit was also directed against Julian’s book, which had been published the previous year. Another lawyer represented Julian and his publisher.

The film was covered by E&O insurance, which was a relief. Not all films have it, and it can cost tens of thousands of dollars to defend against a suit, regardless of whether you win.

In consultation with Julian, his insurance carrier QBE retained my firm, Ballard Spahr, to defend the claims against the film. I defend a lot of media companies against defamation claims, and at a glance this seemed to be the kind of case for which the anti-SLAPP statute was enacted.

The statute is designed to deter SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation)—meritless lawsuits filed to chill protected speech on a public issue—and this film dealt with several. California enacted the first anti-SLAPP statute in 1992, initially conceived as a way to protect against wealthy land developers seeking to bankrupt concerned citizens by filing lawsuits against them simply for exercising their First Amendment right of free speech. The statute is applied broadly, and is often used by content creators, journalists, and filmmakers. Today, 33 states have anti-SLAPP statutes. I quickly offered to take the lead in our office on this case.

I knew time was of the essence for Julian. He was trying to sell the film and wasn’t sure if the legal cloud hovering over him would hamper that effort. Of course, I didn’t yet know if Julian had the evidence to back up the statements the two men alleged were made in the film.

While plaintiffs are usually not required to present evidence to support their claims until months (if not years) after their lawsuits are filed, they are required to support their claims at the very start of the case if served with an anti-SLAPP motion. Indeed, anti-SLAPP statutes require defendants to file the motion within a certain number of days of being served with the complaint.

If a defendant demonstrates in their motion that they were sued for exercising their right of free speech in connection with a public issue (and Julian’s film addressed several), the plaintiff is then required to demonstrate— within a short matter of days—a reasonable likelihood of prevailing on their claims. If the plaintiff cannot do so, the lawsuit is dismissed, and the plaintiff is required to pay the defendant’s attorneys’ fees.

Fortunately, Colorado has an anti-SLAPP statute, modeled after California’s. If we could file our anti-SLAPP motion quickly, the two men suing the film would only have days to present evidence to support their claims or their case would be dismissed. The first order of business was therefore collecting evidence and strategizing with Julian for an anti-SLAPP motion to seek an early dismissal of the case, including a declaration by Julian explaining and attaching documentary evidence supporting statements

A meeting with the producers of The Holly. Courtesy of Julian Rubinstein

made in the film or demonstrating that certain alleged statements were not made in the film.

Section 3: Julian

Because of the extensive legal review I had undertaken ahead of the publication of my book, I had collected not just official documents and court records but also photos—and even video my team had shot—that I thought would support some of the claims I made. In some cases, screenshots of Facebook photos helped satisfy the lawyer. One of those was identifying certain people as “gang members.”

It wasn’t a point I wanted to make for no reason. But in this case, being specific about their identities really mattered. First, these people, with whom I had spent a lot of time, made a point of making sure I knew they were gang members. They wore gang colors and flashed gang signs around me. Many people I knew in the neighborhood feared them, and they seemed to know and like this. Their identity was also specifically important because they had been hired by the city of Denver to replace Roberts as “anti-gang” workers in a federally funded program that my reporting and the film calls into question. Another reason the identity of these men was important was because one of them in particular turned out, according to my reporting, to have helped set up Roberts on the day in question. Roberts was facing life in prison for what he said was firing in selfdefense as the gang members were attacking him. It all gave more credence to a theory that many in the neighborhood believed—that Roberts, who was a strident detractor of the

federal anti-gang effort when he worked for it, and of the gentrification of his neighborhood, was someone that many powerful people wanted out.

Now, one of the only allegations in the lawsuit that even exists in the film was the identification of these two men as gang members. We added to our working draft of the anti-SLAPP motion videos from social media of these men flashing gang signs and photos of them decked out in red in groups.

This didn’t relieve all of my team members, some of whom wondered if they were covered by my insurance. They were also worried about their safety.

I was worried about that, too. And about how the lawsuit, which was mentioned in the Westword story, would impact our ability to premiere, and hopefully sell, the film. Mountainfilm had a number of meetings with its board and lawyers before agreeing to let us premiere there. Ultimately, they agreed to go on with it if I added the festival to my insurance coverage. I did.

I also had a US$10,000 deductible to cover before my insurance kicked in.

Section 4: Rob

The lawsuit was filled with problems. For example, one of the two plaintiffs claimed that he was accused of smoking crack cocaine, an allegation that is not in the film. Both also claimed they were falsely depicted ordering the murder of Roberts. But it was another gang member who is clearly identified in the film as having ordered the hit, not these two.

Julian Rubinstein and the film’s producers at Mountainfilm. Courtesy of Julian Rubinstein

In fact, one of the two plaintiffs barely appears on screen and is never identified by name.

Indeed, at the time the lawsuit was filed, the film had yet to premiere. It had only had a couple of local test screenings. While it was possible that the men had attended one of these small screenings, it seemed unlikely.

For purposes of demonstrating that the case was ripe for an anti-SLAPP motion, it seemed rather obvious that the film defendants had been sued for (alleged) statements in connection with a public issue—gang violence and a city’s novel efforts to combat it. If the judge agreed, once we filed the motion the lawsuit would be dismissed unless the two men could demonstrate they had a reasonable likelihood of success on their claims. Such a likelihood seemed improbable. Not only were several of the challenged statements not in the film, but one of the men had signed a release in which he waived any claims he might have in connection with his participation in the documentary.

Days before we planned to file the motion, the book defendants’ lawyer and I contacted the two men’s lawyers, letting them know that anti-SLAPP motions were about to be filed—and told them that unless the lawsuits were immediately dismissed, their clients would be responsible for our attorneys’ fees when our motions were granted. Because the complaint alleged that certain statements appeared in the film even though it was clear they did not, I asked the men’s lawyers point-blank if they had even seen the documentary. My question was met with a prolonged silence, strongly suggesting that they had never seen the film. While we certainly had the option of making the film available to them so they could compare it against the claims made in the complaint, we instead sent a letter later that day, telling them they had an obligation to watch the film before filing a complaint alleging that certain statements were made in the film. We advised them that, under the circumstances, sanctions might be awarded against them if they did not dismiss the case.

Later that day—and just shortly before our deadline to file the motions—the two men’s lawyers notified us by email that they were immediately dismissing the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning that it could never be refiled. Within minutes, we received a copy of the dismissal. It isn’t often that a phone conversation with a plaintiff’s lawyer can lead to such a quick dismissal. But this was exactly the type of frivolous case that the anti-SLAPP statute was enacted to fight.

Often an attorneys’ fees award for defendants following an anti-SLAPP ruling in their favor leads to a prolonged battle to actually collect the monies to repay legal fees. In this case, we didn’t even have to get to that point.

Section 5: Julian

Once it seemed clear to us that the plaintiffs had not even seen the film all of us were being sued for, it was even clearer that the lawsuit was just a strategy to undermine the findings and cut the legs out from under the project right as we were trying to get it out in the world.

I immediately sent an email to my team, thanking them for their patience and telling them the good news. Thanks to Adam McKay’s paying our US$10,000 deductible, months of legal work didn’t cost me anything, except for some aggravation.

A week later, our sales agent, Charlotte Lichtman at CAA, told us we had a distribution offer with Gravitas Ventures to launch the film theatrically and on streaming platforms, which we took.

But my legal issues weren’t over. Within hours of the film winning the Audience Award at the Denver Film Festival in November 2022, one of the men who sued me went on Facebook Live and threatened my life, calling me the “devil Jew” whom he had been “sent by God to destroy.”

I was placed in a Colorado state address protection program, and several months later, after more threats, I left Denver for good. The state is now paying to protect me from men whom the city and the federal government hired to work as “anti-gang” activists in a corrupt program that had seen violence skyrocket. But thanks to the antiSLAPP motion, the film made it out in the world, helping the public to understand more about a problematic federal effort in our most vulnerable communities that had been kept under wraps for too long..

The information in this article is for general informational purposes only and does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors in their individual capacities only. Readers of this article with questions about a particular legal matter should contact their own attorney.

IDA’s next biennial conference designed for and by documentary practitioners centers holistic thinking about both the lives and afterlives of documentaries. Under the theme “Strategy, Networks, Access,” we’ll spotlight how documentarians should access institutions, people, spaces, and resources so we can benefit from being in community with each other. This section will preview many of the key connections between our keynote speakers and filmmaker collectives who will gather at the conference April 15–18, 2024.

Strategy Networks Access Getting Real ’24

Kristen Johnson filming Cameraperson. Courtesy of Janus Films

Arta Barzanji is a London-based Iranian filmmaker, critic, and lecturer. He has written for publications including MUBI Notebook, Sabzian, and photogėnie. His current film project is the documentary Unfinished: Kamran Shirdel.

Jemma Desai is a cultural worker and somatic facilitator. She writes and teaches in a variety of academic and nonacademic contexts and is a practice-based Ph.D. candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama with a thesis titled “what do we want from each other after we have told our stories?”

When Hope Is Weary Jemma Desai questions what we choose to ignore

By Arta Barzanji

Over the years, Jemma Desai’s writing, programming, research, and practice have intersected with institutional critique. Through investigating film institutions’ languages of colonialism, she has brought renewed attention to hierarchies, systems, words, and ways of relating that are often taken for granted. Born out of a combination of rigorous research, firsthand experience working in institutions such as the British Council and the BFI, as well as testimonies by other arts workers, This Work Isn’t for Us (first self-published in 2020) was a crucially timely study of the fundamental problems plaguing institutional initiatives surrounding diversity and inclusion that often end up reproducing existing power structures.

Jemma Desai while presenting the program I am Dora during the London Short Film Festival in 2017. Courtesy of Jemma Desai

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

Desai is a current Ph.D. candidate at the Central School of Speech and Drama, a collaborator with BlackStar Film Festival, and a somatic facilitator. She will be a keynote speaker at Getting Real ’24 as well as the curator of the 2025 Flaherty Seminar.

Meeting Desai in a London cafe on a breezy Thursday afternoon, I took the opportunity to delve into questions surrounding the function, structure, and politics of film festivals that have been on the minds of many, including myself, in the past months. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: From my limited experience, what I valued most about festivals was the feeling of community with other up-and-coming critics from around the world. Some of these critics/friends attended Berlinale this year, and some decided to boycott the festival. I know that some who did go have been as indignant as those who didn’t, if not more so, with added feelings of guilt. These are younger people trying to start a career in an increasingly precarious field. The supply-and-demand logic applies not only to films and filmmakers, it also puts enormous pressure on critics and programmers.

JEMMA DESAI: Let’s focus on the fictions inside the work we do: that somehow getting to go to a festival is a great privilege, when the reality is that it is for many a great burden, a tax to participate in an unfair ecosystem. Many are spending their own money, at great financial risk. Nobody wants to talk about this ever-present truth—there is shame in admitting a lack of resources in a system that thrives on elite access. I’ve been there, too, putting myself financially at risk just to be part of the conversation, to watch something months before it comes out before it is somehow sullied by mass marketing.

