Experiences such as those of exile, immigration, and transnationality are central in the current political and cultural debate. Several filmic works and visual artistic projects focus their narratives on life stories, as shaped by distance (either geographic or memory-related) and motion (in terms of travel, border crossing and disorientation). Meanwhile, a focus on exilic and diasporic identities may lead potential audience to perceive migrant works merely on the basis of personal traumas of displacement.

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The Migrant as an Eye/I. Transculturality, Self-Representation, Audiovisual Practices

It is an honor to be part of this inaugural film symposium. We send our sincere thanks to all the contributors. The care and attention you brought in watching, sensing, and reflecting with our film has really touched us and inspired us to revisit with fresh eyes the making of Unwritten Letters. The film in its entirety is available online as a supplement. For the first few months, the process was driven not only by the desire to document Abd’s moment of transition, but by a desire “tomake a film” and to be in a space of active creation. Films like Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin (as Christian Suhr picked up correctly), Notebooks on Cities and Clothes by Wim Wenders, or In the Last Days of the City by Tamer El Said pointed us to a direction of filmmaking as a process of testing, whereby filming a scene and together watching the material became the central gesture. This act of recording and revisiting allowed us to see, feel, and witness Abd’s experience of forced migration but also served as a mirror to our own process of filmmaking. Reconvening every two to three months to continue the ritual of filming and watching that we had started in Beirut, slowly the form of our film started to emerge. As Eda Elif Tibet beautifully describes, the camera became a mediator and holder of the space we had started to cultivate and commit to. This space we always referred to as our

