Workshop: Collaborative Filmmaking – Why relationship matters

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.

SHEDDING SKIN IN LATE JUNE

Alia Reslan verlässt in wenigen Tagen ihre Wahlheimat Münster, und reist zur Hochzeit ihres Vaters im Libanon. Über zu packenden Koffern entfaltet sich zwischen ihr und der befreundeten libanesischen Filmschaffenden Sabah Jalloul ein ungezwungenes Gespräch über das Coming Out, neu gewonnene Freiheit und die Angst davor, nicht akzeptiert zu werden.
SHEDDING SKIN IN LATE JUNE entstand in nur drei Tagen und schafft es dennoch, lebendig zu vermitteln, was die Rückkehr in die kleine Welt des Heimatdorfes für Alia bedeutet: Unsicherheiten, Aufregung, Selbstpositionierung. Eindrücklich ist Alias Leichtigkeit, mit der sie sich durch kleine, provokative Schritte von einengenden Erwartungen befreit und zu ihrer eigenen Identität steht.

Regie, Buch, Kamera, Monatge: Sabah Jalloul
Kontakt: sabhjalloul@gmail.com