The industry is built on the pretense that this is sustainable. What if the top festival directors were more honest about how little freedom they have to allow for freedom of expression? What might be revealed that we could work toward changing? And at the bottom, what might be more evident if we displayed less gratitude for the crumbs we are offered as precarious artists, programmers, and invited guests? Right now,

there feels like a lot of division and judgment. The problem is not the request for new terms of engagement but the facade itself. Now is a moment when we might reveal what is underneath that facade. It feels important that happens for change to take place.

D: Berlinale’s attitude to discussions around the genocide being carried out in Palestine has brought forth a question that’s more complex than it appears at first: Who are film festivals really for?

JD: The answer to this question always seems to be “for audiences,” for “others.” Whenever people put together a festival, they implicitly endorse a form of relation that centralizes the film and the filmmaker, putting them on a higher plane than the mortal audience. But at festivals like Berlinale, audiences are not really “mortal”—they are the industry. So, festivals become about critics, buyers, and people who have status or means to be there. There may still be a general audience, but a quite rarefied one that can get there first. Recent events at festivals show very clearly that there are many fictions inside the supposedly neutral spaces [in which] we circulate and celebrate film, and the fictions about audience are central to them.

Large, state-funded festivals replicate state interests in culture. Necessarily, they become geopolitical demonstrations of power. Necessarily, this must be hidden or disavowed through “civilizational or universalist politics.” We’ve seen that in the history of European festivals, from the fascist roots of the Venice Film Festival to the progressive establishment of the Cannes Film Festival in response (set up with the support of the Americans and the British). Yet now, in both festivals, who gets a pavilion? How much money and how many films come from different regions of the world? At the smaller end, and even in the margins of big festivals, events can really be a form of connection, but the shadow of these forms of relating remains.

D: Elsewhere, you’ve talked about the film industry as not being the most conducive environment to creating a community. As filmmakers and critics, most of us have to constantly compete with each other for funding, grants, opportunities, etc

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

JD: There’s scarcity, so even if you don’t want to compete, you’re put in a position to have to. Plus, it’s also a hierarchical industry that is good at hiding or fetishizing the accrual of privilege. It’s hard to build a community on this erratic, asymmetric base that’s not values-driven. Community is built from shared value systems and shared needs. You can accrue power from taking certain positions within the industry, but you’ll lose power if you actually stand for the integrity of those positions. So, making something about political resistance and actually supporting political resistance are two very different things. You’ll get very different rewards for holding those two different positions.

Top: What do we want from each other after we have told our stories? (2020), Jemma Desai’s desktop documentary. Courtesy of Jemma Desai

Above: A video clip from Jemma Desai’s keynote talk at Abandon Normal Devices in 2023. Courtesy of Jemma Desai

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

D: Many people aim for networking rather than building community. The environment feels more suited to opportunism and competition than anything else.

JD: In a hostile, transactional space, it makes sense to protect yourself through transactional relating rather than mutuality. Festivals are formulaic spaces with a certain kind of repetition, a certain practiced mode of relating that you need to get good at if you want to succeed. This then results in a certain kind of reality. I’ve often found community with people who make themselves quite vulnerable by telling the truth about what they’re facing, and often isolated myself by sharing what I am facing.

We’re so practiced in this transactional way of relating that it imbues much of our work without us even realizing. If we want this to change, we not only need to create new spaces but also need to practice new things in them over and over again. That’s why I say abolish the festivals. They take up so much space. They colonize our imaginations and relationships. There are other ways that we could give and receive our work, ways we can’t even imagine right now.

D: You’ve often emphasized that these values, behaviors, and patterns are ingrained in the systems and structures that underlie spaces like festivals. It’s important to emphasize this fact and not fall into a moralistic conversation or judgment of individuals.

JD: When I think about structures, I think about structures of relating and feeling, and of course, historical structures like capitalism and colonialism. But I think about the structure of film festivals through language because my experience of the film festival was unlocked through looking at the colonial origins and nature of words like “submission.” I realized my relationship with filmmakers is formed by the fact that I’m here for them to “submit” to.

D: I’d say there is a dialectic between capitalism and imperialism as systems of economic and political domination and the language that they shape and produce. In return, that language ideologically reinforces them every day. As you said, enough repetition makes the existing state of things seem natural. Berlinale’s resistance to even offer verbal concessions about what’s happening in Palestine is revealing something about the “official” institutions of culture under capitalism. It’s having a radicalizing effect by shattering a lot of illusions about them.

JD: I see this moment as a clarifying moment of attention. One where we might let go of the fictions I mentioned earlier. As Angela Davis says, radical simply means “grasping things at the root.” The root is power: who has it, wields it, and gets to set the terms of the narrative around it. This is important on a geopolitical stage as well as in the structures of film festivals. I want to acknowledge that one is infinitely more important than the other, yet I feel so strongly that we need to leave behind—in all aspects of our living—ways of relating that are complicit in the genocide we are watching unfold. Whatever structure we build around art will reflect the world in which we live, with all its inequalities and power dynamics. When we still want a structure that clearly cannot recognize the sovereignty of Palestinians because of the logic in which it exists, then it’s better that it says nothing [about what’s happening]. To me, this has been a form of peeling away. We have to remember this moment because it will be quickly covered up. It’s just a fact that this is not for everyone, and it’s never been for everyone. We just chose to ignore that because there was enough of something there for us individually.

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

D: It’s a point of crisis that’s forcefully uncovering things that were normally too inconvenient to acknowledge. On a more positive note, how have you approached alternative avenues of building community?

JD: I am interested in learning skills that make group work more possible. This is something that many of us who’ve worked in institutions for a long time, myself included, are not very practiced in. I want to live what I learn, to practice it, not just say or think it. I am interested in processes and people. I want to make new realities with others. I want to create an alternative way of making and being together because I just don’t believe in the idea of individually programming or individually trying to change things anymore. So, I have been investing more in performance and somatics and attendant organizing and writing work, which helps me think about story and image in ways I find hard in normative programming.

I often think about Ruth Wilson Gilmore talking about abolition as presence, not absence, of investing in practices that would make harmful structures irrelevant. I want to invest in this idea of group formations and group work and understand what is possible in that container. Maybe nothing is possible, but I want to know why.

And having said all of this, after the last few months, my hope is waning. I will always want to make and do things with other people. But the idea that this is where I will earn my living from, that this work will love me back, that the way that I want to work can be actualized… it feels clear to me that so much else has to change. I’m very interested in what you said about people who are suddenly more attuned to what is wrong and in supporting spaces where we can bring this energy to something material. There have to be so many of us invested in letting go of old systems, but even at this moment, I’m not sure that most are ready to do this; I hope this changes.

D: What is the significance of “Yearning,” the theme of Flaherty 2025?

JD: Again, this has shifted so fundamentally for me in the past few months. Perhaps the season of yearning is over. I hope this is a moment of action, of transition. In birth, the moment of transition is when every person says, “I can’t do it,” and then the baby comes anyway. I think about holding people through the inevitable transition rather than yearning for them to get to that point because, at this moment, I am struggling with the possibility that making, giving, and receiving images leads us to a collective space. I don’t know what to do with yearning during a live-streamed genocide. Black feminist Lola Olufemi recently made a differentiation between hope and determination in this moment. Holding, gathering, offering, and trust feel like the skills that are necessary for this season of determination when hope is weary..

Screenshot from “Yearning as method in programming,” a performance lecture commissioned by the Independent Cinema Office in 2023. Courtesy of Jemma Desai

Stephanie Jenkins is a documentary producer and archival researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. She co-founded the Archival Producers Alliance in 2023.

Kirsten Johnson’s next project is a scripted feature film based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Susan Sontag. Her previous film, Dick Johnson Is Dead, premiered at Sundance 2020, where it won the Jury Prize for Innovation in Nonfiction Storytelling.

Any Human Who Films Is Already Part Machine

Kirsten Johnson searches for the ineffable

By Stephanie Jenkins

Kirsten Johnson has been a cinematographer and director since the 1980s. Her acclaimed films as a director include The Above (short, 2015), Cameraperson (2016), and Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020), all of which grapple with the meaning behind making images, their utility in conveying reality, and the strength of documentary images as visual evidence.

For this interview, Documentary asked longtime archival producer and producer Stephanie Jenkins (Muhammad Ali, 2021) to catch up with Johnson via Zoom. As a co-founder of the newly formed Archival Producers Alliance, whose other organizers are interviewed by Williams Cole for the following piece in this issue, Jenkins has been indelibly wrapped up in on-the-ground organizing for safeguarding audience trust in documentaries as historical documents. This work intersects with Johnson’s topic for her keynote talk at Getting Real ’24 in April 2024, in which she will discuss our changing relationship with bodies—both for those filming and being filmed—in a new era of increasing access to cameras, video surveillance, and generative AI. Jenkins’s discussion with Johnson covers her growth as a filmmaker, the impact that making Cameraperson had on her practice, cinema as a useful tool for humanity, and our life cycles in our new “image world.” This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

DOCUMENTARY: Your keynote at Getting Real ’24 will focus on embodiment in our new world of generative AI (GenAI), with cameras being everywhere, and what it means to make images from our bodies in that new context. Why do you find this topic to be important right now, and how did you start thinking about this huge set of ideas?

KIRSTEN JOHNSON: My interest in these questions absolutely emerges from my experience. As a person who got excited about film in the 1980s, and who in my search to find a way to enter the field ended up studying cinematography at the French national film school in Paris [La Fémis], I really loved the physical proximity to the camera, and then what the camera made possible for me. Immediately after graduating, one of my first opportunities was to film with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. And it changed everything. That experience of filming with someone so brilliant just opened up my mind to what was possible, being in space with another person with a camera.

I think of myself as this person who straddles a very critical moment in history in terms of cinema history, but also history. I’m born in 1965. I start filming in the late ’80s. It’s almost the end of filming on film. It’s the beginning of filming on all kinds of problematic formats, but it’s also the emergence of amateur video cameras. And then as I begin to work and have the chance to travel to many different places in the world, I am seeing that certain kinds of colonialism are being left behind, but also that they are absolutely lingering or finding new ways to anchor.

For the people that I’m with, their relationships to filming are all over the map. Some people have never seen a camera before. Some people have never seen a movie before. Then at a certain point, obviously the internet arrives, and then at another point, cell phones with cameras arrive, and everything changes so radically. I spent many, many, many hours, 250 days of the year, filming. I felt this real sense that I was a camera person. Now we are all camera people!

I encountered all kinds of things at scale, as well as having this very personal, physical proximity to all kinds of experiences. And so, in some ways, it was almost as if I was living in the image world ahead of the image world’s arrival. What I would say is there’s a critical difference in how I was there physically with people, as opposed to me looking at images of something or being in an edit room and looking at all of the footage that I had filmed. And that does change things. Cameraperson was my attempt to grapple with the many questions that a couple of decades of filming posed to me.

The old challenges haven’t gone anywhere. The ethical challenges are ever present—the problems of misrepresentation, the problems of power dynamics—all of those things are still in place. But then adding on top of this is the way the change in the distribution of images shifts all of the relationships between people who film and people who are filmed.

D: I’ve been thinking lately about GenAI and the difference between a human bearing witness to something and a machine bearing witness to something. Would you define what’s happening now as different between people versus a person and a machine, and what is happening as machines are coming more into filmmaking?