Relational filmmaking

Previous articleNext article FreeFilm SymposiumCatharsis after the hangover A focus on Unwritten Letters Comment on Unwritten Letters. 2020. Max Bloching and Abd Alrahman Dukmak, directors. Distributed by The Royal Anthropological Institute.Raminder KaurRaminder KaurUniversity of Sussex Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAt some point I love the hangover.I like the moment after the hangover.After the hangover you wake up again.The catharsis.—Unwritten Letters, 2020We launch the Film Symposium with a focus on an outstanding film on several levels—in terms of ethnographic process, interpersonal relationships, and filmmaking approach. The one-hour documentary, Unwritten Letters, involves Max Bloching in close collaboration with a Syrian friend, interlocutor, and migrant, Abd Alrahman Dukmak, who was equally involved as director and editor (see the online edition for the trailer and full-length film version of Unwritten Letters). Beginning with a quote from the German-language poet Paul Celan: “to speak, to find orientation, to explore where I found myself and where I was taken, to construct myself reality,” the documentary too constructs its own filmic reality around refugee realities that are ever-changing and precarious. It is intricate, intimate, and interactive, the warp and weft of a beautiful yet distressing weave.The documentary conveys a complex story over several time-spaces. Abd’s trials and tribulations in a foreign land are deeply poignant as Italy becomes his “second migration” after leaving Lebanon having already left a besieged Syria. Unlike other films on a refugee, this is a film with a refugee—but even here the term refugee is inadequate for the multifaceted and talented personality of Abd. The audio-visual outcome is paradigm-shifting as it pushes ethnography forwards to an equitable exploration while avoiding the fetishization of filmed participants. A very contemporary and pathbreaking film for a “fifth cinema” (Kaur and Grassilli 2019), it steadfastly moves beyond Jean Rouch’s participatory filmmaking style and anthropologie partagée—where the director remains the main orchestrator of the footage—to a film with equal directorial and editorial accreditation and a genuinely shared anthropology through cinema.On a comparable note, the film, On the Bride’s Side (Io sto con la sposa, 2014) made with Antonio Augugiliaro, Gabriele Del Grande, and Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry, shared an ingenious physical journey with migrants all dressed as a wedding party travelling across borders from Italy to Sweden to seek sanctuary, with the hope that their families might later join them there. Unwritten Letters shares an intimate and inventive journey that results in a piece of work that in addition establishes new filmmakers on the block. Abd and Max initially connected through their shared love for cinema and stories in Beirut. Unwritten Letters is the result, becoming a hands-on entry to the field as Abd wanted to make a film about his experiences. He says about the trial of making the documentary to Max: “First of all it’s a challenge between me and myself, whether I can be a director or not? To document my life? Why I’m like this now and why I’m not like that.”The trial becomes a trail of debut filmmaking as well as one of tenuous belonging. As the film documents Abd’s moments of transition, it also traces how he has to get his documents for residence in Italy. The viewer is taken through a personal, geographical, and temporal journey, in an effort to break out of the waiting rooms and revolving doors in which asylum-seekers are systematically placed. There are some memorable exchanges. The moment Abd got his five-year permit in Italy was also the moment he lost his girlfriend in Lebanon: a situation that leads to avuncular advice from his older Italian friend, Silvano, on how to find a new partner by trimming his moustache and not being too direct. When reflecting backwards, Abd also faces forwards with future aspirations, perhaps to go to university, perhaps do a psychology degree … As a tribute to the vacillations of youth life, Abd comes across as a down-to-earth man socializing with other Italians despite the linguistic gulf. While focused on Abd’s life and thoughts, some sentiments could apply to us all: “Are you happy in life?” “Almost always,” was the response.Bureaucracy for refugees might seem insurmountable, but the intercultural gap slowly decreases as Abd becomes familiar with the language and landscape over the seasons. His encounters in a new land effervesce through shared food, drink, romance, and references to Romeo and Juliet and balconies in Verona. At a later point with his designated family in Italy, Abd says that he feels comfortable there. But there is always a restlessness, of “next step travelling.” This might be seen as a condition of precarity but it could also be construed as a way of getting out of the rut of routine. In one scene he is in front of a wall of photos put up by his host family. Despite having been in Italy for almost a year, he had not found the right wall to put up his own photos. The place can only be a transient home, and one wonders where Abd ended up after the film was finished.Abd’s fertile imagination is plain to see as he recites his letters, unwritten in the title of the film in the sense of being unposted, but written in terms of their narrative force in remembrance of his deceased friends. Thirty-six of his friends had died or disappeared at that point, and those displaced from the region make him want to live, to write, to document, and to create. His attachment to words in letters and social media resuscitates memories that would otherwise fade along with his friends. They become memorials for mates with whom he protested in Syrian squares a decade ago.The narrativized and visualized letters take on a compelling agency while informing a cathartic cinema. Just like his Syrian friends, they are both there and not there: absent-presences that haunt while impelling a quest for meaning and healing. In one letter, Abd makes a satirical narrative about a utopic Syria with elections held every four years, no corruption, visa-free travel to Europe, and the “problem” of people committing suicide out of sheer happiness. In another letter, as a mockery of the bourgeois dream, he tells his friend about his new family life in Milan with his wife, son, daughter, car, and several other modern conveniences.Abd’s recollections become heavier the more the satire is contrasted with the actuality—reinforced by stock footage of soldiers, tanks, explosions, and cities in ruin that reflect a nightmarish scenario both out there and in the head. Abd reiterates: “I need the future at this point of my life. Enough with the past.” When the two filmmakers try to work out the beginning and end, Max asks, “Where do we come from and where do we end up?” In film as in life, he continues: “The baby is coming out but not yet born.”The work is a collage of audio-visual fragments that come together more like a poem rather than a composite jigsaw. And if it is to be a jigsaw, it is one with many missing pieces. Those that are found do not quite fit even if they’re crying out to be accommodated. The poetic collage also captures a linguistic polyphony as Abd navigates his various encounters in Arabic, Italian, English, and German. Likewise, the calligraphy of the film’s title adds an exquisite frame to the staid linearity of the Roman script.As the winner of the Wiley-Blackwell Student Prize at the 2021 RAI online film festival, the highly engaging narrative is imaginatively edited with screen cuts, overlaps, and juxtapositions, in some ways capturing the interleaving of past, present, and future aspirations. It is as if time, space, and film fold into each other. This becomes the miasmic embryo where Max and Abd reflect, create, prospect, and discuss shots while taking about the struggles of location, dislocation, and moments of transition late into the night. As recounted in the film, “where two strangers sitting next to each other become one,” at points Max and Abd also become as if one. But there are significant differences, and this is acknowledged throughout. The recurrent use of the split screen conveys an attempt to not only appreciate but also level the field between representer and represented, citizen and refugee, friend and stranger, and varied time-spaces. It not only emphasizes the separation of Abd from Max, but also the split in Abd from himself.In terms of content, process, and aesthetic, the film becomes a multilayered journey, a searching within, with, and through the medium, with Abd looking for “redemption between me and myself.” “But what is it redemption from?” asks Max—perhaps working out what this redemption is the main purpose of the film—to which Abd replies, “from the past … From the reality … From what happened … From memory.”Filmmaking then becomes “an attempt for catharsis” and a search for peace through collaborative creativity. Narration through the letters becomes one way to come out of the rigor mortis of grief and apathy: “It’s a matter of awareness, of knowing all these words, to know the feeling of the words in a way. After twenty-six years I need the key to deal with that sadness. At the beginning I found the sadness cool. But it’s not anymore cool,” says Abd at another point of dawning realization. This birthing out of trauma is the lingering legacy of Unwritten Letters.ReferencesKaur, Raminder, and Mariagiulia Grassilli. 2019. “Towards a fifth cinema.” Third Text 33 (1): 1–25.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarRaminder Kaur is based in the Departments of Anthropology and International Development in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. Among her various writings, she is (co)author of five books, co-editor of five collections, and a scriptwriter.Raminder Kaur[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 12, Number 3Winter 2022 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723870 © 2022 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article. 

