Films

This workshop will aim to generate a constructive dialogue between innovative or emerging non-linear (or interactive) documentary practices and the terrain of ethnographic film. It will be structured around a set of short, illustrated provocations glued together by a mediator who will progressively involve the audience.

It will draw on the expertise of David MacDougall and experienced filmmakers as well as digital pioneers in interrogating the relationship between interactive documentary, observational film and participatory processes.

The general objective will be to focus more on continuities than on disruptions, and to consider technological developments within a much deeper canon of ethnographic and anthropological film practices.

Judith Aston is a Founding Director of i-Docs (i-docs.org) and a Senior Lecturer in the Filmmaking Department of the University of the West of England (UWE). She has a longstanding track record of engagement with ethnographic film, from her own PhD fieldwork through to work on anthropological archives and generating interdisciplinary art projects. She is an active practitioner, and her latest publication is a co-edited book, "The Evolving Practices of Interactive Documentary", which will be available from March 2017.

Paolo Favero is Associate Professor in Film Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Antwerp. With a PhD in Social Anthropology from Stockholm University, he has devoted the core of his career to the study of visual culture in India and Italy. He is an active filmmaker and a specialist in the integration of emerging technologies with ethnographic methods. His most recent publications focus on interactive documentary filmmaking and on the meaning of images in a digital landscape.