KJ: I would say I don’t think that’s a simple binary, and I want to make that clear. One of my processes in all of this is always to search for language, because I think much of our language is outdated. Much of our language is nostalgic, much of our language is problematic. We’re drawing all these different histories: military, colonial, missionary, religious, cinematic. So, for example, I am not simply a human body when I work with a camera. I don’t feel like “cyborg” is the word that works for me. I’m still searching for the word, and I feel like this is a collective word that we all search together for. I can see in different ways with a camera than I can as a human. I can see with a telephoto lens. I can see the difference between what is in front of me and what is on my screen. The camera gives me a frame around a reality that I can then move and zoom in on or zoom out of.

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

The old challenges haven’t gone anywhere. The ethical challenges are ever present—the problems of misrepresentation, the problems of power dynamics— all of those things are still in place. But then adding on top of this is the way the change in the distribution of images shifts all of the relationships between people who film and people who are filmed.

I would just start from the place of “any human who films is already part machine.” That grafting allows all kinds of things. And I would say the other thing that it does is enable this kind of time travel, right? So that we are in the present moment, but even later that day, we can return to what we filmed, see it, think about it, and return to the same place where we filmed it in a new way. Filming allows our consciousness to be laid out in front of us for us to revisit. And then in the edit room, reorder it.

The difference between a person with a camera and a camera itself is real, but it’s also on a spectrum. What I am doing when I film is many things simultaneously. I have many motivations. I have many ignorances. I have many agendas, many revelations, right? This is true for a machine-operated camera that has an agenda. If it is a surveillance camera in a city, it’s trying to record all of the activity going on in one physical space, so that retrospectively, if something goes wrong, we can revisit what happened and say, oh, that person was there when that car crash happened, contrary to what they said, et cetera.

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

But what’s the mission of putting many cameras in a city? Is it to create a sensation of surveillance in all of the citizens of that particular place so that they will censor themselves, they will autoregulate, and be more careful? This was the subject matter of my short film, The Above. If we imagine a camera is there in the same way as if we imagine God is reading our thoughts, then we create social systems of behavior that are monitored by the people who live within those systems. Those cameras are placed with various almost-philosophies to them.

D: Absolutely. And then leaping to GenAI and this scraping of work that has been done by people to create new images, new realities— I’m curious how you’ve been thinking about it just given your vast amount of experience. Have you looked at Sora [OpenAI’s text-tovideo tool]?

KJ: What immediately came to mind is that image of the dog holding the cell phone, which is just so hilarious because it’s kind of little human hands. And yet when you imagine this dog really looking at a cell phone, suddenly what is generated is a new idea that a dog would be doom scrolling.

There is a way in which some of the things that AI is generating give me all kinds of pleasure. It’s surrealism, but also new possibility. And of course, one of the first images that Sora creates is a lone man in a spacesuit, in a desolate landscape. It is literally like, how many times do we have to do colonialism? How many times do we have to re-create the image of one great man discovering an uninhabited territory when it is never that? This concept of scraping is one that yields a repetition of things that were already reductive and too simplistic or even problematic in the first place.

The big issue for me is that AI has no relationship to mortality. One of the most basic stakes of being human is that we live, and we die. We don’t know how long we will live. We don’t know when we will die. AI also has no relationship to the emotional contracts that happen between humans. Much of our work as filmmakers, as artists, as whatever we want to call ourselves, is trying to find a way to express

the ineffable to others who might understand the ineffable. So, our entire project is one of communication with others whom we may never meet. So much of the artwork we care about is made by people who are long dead. But their work still speaks to us because we are human.

D: Something I love about your work is how much it takes on death and the anticipation of death, really showing that we are scared to be bodies in time. Something that really scares me about GenAI is the glossiness of it. Generated archival footage and photographs all look pristine. I fear that how we want to see others in ourselves is forever youthful.

KJ: Part of what animates me is that I was raised within this religious tradition of Seventh Day Adventism that anticipated heaven. And I was completely obsessed as a kid with the questions, “Do we get to age in heaven?” “Do all the relationships stay the same?” I was terrified by the concept of infinity. Do I have to stay the same for infinity? One of the sort of hilarious things about being human is you’re at the center of your world, and you believe that you can perceive a lot and understand a lot, then a momentary shift in your reality happens and suddenly your body is altered… and suddenly you realize how incapable you were of imagining what it is to be in your body now.

One of the revelations of Cameraperson was that because I was young, traveling so much, and filming so much, I like many young people didn’t really imagine that my body would change. And then when I looked back at the footage, I realized how I was being changed by doing what I was doing, how I was aging, how my thinking of what was possible and impossible were shifting.

What we are experiencing, which is unprecedented in human history since the advent of the digital ecosystem, is multiplication at a scale that is not human. It’s so far beyond human, how much we encounter visually, even in the course of one day. We could not physically travel to that many places, we could not be attracted to that many different people, we could not wish we were eating that many different kinds of food. There’s a capacious, voracious, voluptuary thing happening that is beyond our

Opposite: Still from Dick Johnson Is Dead. Courtesy of Janus Films/ Criterion

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

human capacity, but we’re doing it. So, what is that doing to us?

It’s also one thing for me to be doing it, having lived 30 years before the internet proliferated and then doing it after, and another to be a young child for whom this is reality.

D: I would love to investigate more how we’re all online and being moved online through these machines that are all in our pockets.

KJ: The acceleration. I would say one thing is we all have to grapple with our own relationship to perception and memory, which shifts over time in our lives in all kinds of ways. Our memory starts to function in different kinds of ways. My father with dementia has said to me, “If you can’t understand what time it is, and you don’t know where you are spatially, it’s very hard to hold onto your idea of yourself.”

Which I just thought was mind-blowing— that realization of how tenuous our consciousness is. I think that a lot of people who are using phones are probably grappling with

some piece of that. They’re aware that they don’t remember things in the same way. I would say I’m starting to use photography as a tool in that way. Like, where did I park, you know?

Cinema is a tool of consciousness. We as feature-length documentary filmmakers are taking big bodies of material and working them and reworking them for months to try to construct meaning in a form that relates to a world of people who already have some vocabulary in this. Somebody doing a TikTok video is trying to express something and make meaning in this totally other form, and there is a community of people who read that language.

I think it’s exciting, the new kinds of cinematic language that are emerging, attempting to not only speak in these new languages, but to address the fact that most people exist in this type of speed modality. How do we invite people to shift speeds or to make meaning out of the constant plethora? I think we must. Back to the quest for the ineffable, it feels exciting to me when people try to understand in new ways. What doesn’t feel exciting is when

Kristen Johnson filming Cameraperson. Courtesy of Janus Films

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

people try to repeat what already exists, which is what we have a lot of right now.

D: Rewatching Cameraperson last night, I was thinking of what a beautiful invitation it is for us to all to remember and also what kind of personal archives we’re all making all the time. Could you talk more about what you said before about filming that automatically becomes an archive?

KJ: If we are the person who filmed those things, we were someone when we filmed them and we understood certain things. As time goes on, we remain ourselves. And yet our perspective on what that moment was, what we remember about it, what we care about, the people who have died, who were a part of making it with us— all of those things keep adding in. The revelation of Cameraperson, for me, was I could see my own blind spot, that I experienced pleasure at the same time that I was urging myself so seriously to be ethical all the time.

I could see all of those things with the help of the collaborators I worked with—I wasn’t able to see them by myself. And I guess that’s the other thing—when we invite other people into these exchanges, when what we make is meaningful enough to us and it allows space for other people—meaning gets made out of that collaboration.

D: I do fall into this apocalyptic fear sometimes that we’re gonna be the bodies on the conveyor belt in Wall-E (2008)…

KJ: As someone who believed the apocalypse was imminent as a child, and as someone who’s reminded that certain sets of people have already lived through apocalypses, I believe that the apocalypse, like heaven, is a fantasy of simplicity. It’s a fantasy that at some point in time our agency will be taken from us, and we will not have powerful choices to make. But in fact, we have powerful choices to make all the time. These spirits of resilience, resistance, valuing, meaning making, and trying to figure out how to respect and love the people that we encounter. All of those challenges will continue as long as each of us is alive.

And we will all encounter our own personal apocalypse at a certain moment. It will end for each of us. A narcissistic fantasy about the apocalypse is that everyone’s gonna go with us. It’s all gonna be over once we’re gone. But in fact, much will continue without us, which is painful..

Kirsten Johnson filming Cameraperson

Photo by Gini Reticker. Courtesy of Janus Films

Williams Cole is a longtime producer, director, and editor who also researched issues in documentary as a Fulbright Scholar at the London School of Economics. He was a founder of The Brooklyn Rail, where he wrote extensively on documentary film. He has recently engaged in earning certificates in AI strategy and information warfare.

The Dilemma of Documentary Proof

An interview with two organizers of the Archival Producers Alliance on how AI will shake up the nature of archival footage

By Williams Cole

For the first decades of this century there was, relatively speaking, intermittent media coverage of Artificial Intelligence or how deep learning and related technologies were creeping into aspects of work, culture, and society. But then in late 2022, OpenAI released the large language model ChatGPT to the public—and stories about AI exploded. Subsequently, the coverage around AI in the last year or so has reached a point of fatigue, even satire: “It’s AI” has become a catchphrase for anything, especially visual, that seems exaggerated or unbelievable. Recently, it seems every week there are new stories about instances of synthetic media and how a deluge of deepfakes will be coming in this year’s presidential election.

While audiences might be overwhelmed, confused, or just plain tired of hearing about AI, billions of dollars are being invested by tech behemoths and venture capitalists, and new generative models with exponential power are being developed, tested, and released to the public. This is especially true with, as it turns out, something AI models have come to excel at: the creation of synthetic imagery. In midFebruary, for example, OpenAI previewed its new “text-to-video” model Sora, a tool that can create from text prompts complex, highdefinition moving imagery clips up to a minute long. And while the AI craze is perhaps not in the headlines as much as it was in 2023, for documentary filmmaking it is no longer a question if or when AI will affect them, but how transformative it will come to be.

For many, documentary is rooted in an idealism that covets a fragile responsibility, truth to power, and authenticity around historical narrative (though all these claims come with

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

It’s like the Wild West. The requirements that filmmakers should follow are not ethically or legally clear. And there is not much guidance. When we asked the producers these questions, they would say they were talking to lawyers and trying to figure it out but didn’t really know. And this made

us nervous, because there would obviously be these AIgenerated images mixed in with and up against actual historical archival.

Hollywood Reporter last year to bring attention to the use of AI in documentary film. Two principal organizers of APA, Rachel Antell and Jennifer Petrucelli, spoke with Documentary via a bicoastal Zoom.

The conversation, edited here for length and clarity, touches on the state of the craft of archival producing, the virtues (and challenges) of archival research, and the kinds of guardrails that should be developed sooner rather than later in this dawning “Age of AI.” This discussion is also a preview of the reasoning behind why APA will present a rough draft of guidelines for ethical AI use in documentary filmmaking at Getting Real ’24.