Catharsis after the hangover

Este dossier temático explora histórias cruzadas do cinema e da antropologia através de seis textos que procuram dar conta de como os dois campos têm sido ‘fertilizados’ com contributos dos dois lados. A história do cinema e da antropologia (visual) é uma história feita de mutualismos, nem sempre óbvios ou facilmente identificáveis. A partir de seis estudos e de seis histórias particulares, pretendemos contribuir, com este dossier, para a história da representação visual das pessoas no cinema etnográfico e na antropologia visual, explorando questões de conhecimento, narrativa e construção que posicionam o tema das imagens em movimento antropologizáveis em relação a dimensões éticas e políticas inescapáveis para autores, espectadores, representados, e estudiosos da imagem.

Olhar para Trás: Histórias enredadas do cinema e da antropologia

This chapter critiques the international opportunities for digital technologies to assist architects supporting communities in environmentally, socially and economically challenged parts of the world, where there is limited ability to access these regions. The perspective includes evidence from projects where digital tools have been used to consult and communicate with stakeholders in geographically difficult-to-reach projects. Case studies demonstrate how digital tools can be used to collect site data and involve local people. However, it also shows that digitisation may be the province of the developed world and can involve tools of exclusion. If advanced technologies are applied from advantaged countries and used remotely for design development, this kind of approach can damage local structures, and there are consequent ethical dilemmas associated with it. The chapter discusses the pros and cons of applying digital techniques and discusses the potential for enabling local initiatives, instead of imposing them from outside. 

Not Being There: The Potential for Digital Architecture to Reach the Disadvantaged and the Disenfranchised

Following other advances in international film movements, namely Third and Fourth Cinema, we propose the concept of Fifth Cinema to refer to a composite of audio-visual outputs developed primarily by refugees and/or enabled with their interests and stories at heart. Although the experience of forcible displacement and expatriation varies greatly from one person to the next, Fifth Cinema exhibits certain similarities. It is a cinema that is nomadic, insecure, fragmented, displaced, accented, and hybrid. Emotionally and politically fraught, it is emergency cinema, getting unheard voices out there. It is a ‘smart cinema’ enabled by the spread of digital technologies making it instantaneous, dispensable yet indispensable as a record of a millennial phenomenon. By no means a concerted social movement, it is certainly about reflecting on the surge of individual movements and their filmic outputs, occasionally collective as the result of shared endeavours and co-productions. In this article, we chart out some key features and proponents of Fifth Cinema as an ‘open corpus’ and as part of making a political statement: that refugee conditions and contributions are appreciated, valorised and supported with the means to represent themselves, creatively, interculturally and politically through the (co-)production of their own stories.

Towards a Fifth Cinema

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Towards a Fifth Cinema