ACTION! PRESENTS “WHAT IS A POLITICAL FILM?” WORKSHOP
Saturday, June 3: Noon – 5 pm
This workshop is free and open to young filmmakers ages 19 – 35 with priority given to traditionally media-marginalized populations. Write to them at info@echoparkfilmcenter.org for more info and sign up.
The workshop will begin with an expanded version of a presentation that they have presented at numerous universities, art galleries, cinema spaces and the reservations and refugee camps themselves. The presentation will take into account questions concerning the themes of the project; that is to say an analysis of the refugee camps and native reservations as spaces of exception within the prevailing nation-states they are located in–as repositories of very particular histories of displacement, and as locations where the logic of modern nationalism is thoroughly excavated, scrutinized and deconstructed.
The presentation will also focus very heavily on questions of methodology, examinations of the film as a political document and tool and looking into questions of audience and contexts of exhibition. What does it mean to make a film with a non-Western audience in mind? What does it mean for a film to actually be a conduit of communication between peoples rather than an object for an imagined spectator? What is the liberatory value of treating film as an instrument of pedagogy rather than an end in and of itself?
The other subject they will turn their attention to is the political realities of space and their reflection in film and video. For example, they could ask what are the spatial qualities of rural poverty on a reservation that can be visually represented or intimated? Or how does the crowdedness of refugee camps speak to the paradigm of Palestinian refugeehood and how does one capture that on film?
This workshop is part of Action! Cinema as Sanctuary summer series.
ACTION! Cinema as Sanctuary
Political documentary films take on a renewed role amid a reinvigorated rage against immigrants, refugees, and people of color in many places around the world. Through politically engaged cinematic work, many filmmakers are confronting old and new forms of racism, the deepening ungrievability of Black and Brown lives, and precarious realities faced by minority communities including indigenous peoples, the elderly, refugees, women and children. ACTION! series: Cinema as Sanctuary features political documentary films that re-assert the images and stories that remind us that a compassionate world rooted upon solidarity, friendship, and collective action is possible.
Curated by Nerve Macaspac of the Echo Park Film Center (EPFC), with special support provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