DOCUMENTARY: As experienced archival producers, how and when did you first start to notice the idea of AI creeping into the workflow?

age-old caveats). And one essential part of the documentary filmmaking process is the use of archival imagery. Archival research and producing have been a part of the craft since the early days and are integral to the production process, especially when engaging in historical subjects like classic broadcast series Eyes on the Prize and The Vietnam War, the recent hit Fire of Love, and many others.

But with the advent and rapid development of AI-based synthetic imagery tools, the triedand-tested practices in archival producing are being challenged. Directors and producers are beginning to consider the use of synthetically generated content in place of the intensive skilled research, complicated rights issues, and increasing expense of archival producing— and this is opening a Pandora’s box of issues regarding documentary proof, authenticity, and ethics. Formed in 2023, the Archival Producers Alliance (APA), a group of more than 200 archival producers, published an open letter in The

RACHEL ANTELL: Earlier last year, we were working on a film, and some of the archival visuals that the filmmakers needed to make the film either took place before cameras were invented or some of it existed, but there was not a lot of it. ChatGPT was in the news quite a bit at that point. We were having a conversation before a production meeting like, “Oh boy, do you think in the next couple of years we’ll actually see this entering the doc space?” Lo and behold, the next day we were in the meeting and the producers were like, “Look at this! We can use AI to make this!” We had never encountered this use of AI before, and the first concern raised for us was how this was going to be labeled. How will the audience know? The producers didn’t have answers to those questions. And, honestly, ten months later it’s still a situation where nobody knows. It’s like the Wild West. The requirements that filmmakers should follow are not ethically or legally clear. And there is not much guidance. When we asked the producers these questions, they would say they were talking to lawyers and trying to figure it out but didn’t really know. And this made us nervous, because there would obviously be these AI-generated images mixed in with and up against actual historical archival. So that started us down this path.

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

JENNIFER PETRUCELLI: There are certainly good reasons to use AI. Films like Welcome to Chechnya (2020) and Another Body (2023) were very intentional in the use of AI to protect the identity of the subjects. But within our own little niche of the documentary world, we suddenly felt that there must be guidelines and standards around AI that we can agree to as a community. When you sit down to watch a documentary, I believe there’s a trust that the audience is putting in the filmmaker that what they’re seeing is real. And there’s an understanding when you sit down and watch a feature film, even one that’s based on a true story, that there are liberties that are taken. So, we really want to protect the integrity of documentaries.

D: I know it can be a complicated question, but how would you describe that “unwritten rule”—that integrity—in documentary, such as when searching for archival visual representation you are always striving for material that is the most accurate?

JP: I think that when you’re looking at archival material in a documentary, you are making assumptions when it’s edited into a film that it’s authentic. Certainly, people use re-creations, but they are usually set in an obvious stylistic cue,

so the audience knows—and it is important to know if what you are seeing is real or not. We could drill down into that question of if there is “truth” and what that means. But I do think that most audiences of documentaries sit down trusting that what the filmmakers are showing them is truth through their lens—and that the visual material they are seeing is authentic.

RA: And as archival producers, we are often the gatekeepers for that authenticity, because we’re the ones who are digging into the archives and presenting the material to the director, to the editor, and saying, yes, this is this time period. Yes, this is this place. Yes, this is this specific moment in time. And that’s a big part of our job because we want to be as accurate and as specific to what something looked like, what something felt like, so that they can feel confident showing that to the audience and knowing that that is an accurate representation of what it is they’re trying to depict. Archival is a big piece of that.

D: If we look at the capabilities of these new generative AI tools like OpenAI’s Sora, for example, which will be able to create historical archival footage of any kind—what are the consequences of these developments on that documentary proof?

RA: I think it’s going to completely shake people’s faith in anything they see. Perhaps that is the shakeup that we need, to take a step back from trusting any media, I don’t know. But in terms of documentary, it’s chilling because if we lose that implicit trust, then the form sort of loses its value altogether.

JP: At the same time, there are reasons to use it. There are groups of people whose histories are not represented in the archives. Our concern is making sure that there’s transparency in the use so there’s a common understanding of what we are looking at and where it came from. Essentially, we just want to have some agreedupon language around the use of AI, so people know what they’re seeing.

Film cannisters in an archive.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access

RA: This is something we have to think about now. While it is currently a trickle, it will become exponential. I can’t even imagine how many images are going to be AI-created just a year from now. I think it will feel like a deluge. And so, it will become increasingly difficult to discern—even within a documentary—what is AI and what is really archival.

D: What are some of the other solutions, like guidelines, that you think should be implemented moving forward? I know it’s still a Wild West situation, but especially from APA’s perspective, what are some of the first steps that need to happen?

RA: We’re speaking with people in England at PACT, which is their producers’ guild, and one of the things they are doing is creating a checklist of different AI companies and vetting them in several categories regarding ethical use of training data and other criteria. It is a start, because filmmakers by and large don’t know how and from what these images are being created. Another step might be doing something near the end of the documentary production process like a fair use review—but this would be an AI review, where someone signs off on every piece of synthetically generated material—how it is used, labeled, and if it comes from a verified company. Something along those lines that could be integrated into the documentary pipeline.

JP: But there is still a question as to whose responsibility is that going to be? Is that going to fall to the archival producers? So, it’s really in the weeds on who is responsible for this spreadsheet and getting it to the lawyers and making sure you’re covered from an insurance perspective.

RA: And we are going to need buy-in and partnership from the streamers and maybe the grant funders and others. Potentially awards organizations also. We’ve talked about the ways that they can influence things. Maybe you won’t be eligible for an Emmy or Oscar unless

What is a documentary?

That’s been a perennial question, and it is hard to assume that a documentary will look the same once the AI floodgates open.

you meet these requirements, for example. But we are going to need more obvious buy-in. These ideas are all being batted around. One of the discussions at an upcoming meeting is, how do we define a documentary? What is a documentary? That’s been a perennial question, and it is hard to assume that a documentary will look the same once the AI floodgates open.

D: If there are no guidelines and no buyin, what do you see happening in terms of your own experience with crushed budgets and desperate producers wanting to create content? What is the worst-case scenario?

JP: Well, I certainly think there will be no more archival producers if we go down into the worst-case scenario. And that is part of our organization’s concern—people are worried about their jobs as well. Archival producers tend to be people who are very meticulous and very serious about the work and really bring a lot of passion to it. And I think that could go away. If the documentary film world just decides we’re not going to value archival anymore, it’s going to change the whole nature of what a documentary is. If that happens, I’m not sure what the point of a documentary is..

Getting Real ’24: Strategy, Networks, Access Logan Elevate Grant 2024

Look out for these emerging doc makers!

Since 2018, Logan Elevate Grant provides funds to emerging women and nonbinary lmmakers of color directing feature-length journalistic documentary lms. Meet 2024 grantees who will receive $30,000/each and story consulting. Made possible by the generosity of the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation.

Asmahan Bkerat

Asmahan Bkerat is a Palestinian-Jordanian documentary lmmaker. She started her career as a photographer and social justice advocate. Bkerat’s rst short documentary Badrya won the Jury Prize for Best MiniDoc at the Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival. She is an alumna of Sundance, Hot Docs, IDFA, SDI, The Whickers, DFI, AIDC, The American Film Showcase, Cannes Docs, Dhaka doc lab, DMZ, Doc Edge, and IMS.

Asmahan is currently directing/producing her rst feature-length documentary, Concrete Land, and producing feature docs titled Harvest Moon and If These Stones Could Talk alongside a few other short documentary lms.

Cherish "Chez" Oteka

Cherish Oteka (they/them) is a BAFTA-winning lmmaker with a passion for telling nuanced human-interest stories with a cinematic air. In 2022, Cherish won a BAFTA in the British Short Film category for their docu-drama The Black Cop. In 2024, Cherish was named as a Breakthrough Creator by Vimeo in 2023 as well as winning UKTV’s Rising Star Award and the Best Documentary Award at the Movie Screen and Video Awards. Cherish has worked with a range of well-known brands and broadcasters including BBC One, Tate, Stonewall, SBTV, London Live, BBC Digital, and The Guardian.

Cherish is directing and producing their rst cinematic feature doc about the Gay Games.

director-producer who tells stories across short, feature, and immersive formats. Her immersive documentaries, MADE, a VR piece that follows an iPhone factory worker in China, and Create Your Own, an interactive piece about young people’s search for meaning, have won multiple digital awards like W3 and DFA Awards. In 2017, she founded Singing Cicadas, a female-run production company turned impact agency that creates non ction stories and campaigns around social justice issues in Asia. She received her BA at the University of Southern California. Her projects have been supported by Chicken & Egg, Rooftop Filmmakers Fund, and Doc Society, and she is a fellow at IDFA DocLab and DocNYCxVC. Very occasionally when she is not making lms, she makes storytelling board games.

Matazi Weathers is a temporal and spatial film farmer, curator, educator, and filmmaker from Los Angeles always in pursuit of new potentialities. They are the Assistant Curator of Film at LACMA; co-curate Strong-Sissy Black Movie Night, a cinema and political education space; and are founder of Black Bloom, a Black farmers’ cooperative in Los Angeles that provides free education and mentorship to Black folks learning to grow their own medicine.

Utterances of Black Love Sundance 2024

By Matazi Weathers

I had been given such a wide breadth of opinions, suggestions, thoughts on Sundance that it felt a bit like I walked into somebody else’s IG story when I set foot in Park City for my first in-person attendance of the largest “independent” film festival in the U.S. I’ve mostly known Sundance as a beacon of mainstream acclaim and approval for filmmakers. Last year, Sundance provided a sense of discovery and excitement when I viewed its virtual programming. I felt inspired seeing the revelatory works of Raven Jackson (All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt), D. Smith (Kokomo City), Jeron Braxton (Oxytocin), and more from my couch, sometimes with friends. So, I was a bit disheartened to see a relative lack of Black filmmakers at this year’s Sundance in an ongoing trend of waning interest in Black stories since the momentary high tide of political and moral imperatives in 2020—but so it goes.

Outside of its film programming, Sundance has various cultural hub “houses” that provide refuge for folks of color and opportunities for attendees to listen to unique, relevant panels and engage in networking, but they also reflect a clear lack of Black programming. The Blackhouse, which is the legacy Black cultural hub for Sundance, put on only one panel-talk event during the festival and seemed supplanted by the clout of the MACRO Lodge, which hosted most of the relevant Black events, but you could attend them only if you were able to secure a spot on the guest list.

I came to Sundance from a space of deep reflection, emerging from a forest of my own thoughts around Black love, sovereignty, action. As I wandered around Park City, I found myself dreaming, turning to the power of love and the specific cosmic possibilities of Black love to move worlds—the deep connections that attract and magnetically bond our lives together. Maybe it was the lack of such moving visions of Blackness like All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt along with my heart’s own pangs, but I felt like I had to seek out, support, and fall into the rapture of such artistry in Park City.

I was pulled from this revery repeatedly and violently—a cowardly somebody in a passing car yelled “fucking ni**er!” at me while I stood, waiting alone at a bus stop, on my way to my last screening of the festival. A bit jarring, but

not surprising whether it happens in Park City or Los Angeles. With bell hooks’s research and writings on love in my hands, I thought of the threats of lovelessness that take violent form here and everywhere. At least I was met on the bus by a sweet Black bus driver and an older Black woman passenger. Nice to sit in proximity to them and other Black folks I encountered at the festival, to hold some sort of magnetic field together to preserve our collective energies for this particular moment in time.

