What are essentials to a sensitive approach to film? How does relationship-building in filmmaking influence the whole experience for all participants? What does collaboration really mean in a practical sense within filmmaking? How can one involve the co-creators in the process and how can one carry the weight of deciding? What does collaboration entail when it comes to questions of authorship? 

Making films with and about people involves a realm of negotiating relationships, sensitivities, power dynamics, and decisions. When asking questions of a private or critical nature, that is, when asking people to share with a wider public no less than “pieces of themselves”, numerous ethical questions surely arise.  

In this workshop, we will practice and apply the participatory, collaborative, and autoethnographic approaches to documentary filmmaking while also discussing it together. Participatory collaborative filmmaking methods hold the potential to make documentaries and films more authentic by redesigning power relations between the director/facilitator and the protagonists/co-creators. By the end of the workshop, we will have produced short films using these methods incorporating personal archive material from voice messages over phone-filmed videos in our practice of filmmaking.  

This workshop is suitable for filmmakers, researchers, anthropologists, and anyone interested in exploring new and innovative approaches to documentary filmmaking. No prior knowledge of visual anthropology or autoethnography is required, as the workshop aims to make the concepts accessible and applicable to a wider audience. The only thing required is dedication and passion from you to unlearn and learn the methods to disrupt the normative filming approaches and to reflect on your ‘self’ in the field. We navigate with all those present through questions related to boundaries, friendship, decision-making and accountability. 

Humad Nisar is showing the debut film HOME SWEET HOME in this years’ edition of the students’ platform. Humad Nisar is also giving the workshop on Queering Visual Anthropology – irritation, confrontation, finding home”. 

Humad Nisar (any pronoun) is a visual anthropologist based in Germany, born and raised in Pakistan. Currently, Humad is working on conducting queer and migration film workshops for the BIPOC youth in Germany. Humad Nisar conducts film workshops to make filmmaking accessible for everyone by producing films shot on their mobile phones. Humad uses participatory collaborative and autoethnographic filmmaking methods in art activism to decolonise narrative filmmaking when stories are told by the BIPOC/Queer people themselves. Queer displacements, kinship, and identity are research themes in the artist’s work. Humad’s debut film, HOME SWEET HOME, explores how queer people of Pakistani origin related to the idea of ‘home’. It is a semi-autoethnographic, participative collaborative theoretical and media project. 

Sabah Jalloul is a writer, journalist and filmmaker from Beirut, Lebanon. She is currently finishing her MA in Visual Anthropology, Media and Documentary Practices at WWU Münster in Germany and working on questions related to the affective response to the economic collapse in Lebanon since 2019 and normalizing the death of “life as we once knew it”. Sabah has screened her debut film SHEDDING SKIN IN LATE JUNE in the students’ edition of Freiburger Filmforum 2021. The film, shot in only three days, portrays an encounter between Sabah and Alia before her returning to Lebanon. It is a collaborative film project which refers to the high potential of friendship in filmmaking, as well as its limits. 

The Workshop will be held in English.

How can we use methods of irritation and confrontation within our filmmaking practice to irritate the status quo and show that there are more ways of being in and experiencing the world than covered within normative narratives? How do we keep a high level of sensitivity within the work together with protagonists when working on sensitive topics? How can we thematize sensitive topics like home and belonging in film by showing the struggles of locating one’s own identities in a binary, racial social system? 

We will get a first insight in how queering the approach to shooting ‘Other’ can be used to re-design normative research methods, making them more inclusive, innovative, and empathic, and how this can impact the ethics and authenticity of the whole film. 

Taking a closer look to the film of filmmaker Humad Nisar we will also get the opportunity to learn from Humad’s experiences, who will share insights and material from the directors work on the film HOME SWEET HOME. In this film project participatory methods were experimented with over three years. To accumulate the sensuality of a place like home, the film uses sensory and psychedelic ethnographic film methods to create haptic visuals for the viewer rather than passive participation. 

We highly recommend the participants to take part in the film screening of HOME SWEET HOME on 15th of May. Humad Nisar, together with Sabah Jalloul, is giving another workshop on Collaborative Filmmaking - Why relationship matters.

Humad Nisar (any pronoun) is a visual anthropologist based in Germany, born and raised in Pakistan. Currently, Humad is working on conducting queer and migration film workshops for the BIPOC youth in Germany. Humad Nisar conducts film workshops to make filmmaking accessible for everyone by producing films shot on their mobile phones. Humad uses participatory collaborative and autoethnographic filmmaking methods in art activism to decolonise narrative filmmaking when stories are told by the BIPOC/Queer people themselves. Queer displacements, kinship, and identity are research themes in the artist’s work. Humad’s debut film, HOME SWEET HOME, explores how queer people of Pakistani origin related to the idea of ‘home’. It is a semi-autoethnographic, participative collaborative theoretical and media project. 

The Workshop will be held in English.

Was “Zuhause” bedeutet, geht oft weit über vier Wände hinaus. Für queere Menschen ist das Thema “zuhause” oft ein komplexes Rätsel - insbesondere in einem Land, indem die eigene Existenz illegalisiert wird.  Das partizipative Erstlingswerk HOME SWEET HOME nutzt experimentelle, non-lineare Filmmethoden, um den damit verbundenen Gedanken, Gefühlen und Erfahrungen verschiedener queeren Menschen in Pakistan und der Diaspora nachzuspüren. Das Ergebnis ist eine ungewöhnliche, experimentelle Collage, die versucht, das komplexe Rätsel zu erfassen, was “Heimat” für pakistanische queere Menschen bedeutet.