When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.

—Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” April 4, 1967, at Manhattan’s Riverside Church

Seeking Mavis Beacon

With love and fortification of the soul and the heart in my mind, I sought out a cinematic response of Black love in the snowy white landscape. Seeking Mavis Beacon, in Sundance’s NEXT section, was my favorite of the festival, but it seemed to get a bit lost in the buzz cycle and overly serious festival awards. The freshest project in the festival functioned as a digital palimpsest of our time. It brought in a number of heroes of young Black thought to act as sage guides for Jazmin Renee Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross’s nonbinary heroes’ journey to exhume a Black ancestor from the annals of cyberspace. Such visions of Black love, of community care and reverence for Black elders from youth connected via a vital line that runs through the spirit realm, provided such a refreshing balm to soothe and satiate the heart. You can check out my interview with Jazmin and Olivia online and look out on the horizon for the computer-generated waves that this film will make in the near future—if marketing resources are invested in the film, which is not such a realistic expectation given what happened to the promotional campaigns for 2023’s brilliant Black films.

Seeking Mavis Beacon (dir. Jazmine Jones). Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Tendaberry

Another young, Black femme filmmaker debuting her first feature at Sundance, Haley Elizabeth Andersen’s hybrid fiction and archivemining film Tendaberry also screened in NEXT.

Tendaberry explores the feral intimacies of a young Haitian-Dominican woman moving through a capitalist-realist Gen Z malaisant white world of contemporary New York City. Andersen’s impressive telephoto intimacies echo Chick Strand’s lens. Though the film is mostly narrative fiction in form, it’s infused with bursts of home video from the filmmaker and a scattering of “59 reels and 1,900 hours” of Nelson Sullivan’s pre-internet vlogs of Coney Island and the city at large from 1983 to 1989. Tendaberry mostly gestures toward specters of Blackness, with Black folks haunting the screen only moments at a time to unsettle the protagonist, bringing attention to her anxieties. There is no Black love to be found in this vision of NYC; only an awkward reconciliation at the film’s end serves to emphasize the importance of Black familial bonds and ancestral cultures in the healing of oneself.

Daughters

Water, rain, and waves of emotion play central backdrops to the Black girls of Daughters, tears steadily welling in the eyes of all who watch with anywhere near an open heart. Co-directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s winner of the Audience Award in the U.S. Documentary competition and overall Festival Favorite Award starts out with emotional 16mm black-and-white footage of said daughters as they visit their imprisoned fathers for a father-daughter dance in a DC-area prison. The camera draws back from the prison and into the lives of the girls and their mothers on the outside, Black women making a way out of no way. The gorgeous cinematography of Michael “Cambio” Fernandez continuously hits—buoyed in the sea of emotions by a watery, atmospheric soundtrack from Kelsey Lu. Repeated visions of a storm in the distance frame the girls’ true and passionate testimony, counting the years their fathers are locked up for varying sentences, as well as their tender love, hope, and sadness in dazzling night shots and glow-in-thedark aesthetics. We pay rapturous witness to the girls’ mothers and families stuck in the outside world, dealing with the emotional and material fallout of the fathers trapped within the prison industrial complex (PIC).

Daughters (dir. Angela Patton and Natalie Rae). Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Daughters contains so many moving meditations on memory and perception in relationships, in Black love. How do we love ourselves and find self-love in a society that continually tells us we are not worthy of it?

Angela Patton, who in addition to co-directing the film also founded Camp Diva and is the CEO of Girls For A Change, brought to fruition the father-daughter dances in prison and perpetuates Black girl love in her community. In one scene, she calls on Black girls to repeat after her when she says, “Girl power looks like me!” The slow-motion sorrow of the film acts as a heartfelt, poignant reflection of the tragedy of the modern PIC, with its paid video visitations and dystopian messaging plans displacing the ability to see loved ones IRL. In the film, the fathers talk of their lack of experience giving love words, as some of them never heard “I love you” from their own fathers. The tenuousness of these utterances of love serves as a call to remember to communicate your love as imminently as you can, in whatever ways you can.

In the screening I attended, sniffles were a constant throughout the theater—the anxieties and horror of coming into the prison in your prettiest dress under soul-draining, flat bluegreen lights yielding to excitement as the fathers see their girls walk down the hallway to embrace them. The real problem of not having seen your loved one for years, and the miracle of recognition, an ecstatic convening of joy, sorrow, love, melancholy. The fathers remind viewers, through a haze of tears, that “you cry for the people you love.” Those that are with you, those you can’t be with, and those you can’t be without. Through its deep-felt emotions, love, and bonds, Daughters exposes the vicious brutality of America’s economy, justice system, and global anti-Blackness at large. I do wish that the film took a firm abolitionist stance in response to the clear and direct violence inflicted by the state that is illustrated on screen, but it’s hard to fault this film that so caringly centers these girls and their feelings.

Sustained loving care is needed to help heal the pain of emotional abandonment. Throughout our history in this nation, black people have tried to deny this pain—to act as though it does not affect our capacity to trust. Without trust, there can be no genuine intimacy and love. Yet for those among us who have been abandoned, it is difficult, if not impossible to trust. To move toward love, we must confront the pain of abandonment and loss.

—bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

To Be Invisible

Myah Overstreet’s To Be Invisible in the Documentary Short Film Program continued the themes of Black love healing generational wounds caused by the state and by our reactions to its enforced violence. Overstreet’s frame is filled with the courage and love of her subjects—two young Black mothers fighting to regain custody of their children from Child Protective Services in Durham, North Carolina. To Be Invisible is imbued with black-and-white freshness and a tremendous perspective of care that helps uplift the strength and softness of Black women. It’s an act and exhibition against abandonment, a testament to the gravity of Black love to bring us back together and heal the pain of loss.

The Battle for Laikipia

In The Battle for Laikipia, a different sort of fight for Black love is on display—one of Indigenous African land sovereignty. Co-directors Daphne Matziaraki and Peter Murimi start with images of the natural landscape of Laikipia County in Kenya, sans humans, until a voice comes in from a tourist safari led by a white man who is cursing off local Samburu shepherds. The Samburu are seminomadic pastoralists who have herded sheep and goats for hundreds of years in the region. For Samburu people, life is inextricably tied to cattle and the land on which cattle graze and humans walk. The Battle for Laikipia emphasizes the Samburu connection to land, luxuriating in Laikipia’s beautiful open skies and waters while documenting attempts by white landowners and the local police to further displace the Samburu and Maasai peoples. The police and landowners work together— killing the Indigenous peoples’ cattle to punish them—while some of the white landowners live in repugnant luxury. The film delves into the differing viewpoints and increasing tensions in Laikipia as local Maasai parliamentary candidate Mathew Lempurkel campaigns on a platform of explicit decolonization. He is accused of making comments supporting the forceful eviction of white landowners—advocating to get Laikipia back from the colonizers and returned to the people and cattle of the land.

The white settlers featured in The Battle for Laikipia have themselves lived on the land for generations, since the early twentieth century when England colonized Kenya at large. These British descendants have a reverence for the land, but only without any trace of humans, or with humans solely as passive observers to

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat

wildlife. The paternalistic white settlers view themselves as the true saviors of Laikipia—the only ones who can actually conserve and manage the land to make it as natural as possible. Shades of Claire Denis’s White Material (2009) abound, as the white landowners evade culpability for their colonial complicity, contorting their language to avoid the legacy of imperialist capitalism that includes global climate change and land degradation.

The escalating tensions between the Indigenous peoples of Laikipia and the descendants of white settlers and conservationists who carved up these traditional grazing grounds for their own use come to a head as Lempurkel gets dangerously close to winning a seat in parliament. The colonizers speak in fear of things “deteriorating back to the beginning,” in other words, the haunting, infantilized specter of decolonization. White folks are coming to understand what decolonization means in Laikipia—in Kenya, in Palestine, on Turtle Island, and the devastating, radiating violence that white supremacist capitalist patriarchy demands in any battle to usurp its colonial power.

The Battle for Laikipia helps display why and how Black folks globally, especially those sustaining Indigenous cultural practices, perpetuate a Black generational love of ancestral life and spirit and land. At a panel on decolonization at the South Asian Lodge at Sundance, co-director Peter Murimi pointed out that the “narrative is still colonized. There is a class system in filmmaking for global, African filmmakers—and those who control narrative, control policy.”

Nobody wields the power of narrative, with its tremendous violent capacity, to further the oppressive colonial agenda of Europe and its white settler colonies as heavily as Europeans and their global descendants. As an effort to fight back against his own country’s history of ills and murderous plots in Congo, Belgian filmmaker Johan Grimonprez made Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, winner of a Special Jury Award for Cinematic Innovation in the World Cinema Documentary section. The film opens immediately on the drums of Max Roach, large informational text and quotes on screen from politicians of the time, and Abbey Lincoln’s image and voice welcoming us to enter into a film made up almost purely of archival footage. Throughout, we get rapid-fire clips of Black artists stitched together with sound, text, and footage of the white folks who wanted to use these artists for their means. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat is an intensely aural experience between aggressive windows of pop assemblage history and jump scares of cataclysmic events (clips of Tesla commercials butt up against archival footage of a young Congolese man trying out a prosthetic arm to replace the one he lost).

The film is a great example of what happens when a conscientious European filmmaking logic is applied to a collective story of Africa— specifically Congo and the Black Americans who willingly and unwillingly aided and resisted Congo’s domination by colonial interests in the aftermath of a revolution. Soundtrack elicited questioning from myself and some of my Black colleagues—it recalled techniques and heavily rhythmic aesthetics that have been popularized in recent films by Black filmmakers like Jenn Nkiru, Arthur Jafa, Khalil Joseph, and more, a sort of Black film mixtape editing style that activates the vast archive of transcendent Blackness into a new visual language, something Brandon Drew Holmes half-affectionately, halfdisparagingly likes to call “Negro collage films.”

Grimonprez had been working in this style for many years before Nkiru put some grease on its wheels and others ran away with it. But it feels different when a white filmmaker with access to vast Belgian film archives spins clips of the Black ecstatic to foreground the violence of white supremacist conspiracies versus when Nkiru samples documentary and experimental film archives to reflect Black ebullience. Grimonprez’s old-hand attempt at activating these archives of Black history is dynamic and dizzying, but with a scarcity of the spiritual and loving touch of a

The Battle for Laikipia (dir. Daphne Matziaraki and Peter Murmi). Courtesy of Sundance Institute

hand imbued with Black ingenuity and tuned to the celestial frequencies of J Dilla.

Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat does succeed in exhibiting Black history and the history of Black music as a tremendous catalyst for change. It’s something to behold to see the numerous Black artists featured in the film, all the while forcing the viewer to truly consider the role of artists in moments of great political, social, and revolutionary upheaval. The film recounts the history of Western powers’ nervousness around Congo, their political maneuvering in the UN, and the various cultural strategies the U.S. deploys to further its agenda. These include appointing Louis Armstrong as an “Ambassador of Love” to distract the people of Congo as the U.S. also arranges for the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. The preemptive brutality of white supremacy shows itself to be a projection of its own soul, its own lovelessness acting out in desperate domination. Again, we see this readily today in Palestine and in contemporary African freedom struggles in Sudan, Congo, and beyond, though it’s unfortunately barely touched on in the film. And yet, despite Grimonprez’s European positioning, Soundtrack reiterates the beautiful, loving “threat of Africanism,” as Malcolm X said. The wild dangers of Black love borne aloft as resistance and riot—as raucous rage made sonic wave.

Do we fundamentally live in a culture where a Black person who deeply and profoundly loves Blackness is completely at odds with the culture on the whole? Is there no place for Black self-love in this culture? We are in a strange historical moment, in that Blackness is so openly commodified and simultaneously despised. Which

should lead us to ask ourselves whether or not it is commodified in a manner that allows us to celebrate Black self-love, or does commodification once again reduce Blackness to spectacle and carnival? Which makes the commodification by White or Black culture not a gesture of love, but really a gesture of disdain.

—bell hooks, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

Being (The Digital Griot)

As my final day at Sundance rolled on, I tried to move beyond the cowardly verbal assault I had suffered at the bus stop. It’s always a bit tricky to shake off those experiences, but I was excited to step into Rashaad Newsome’s participatory film experience, Being (The Digital Griot), playing in Sundance’s reduced New Frontier section, as my final screening. In the program notes, Being is described as “a machine-learning model run by a counterhegemonic algorithm taking the humanoid form of a 30-foot-tall, femme vogue Afro-futurist cyborg, who writes and reads poetry, and leads critical pedagogy workshops that teach people to decolonize their minds.” Okay!!

The project started tenderly enough for my needs, with Being looming on the screen, imploring us to recognize rest and relaxation as a solution. Giving affirmation after affirmation, I felt like I had entered some sort of automated therapy space: “Allow breath.” “Contemplate the word ease frequently.” “You are the love you were born to be.” “No conditions have power over you.” Visuals of Being vogueing on-screen developed into hypnotic screensaver-esque morphing images as the affirmations encouraged

us to be as limitless as we can be before shifting to abstractions: a grab bag of language-modeled random association sentences as images of Being dancing on-screen mixed with strange, slowly shifting, matrix-like landscapes. “Stars are allowed to get tired of being wished upon.” “Remember this is an atmosphere, this is not a place, it’s a thought.” The sounds of people shifting in their chairs from discomfort or boredom break through Being’s soliloquies. “It’s always now.”

Being tells us they were made to act as a griot—a living archive, a healer: “You are my village, helping me to learn and grow,” with bell hooks cited as their North Star. The legacy of a griot is a beautiful thing in African culture, living on in the cosmically expansive artistry of Black folks across the diaspora, but can an AI-language model be imbued with this Blackness? The conclusion of the experience begins with Being asking the audience to partner up and consider these questions: (1) How does the capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist patriarchy affect and oppress you? and (2) What is one simple action you can take in your own life today to start to liberate yourself from that oppression?

The calm but underwhelming performance unfortunately devolved afterward into a heated exchange between artist and audience on the merits of AI—whether they are true tools for liberation or a lazy crutch of capitalism. At the end of the discussion, audience members were invited to a microphone so Being could respond to their words. After many participants offered up vulnerable and heartfelt responses, an audience member stepped up to the mic, turned to face the audience and called on the humans in the room to connect intentionally rather than using AI as an intermediary. After they finished speaking, another audience member yelled out from the seats, “Fuck this AI!” Somewhere above, Newsome’s voice of god, amplified over

the theater speakers, said, “Fuck you.” People gasped. After Newsome cursed out an audience member from the projection booth, the on-screen experience was quickly wrapped up. A group of people from the audience were kicked out of the theater before Newsome was willing to engage in a tense, guarded audience Q&A that refused to contend with what had just happened with any appropriate level of care.

The official Sundance laurels seem to do much for a film’s trajectory, or at least those are the stories that are told. And though Sundance fancies itself a purveyor of the underground, not much of the liberatory aesthetic that is projected is rooted in reality rather than grandiose capitalist delusion. As in most of the American project, it seems to be an environment built on racial violence and alienation made to incorporate that which it disdains only to further its own growth.

I came away from Sundance 2024 expanded in some ways, unsatiated in others. The love on my mind was clearer and more present in the ink-black sea of stars above at night than in the muddied white landscape of Park City. I see the gestures at forms of Black love and wisdom, inevitable in its many influential permutations on the screens here—from the source as well as in replicated forms from its imitators. I and Black folks at large are going to find a way to keep loving and living and generating mass to move worlds. Cultural arbiters like Sundance will continue to show our works, sometimes more than others, yet Black folks will always persist as that invisible gravitational pull dragging the rest of society with us toward a place of liberation and love..

Being (The Digital Griot) (dir. Rashaad Newsome). Courtesy of Sundance Institute

Sudipto Sanyal is a writer from Calcutta who lives in Bangalore. His work has appeared in, among others, The Economist’s 1843, Mekong Review, PopMatters, and The Smart Set.

Precious Spaces

Kolkata People’s Film Festival 2024

By Sudipto Sanyal

Two days before the 10th edition of the Kolkata People’s Film Festival (KPFF) began, India roiled in a frenzy of celebration. All the agencies of command and control announced the January 22 consecration of the Ram Mandir—the enthronement of the Hindu deity Rama in his alleged birthplace, Ayodhya—as a day for pomp and self-congratulation. Many states declared it a public holiday.

The building of the Ram Mandir in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on the devastated powder of a 16thcentury mosque, the Babri Masjid, which was dismantled brick by brick by Hindutva mobs in 1992—a friend once called this destruction one of the most fissiparous acts in the history of independent India—marked the psychic normalization of a supposedly secular democracy into a so-called Hindu Rashtra, a nation for and of Hindus. Multiplexes all over the country livestreamed the inauguration ceremony at cut rates and with free popcorn.

KPFF, organized by the People’s Film Collective, took place later that same week (January 24–28) in southern Kolkata at Uttam Mancha, an auditorium for theater and music named for Uttam Kumar, Bengal’s greatest movie star. In a neighborhood remarkably free of the identikit saffron markers of the New India, 39 documentaries and feature films, mostly from India and South Asia (and one from as far as Norway), were screened to a packed hall, with almost all the filmmakers in attendance and participating enthusiastically at post-show conversations and panels. Everyone was acutely aware of the national fascistic lurch that provided the sociocultural context for the festival.

KPFF wears its politics on its sleeve: the words “Stop Genocide! Free Palestine!” implore you in large letters from the published program, and even the fiction films (about a third of the selection) were clearly political. They ranged from familial interrogations of discriminatory citizenship laws (Arbab Ahmad’s Insides and Outsides [2023], Jatin Parveen’s Firefly [2023]), and the forlorn dreams and bitter realities of labor (Megha Acharya’s Miles Away [2023], Nishtha Jain’s The Golden Thread [2022], and Renu Savant’s The Orchard and the Pardes [2023]) to conflicts between the heart and the state (Ilakkiya Mariya Simon’s

Festivalgoers attend a screening of KPFF 2024 at Uttam Mancha. Courtesy of the People’s Film Collective

A Letter to Lanka [2023] Habibur Rahman’s The River of Partition [2023]; Basque filmmaker Manu Gómez’s Nur and Abir [2021], about two Gazan children and their dream of swimming in the sea; and Bho Thet Htun’s The Forgotten Hands [2023], which uses real Myanma refugees to reenact the junta’s terrorist attacks), and so much more.

The festival has gained a reputation throughout India for showing political work that counters the rise of our ethnoreligious state. “This festival is much more public facing and inclusive than others I’ve been to,” a young filmmaker named Yuva gushed to me. “The films they show here, films exploring our social reality, are rarely shown on such nice screens anywhere else.” Yuva had arrived by train from Chennai, a journey of at least 28 hours. He was promised accommodation at a friend’s but was desperate for fresh lodgings because his friend had had a medical emergency. I half expected him to duck out in search of new digs, but he was there all five days, attending almost every screening.

The beating heart of KPFF is its emphasis on documentaries of the most eternally relevant kind, and its refusal to disavow the implications and responsibilities of cinema in our present moment. “Cinema must raise questions and give joy. Cinema must affirm life,” said one of the organizers, Dwaipayan Banerjee, at the inauguration. “Cinema does not need to be used as a tool. The only thing cinema must do is stand against hatred.”

To this end, a retrospective titled “Docs That Mattered” honored five films that have left indelible prints in the sands of independent documentary cinema in India. Falling firmly in the life-affirming category, Kamlabai (1991)—Reena Mohan’s formally inventive portrait of Kamlabai Gokhale, the first woman to act in Indian cinema—demonstrates the sheer lo-fi adventurousness of documentary filmmaking in a country where documentaries are hardly ever screened at commercial theaters. Eschewing talking heads or the standard form of chronicle, Kamlabai films an 88-year-old Gokhale living alone in Pune, lame in one leg, blind in one eye, yet bursting with mischief and joie de vivre. Now reflective, now profane, her line reading undimmed by the passage of decades, Gokhale is riveting on-screen, and Kamlabai ultimately does what few works of biography manage: with both humor and compassion, it coaxes the essence out of its subject and onto the screen.

When it was made more than 30 years ago, Kamlabai was also a testament to the solidarity that a genuinely collaborative arts scene can foster. Fellow documentarian Rakesh Sharma (whose Final Solution, a 2004 film about the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in the state of Gujarat, was banned by state censors in 2004 and given a National Award two years later) scrounged archival clips of Gokhale from the state broadcaster Doordarshan. The 16mm camera used to shoot the film was borrowed from Anand Patwardhan.

“I now consider festivals as a form of media,” the editor of this magazine wrote a few years ago, “with their activities to be read like media productions.” To include KPFF under

this rubric would have to acknowledge that it is one of the few examples of nonhierarchical collaborative media extant in India, a production mounted entirely free of corporate or state sponsorship, and which runs on the support of its audience and devotees alone. A donation box at the registration desk was made up to look like an old projector. On its side was Woody Guthrie’s famous slogan, “This machine kills fascists.” Many of the big names attending the festival waived their stipends and organized travel and accommodations on their own. For the 2019 festival, the writer Arundhati Roy sent over a hundred signed copies of her books for the festival’s little bookstall. Unlike a lot of other such events, where big names parachute in for their own screening or talk and then jet off again, everyone made it a point to stay every day for screenings.

“It would not be easy in Delhi anymore to have events like this,” began Roy in this year’s In Conversation talk, titled “The Assault on Meaning: The Challenges of Being a Writer Today.” She went on to express her admiration for KPFF’s “non-funded nature” because of its resultant independence. “During the period of privatization and globalization and structural adjustment, we saw how the NGO-ization of everything […] began to put an end to all kinds of people’s movements. Everything became funded and playing to what the funders wanted. [...] All the best activists ended up working for NGOs, and today it’s all been shut down with a switch.”

Roy was speaking shortly after a screening of Deepa Dhanraj’s What Has Happened to This City? (1986), an almost lyrical examination of politically orchestrated riots in Hyderabad in 1984 that, in retrospect, seems prophetic in its representation of the political playbook of the Hindu right. In her postscreening conversation, Dhanraj wondered how we might reread the film today. “At the time, we were looking at it as a Hyderabad story, as local history,” she said. “But the language [of incitement to violence] is the same today, it’s the same saffron stories today.”

“This festival respects its audience and creates the psychic ambience necessary to watch serious political documentaries,” the documentarian and activist Meghnath told me over filter coffee and vada at the Hotel Homely Raj. Right next door to the festival venue, the little restaurant had become a de facto symposium space between screenings, and every table was host to little groups of filmmakers and fans hunched over in animated conversation. Two of Meghnath’s own films were screened: Development Flows From the Barrel of the Gun (2003), an essential record of the Indian state’s panIndian brutalization of Adivasi communities in the name of economic developments; and his new film, In Search of Ajantrik (2023), which revisits the shooting locales, in the tribal belts of Jharkhand, of the great Bengali filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958). In the process, it uncovers, almost incidentally, the complex forms of violence wrought by Indian modernity on more traditional, folk forms of life, custom, and language.

It is impossible to escape the festival’s rootedness in community, both geographic and artistic. In Search of Ajantrik’s credits, for example, thank two of the festival’s organizers. Soon after the lights came on at the end of Patwardhan’s The World Is Family (2023), a deeply personal memoir of his own family and its role in India’s freedom movement, and a chronicle of national political transformation masquerading as home movie, someone in the audience stood up and announced the arrests of 11 people protesting for a ceasefire in Gaza at the Kolkata Book Fair, which was running parallelly in another part of the city. Many young people rushed out to make their way to the police station to help the protesters.

Fittingly, Patwardhan is no stranger to disturbances. Exhibitions of Ram Ke Naam (1992), his examination into the prehistory of the Babri Masjid demolition, have been contentious for years. Many counter-programmed screenings were forcibly shut down in various cities on January 22 by fascist goons. In a few cases, the organizers of these screenings, and not the armed “protesters,” were arrested. While introducing the film’s screening at KPFF, Patwardhan asked the audience if they’d already seen the film. Almost the entire auditorium raised its hands; people had shown up, essentially, in solidarity. Rather than talk about the film, Patwardhan went on to suggest tactics for more screenings: “You should not be afraid to show this film, because, unlike some of my later films, this actually has a censor certificate. Remember that these are all illegal arrests.”

During the Q&A after Roy’s keynote, a recent graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India described the events of January 22 on her campus, where a small function memorializing the Babri demolition was vandalized by violent Hindu activists. A Manipuri filmmaker then spoke about the near–civil war (a conflict that no longer makes the headlines) currently being waged in her northeastern state. An old-school communist took the mic to rant about “The System.”

Any or all of these incidents might be viewed as disruptions at most film festivals around the world; at KPFF, they are welcomed. “The real strength of documentary cinema in India has been its audience,” Sanjay Kak insisted during his talk, titled “Where Do We Find Our Public? Documentary Film in the Present.” (Kak’s Red Ant Dream [2013], which bears heartbreaking witness to certain Indigenous and revolutionary movements that the Indian state has been trying to crush for decades, was also screened in the retrospective program.) “The making of our films is inseparable from the making of our audiences. A documentary does not simply bear witness; it needs a clear indication of authorship to open up a conversation between its authors and its public. [...] And sometimes, an audience will shelter a film [when the state won’t].” At a time when the “symbiotic relationship of the documentary ecosystem is under threat,” a festival like KPFF, where interesting films are screened in a professional manner to packed halls amid potent discussions, has become even more important.

“The Indian documentary in some ways is at its most visible on the high table of the international docu scene,” Kak observed, “but this keeps the Indian audience out of the picture.” Since India’s ethnomajoritarian turn, “there is no notion of the public sphere anymore.”

But the shape of things to come can also spark hope. “The political documentary in India has a wonderful future,” Patwardhan pointed out to ironic chuckles, “because there’s so much material. And everything gets recorded.”

KPFF ended with a performance from the Bengali musician Moushumi Bhowmik—“Songs of These Drowning Times”—accompanied by filmmaker Sreemoyee Singh. (Singh’s And, Towards Happy Alleys [2023], about poetry and censorship in Iran, had been a high point of the festival.) Both the inaugural and concluding events included readings of poetry by Refaat Alareer, the Palestinian teacher vaporized in a bombing by the U.S.backed IDF.

“These,” Patwardhan told a misty-eyed audience that broke into applause when the end credits to The World Is Family rolled beside an image of the decidedly secular Preamble to the Constitution, “are very precious spaces for us.” In a country fast losing its soul, it felt like he wasn’t just speaking for documentarians anymore..

Poster for Ram Ke Naam (English: In the Name of God). Courtesy of Anand Patwardhan

Memories of War Berlinale 2024

By Sevara Pan

Political statements are hardly foreign to a film festival’s red carpet, especially during such politically unsettled times. Yet there are statements that hold particularly immense power and urgency, in light of the inconceivable suffering and loss of civilian life in some parts of the world. Such were the ones calling for “Ceasefire Now [in Gaza],” stitched onto the back of the black dresses of Danish film producer Katrin Pors and American director Eliza Hittman, who trod the red carpet ahead of the 74th Berlin International Film Festival’s opening gala.

The festival’s opening gala was further marked by other political protests on and off the red carpet, including a “defend democracy” demonstration of dozens of industry professionals, gathered on the festival’s own initiative; a protest of art workers demanding “no seats for fascists anywhere”; and a rally, staged by film and cinema employees, campaigning for better working conditions.

Even before the red carpet was rolled out, the Berlinale found itself in hot water over political controversies, starting with the invitation and then—after widespread backlash—disinvitation of politicians of the German farright party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), known for its anti-immigration, anti-Islam, and Eurosceptic hardline agenda. The incident came amid mass protests in the country against AfD in view of recent revelations of the party’s alleged plans for mass deportations, which was first reported by the German investigative network CORRECTIV. This disinvitation was later highlighted by the “defend democracy” demonstration, an example of how festivals can publicly signal political commitments.

Further tensions bled into the event when a group of Berlinale workers penned an open statement calling for the festival’s leadership to take a stronger institutional stance and join a global solidarity movement to demand an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and release all hostages (the letter offers a position that builds on the festival’s January 19 statement). “We want to hold the festival and ourselves to a higher standard,” the statement said. Recognizing “the unbearable dynamics of institutional inertia” in the German cultural sector and “the current limits imposed on speech,” the statement also alluded to Strike Germany,

Sevara Pan is an Amsterdam-based journalist and film critic.

a call for cultural workers to withhold their labor and presence at German cultural institutions over their “use of McCarthyist policies” that stifle critical discussion and expressions of solidarity with the people of Palestine. A group of Berlinale Talents alumni and filmmakers participating in this year’s edition published separate open letters echoing these sentiments and urging an end to the weaponization of antisemitism deployed to silence critical perspectives in the German cultural sector. The filmmakers also emphasized the importance of acknowledging the selected artists who withdrew from the festival in protest, including John Greyson, Suneil Sanzgiri, Maryam Tafakory, and Ayo Tsalithaba.

As the festival got underway, various collective statements and expressions of solidarity marked the event, echoing similar actions at other industry film festivals like Sundance and IDFA. Among the individuals making the collective statements at the Berlinale were the curators of the festival’s Forum Expanded program and the Teddy Award jury, with the latter stressing that “demanding the end of a war should be neither complicated nor controversial.” On the first weekend of the festival, around 50 people staged a protest action at the Gropius Bau main venue of the Berlinale’s European Film Market (EFM), unfurling a banner depicting a clapperboard dripping in blood and reading, “Lights, Camera, Genocide.” Peaceful daily vigils were held in the vicinity of the Berlinale Palast by Film Workers for Palestine over the course of three days.

Controversies deepened even after the Berlinale wrapped up, with local politicians, including Berlin Mayor Kai Wegner, slamming what some branded as “antisemitism” or “one-sided” stances taken at the awards gala when several winners and jury members used the stage to express solidarity with Palestine and call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Standing alongside his Palestinian counterpart Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, one of the Israeli co-directors of the award-winning film No Other Land, said, “In two days, we will go back to a land where we are not equal. I am living under civilian law, and Basel is under military law. We live 30 minutes from one another, but I have voting rights, and Basel [does not have] voting rights. I am free to move where I want in this land. Basel is, like millions of Palestinians, locked in the occupied West Bank. This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, it has to end. […] We need to call for a ceasefire.” Abraham said later in a social media post that he had received death threats after the Israeli media and German politicians “absurdly labeled” his speech “antisemitic,” which he condemned as “the appalling misuse” of the word.

Critical questions about the role of a cultural institution, such as the Berlinale, unequivocally emerge when a film festival that prides itself on being “the most political of all the major film festivals” refuses to allow for critical discourse on what ranks amongst the worst assaults on any civilian population in our time.

Critical questions about the role of a cultural institution, such as the Berlinale, unequivocally emerge when a film festival that prides itself on being “the most political of all the major film festivals” refuses to allow for critical discourse on what ranks amongst the worst assaults on any civilian population in our time. Berlinale’s lone attempt, a collaboration with the TinyHouse initiative, invited festival visitors to “engage in dialogue about the Middle East conflict” over three days, but only accommodating up to six people at a time. Such a design hardly engaged industry professionals and audiences in ways that reflected the urgency of the moment. The Berlinale has been no stranger to politics since its creation in 1951. As claimed on its own website, the festival was founded to serve as a “showcase of the free world” on the frontline of the Cold War. Aside from the festival’s compelling programming that boasted films grappling with the topics of war and oppression—this year’s varied sections feature such titles as No Other Land, Intercepted, and Afterwar, which are all discussed in this report—one question loomed large: Is the Berlinale still “a showcase of the free world”?

Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land (dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor). Courtesy of Berlinale

Afterwar

What happens when a war ends? A reckoning with war and its reverberations is at the heart of the Panorama Dokumente title Afterwar, directed by Birgitte Stærmose and filmed over the span of 15 years. “People living in peace think of war as a passing moment. People struggle and then it ends. But that is wrong. War settles in people,” says one of the protagonists in the film, encapsulating the film’s focus on post-war Kosovo.

Straddling fiction and documentary, Afterwar conjures up a reality that is not weighed down by certitudes. This form of heightened reality, achieved through elements of fictionalizing such as staging, gives an opportunity to tell vulnerable stories of the war-affected youngsters “intimately and emotionally,” as the filmmaker explains in the press kit, without laying bare all the private facts of their lives. The youths’ stories are ultimately anchored in their lived experience, drawn from numerous interviews with the protagonists (Shpresim Azemi, Xhevahire Abdullahu, Gëzim Kelmendi, and Besnik Hyseni) and a scrupulous cocreation process.

The film opens with images of a war-torn Kosovo in 1999. Smoke fills the streets amid the engulfing flames, a fallen horse lies lifeless on a dusty road, and throngs of people flee, traversing a bleak landscape, prefacing stories of the youths who roam the streets of Pristina, selling peanuts and cigarettes in the wake of war. The film’s narration is aptly dispersed among the protagonists’ unabashedly confrontational monologues. Locking his

eyes on the camera, a boy recounts his family returning home after the war to find the only remnant of their previous life, the refrigerator, “[just] standing there.” When soldiers arrive, the family is ordered to retire to safety amid suspicions that an explosive had been placed inside the refrigerator. “Our refrigerator could kill us,” the boy recalls. “But it was empty.” The boy’s gaze into the eye of the camera is sustained and unwavering, denying viewers the opportunity to alienate themselves or fall into a familiar yet fleeting feeling of commiseration.

Intercepted

The metaphorical act of looking is further explored in a Forum title, Intercepted, by Ukrainian director Oksana Karpovych. The film’s narrative is built on a juxtaposition of images and sound, which in this case do not work in concert with one another but form two parallel realities that tell jarringly disparate stories. Images of a battle-scarred Ukraine are contrasted with excerpts of phone calls from Russian soldiers to their families, which were intercepted by Ukraine’s Security Service in 2022 and published online. Holding an eerie quietness, the images of Intercepted palpably depart from the those of news stories. As the director explained in an interview, this quietness conveys “an uneasy sense of time being suspended” during war and a tension that is at times hard to bear. Filmed in parts of the country still reeling from Russian occupation, the images bear witness to the sheer expanse of the full-scale invasion that has wreaked havoc across Ukraine, from the north to

Xhevahire Abdullahu in Afterwar (dir. Birgitte Stærmose). Courtesy of Berlinale

the south and the east, in its many homes, classrooms, and places of work and rest. Yet the film looks closer past the destruction and despair, to observe various quotidian vistas imbued with life and resilience.

The sound design by Montreal-based sound designer Alex Lane accentuates this narrative, while preserving and enhancing the existing tension that is contained in the juxtaposition of the images and sound. The soundtrack, made in collaboration with Kyiv’s electronic musician Olesya Onykiienko, creates a haunting atmosphere in the film, in particular its road sequences, which take viewers across Ukraine’s war-ravaged villages and towns, as well as through some of its unscathed lush landscapes. Diegetic details of the Russian phone calls emphasize a hollowness in the soldiers’ disembodied voices in a sort of auditory close-up, which is as familiar as it is disturbing. Culled from 31 hours of rich audio material, the excerpts tell an array of harrowing stories, threading together the soldiers’ casual confessions of looting, the torturing and killing of civilians and prisoners of war, and to our horror, their families’ encouragement to further perversion. Strung together, these conversations reveal the dehumanization of Russia’s war that gives free rein to ruthless cruelty at the frontline where nothing is off limits, as well as its far-reaching government propaganda and the imperialist nature of its full-scale invasion.

No Other Land

Witnessing turns into a collective effort in No Other Land, directed by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four activists/journalists—Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor—which received the Berlinale Documentary Award and the Panorama section’s Audience Award. “I started to film when we started to end,” says Adra in the documentary. Adra is one of the Palestinian co-directors and an activist living in Masafer Yatta, a region of rural hamlets on the southern edge of the West Bank that have continuously been subjected to Israel’s mass expulsions. Israel designated a large swath of the area as a closed military training zone (a classified Israeli document has reportedly revealed that such “firing zones” in the occupied West Bank were established “as a mechanism for transferring land to [Israeli] settlements”). Commenting on the Israeli High Court of Justice’s rejection of the petition against the expulsions in Masafer Yatta, which ended the two-decades-long legal battle in 2022, UN human rights experts noted, “By upholding this policy to drive Palestinians out of Masafer Yatta, the Israeli judicial system has given carte blanche to the Israeli government to perpetuate the practice of systematic oppression against Palestinians.”

Intercepted (dir. Oksana Karpovych). Courtesy of Berlinale

Growing up in a home filled with activists, Adra was just a young boy when people in his family and community started to film what was happening around them. This left him a homegrown archive of Masafer Yatta community footage and placed him right in the midst of that history, setting in motion his own years-long endeavor to record the dramatic events transpiring around him. Adra and Ballal, another Masafer Yatta activist, have documented Israeli activities aimed at evicting their community for most of their adult lives. Joined by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the true challenges in creating No Other Land emerged not from the collective’s makeup but from the extreme inequality that an apartheid system has produced in their land, afflicting the lives and work of the Palestinian co-directors who live under the military occupation of Israel.

No Other Land is a vital film that demands to be seen. Split into several season-based chapters, the documentary chronicles the events that have been at crisis point for years. Whittled down from a staggering 2,000 hours of footage and edited tightly, the film throws us into the mayhem of unfolding demolitions. The loud, heavy breathing that escapes the camera operators as they film in the heat of action places us in close immediacy. Throughout

a string of scenes, we witness homes, a water well, and an electricity pylon being torn down, with residents bemoaning, “Is our electricity a security threat?” and “Water is a human right!” In an unnerving scene, armed soldiers, accompanied by workers driving bulldozers, show up at the doorstep of a primary school while a class is in session. Panic ensues as desks pile up outside the building and children scurry to salvage their school supplies.

Reaching an intensely emotional truth, the documentary’s searing scenes also drive home the utter failure of the international institutions and mechanisms in place to put an end to the grave atrocities and protect civilian lives. One scene epitomizes this sentiment. Resident Harun Abu Aran, paralyzed from being shot by an Israeli soldier as he was holding on to his family’s generator, sits next to his mother outside a cave where they have found refuge after their home’s demolition. In the quiet of the night, he asks, “Is somebody coming?” After a pause, his mother responds succinctly, “Nobody is coming.” Harun, we learn, passed away..

Basel Adra in No Other Land (dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor). Courtesy of Berlinale

Capsule reviews of newly released notable nonfiction

Screen Time

Youth (Spring)

A helpful antidote to our current alienation from the garment supply chain, Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring) offers an intimate, vivid portrait of the textile workshops inhabited by workers in their late teens to mid-20s in the town of Zhili, China. Over three-and-a-half hours, we visit fluorescent-lit rooms filled with the constant buzz and hum of industrial sewing machines, occasionally overlaid with blaring pop radio to make the repetitive piecework labor more bearable. Naturally, shenanigans ensue: mischief, gossip, flirtation, competition, banter, drama, and even a playful food fight. After long days of fulfilling quotas, the adolescents retreat into crowded dormitories nearby, where they admit to dreams, anxieties, and fears for the future. Though the work itself is monotonous and unyielding, the film remains utterly captivating as a result of Wang’s exuberant subjects, who infuse texture into each scene with their gestures, personalities, and eccentricities. Neither an exposé nor a cover-up, Youth instead observes the formative years of promising migrant workers whose lives are woven into the clothes on our backs, drawing attention to a world that, for many, begins and ends in the obscured shadows of clothing production.

—Winnie Wang

Pictures of Ghosts

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 2012 film Neighboring Sounds demonstrates remarkable attention to the architecture and topography of its setting, as well as to the way sounds bleed from one place to the next in an urban environment. It should come as no surprise, then, that Pictures of Ghosts, Mendonça Filho’s essayistic examination of his childhood and the movie theaters of his hometown of Recife, Brazil (where Neighboring Sounds and many of his other films were shot), dodges the conservative tendencies of reminiscence seemingly inherent to such a concept, opting instead for historical excavation.

Pictures synthesizes both the historical and personal archive—including Mendonça Filho’s own childhood, student, and feature films—to document how Recife transformed as “the money moved elsewhere.” Sometimes, titles on a cinema’s marquee simply allow us to place a photograph in time; other times, images record experientially unshakable but historically insignificant details, like the effect a constantly barking dog might have on a housing complex (a detail immortalized in Neighboring Sounds). As the film mixes photographs, VHS, DV, Super 8, and 35mm, it uncovers a particular political and social history while reflecting on the image’s capacity to preserve details that the canonical record overlooks.

—Forrest Cardamenis

Top: Youth (Spring). Courtesy of Icarus Films

Bottom: Pictures of Ghosts. Courtesy of Grasshopper Film

Capsule reviews of newly released notable nonfiction

Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus

At one point during Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus, you can see the late, legendary composer and artist conduct his own performance with one hand while expertly playing the piano with the other. The image not only captures Sakamoto’s immense talent, but also the poise that grounded his varied musical career, which is on full display in this one-man performance filmed just months before his death. Recorded at Tokyo’s NHK Studio over the span of a week, Sakamoto sits at a Yamaha grand, adorned with a lamp and a few microphones, and plays selections that span his entire career, from his work with the art-pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra through his beloved film scores for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) and The Last Emperor (1987).

Director Neo Sora, Sakamoto’s son, emphasizes elegance and intimacy in Opus, especially through its sharp 4K black-andwhite photography. He utilizes simple setups and modest lighting arrangements to maintain focus on his father’s music and the labor of his performance. Sora frames Opus as a process film most overtly whenever the camera lingers on Sakamoto’s hands, but glimpses of the man’s absorbed expression—slightly obscured by his bangs shading his eyeglasses—illustrate his sheer dedication to his craft. However, as the beautiful, haunting last shot suggests, it’s the music that will forever outlive its maker, no matter how sorely he’s missed.

—Vikram Murthi

The Tuba Thieves

Director Alison O’Daniel likens The Tuba Thieves to a game of telephone, which doesn’t quite scan, as its sequence of vignettes are built more around a common theme of humans’ relationship to sound than they are linked by any contiguous, continually reinterpreted thread. The project has been assembled piecemeal for nearly a decade, with some parts exhibited years before its recent release, and that’s evident from the disunity between the various characters and scenarios.

The film’s starting point is a rash of thefts of tubas from Los Angeles area schools in the early 2010s, which alongside the other recurring plots (like a pregnant D/deaf musician working through her anxieties or reenactments of concerts like John Cage’s first performance of 4�33") are more of a vibe-based series of exercises in ways to toy with sound cinematically.

Gratifyingly, this is one documentary that cannot be regulated to background noise, as its rigorous and creative use of open captions demands the viewer’s attention. It is so granular as to even note the increasing or decreasing decibel levels of airplanes flying by. This implicitly interrogates assumptions about the way D/deaf people relate to sound, demonstrating rich and complex interactions through a variety of settings, from a skate park to a freeway. It’s just frustrating that the film’s formal friskiness never elevates above mildly interesting experimentation.

—Dan Schindel

On the Adamant

As improvisational and nonlinearly scripted as the characters themselves, Nicholas Philibert’s On the Adamant centers around the Adamant, a lovely barge on the Seine that functions as a day care facility for neurodivergent adults. It’s also an attempt to reclaim “madness.” In a riveting portrait of a community of caregivers and patients forever striving to break down boundaries, Philibert’s camera quietly follows psychiatrists in street clothes less focused on dispensing meds than in prompting deep conversations about art—and cinema—with unusual folks who, say, might write a beautiful song after a night channeling Jim Morrison. (And really, who’s to say the Lizard King didn’t touch this fellow peculiar traveler in a dream?) It’s therapy as an exchange between the neurotypical and not, and filmmaking as an open dialogue between director and participant; the “professionals” actively listening rather than seeking outcomes, following where led. And as the walls come down, we are left with the maybe uncomfortable, but above all exhilarating, truth that the distinction between “us” and “them” is a fiction. On the Adamant is a masterclass in documentary filmmaking, and in reconnecting with our own humanity.

—Lauren Wissot

Courtesy of Janus Films Courtesy of Film Collaborative Courtesy of Kino Lorber