Erol Mintas

Beyond nation and identity: some notes on contemporary Basque cinema

In 1968, the documentary Ama Lur [Mother Earth] by Fernando Larruquert and Nestor Basterretxea marked the emergence of a new symbolic force in the Basque film industry, sparking hope amidst the seemingly insurmountable constraints posed by Franco’s dictatorship in the Basque Country. For this small corner of the earth, facing the Bay of Biscay and surrounded by the Pyrenees, the documentary’s unique language, shifting from the poetic to the anthropological, evoked the Basque country’s deep cultural roots long consigned to oblivion by the harsh years of dictatorship.

If You Would Understand What I’m Saying You Would Be  Human Trans

Knowing the experience of someone else is something that art can facilitate. Recalling what Alice said to her cat in the beginning of the film, if you would understand what I’m saying you would be human— maybe this film will even make someone who’s not a trans woman from South Korea understand a tiny bit of what it is to be a trans woman in South Korea, or maybe it will just show a glimpse of the lives of two specific, beautiful, hurting, loving, flawed, and infinitely important women.

Embodied Sensing or Divination by Camera

Environmental change has made itself abundantly present, the screening suggests. The earth and its damaged constituents as mediated by the camera, are inherently rich with commentaries, obscure meanings, and mythologies, from both present and the past. Scenes of submerged coastlines, extracted indigenous territories, synthetic cornfields form one half of the narrative. The other, of humanity’s ability to exist and make sense of the changes thrust upon it. Spurred by a wish to capture in visual frames, these scenes strive to represent struggles that perhaps cannot be sensed and damages that cannot be undone. 

THE LEARNING CURVE – Memory of Water, Finland’s first attempt at sustainable film production

Ecological values and sustainable development spread to the western audiovisual (AV) industry from other branches of “hard industry”, which began measuring and reporting on their corporate social responsibility. In the USA the non-profit Environmental Media Association (EMA) was founded already in 1989. In the 2000s and 2010s, in the USA and various European countries different “green initiatives” were proposed in the audiovisual sector, the common factor being that they published a guidebook, checklist, or best-practice guide for ecological film production. Several schemes, such as PGA Green in the US and BAFTA albert in the UK, also launched carbon-footprint calculators tailored for audiovisual productions, which made it possible to measure the CO2 load from an individual production.

A Bloodline of Activism – Shameela Seedat and her documentary film African Moot

“Growing up, I was particularly inspired by family members who’d actively joined the political struggle and were engaged in some form of resistance to the system of racial inequality in our country at the time. Siblings of both my father and mother had been imprisoned, banned, or tortured by the Apartheid government,” says filmmaker, Shameela Seedat, about a long dark period in South African history that only formerly ended in the 1990s. “In some ways, this has inspired my filmmaking in contemporary times, as I am drawn to characters who are ready to speak and ready to act, while all showing their human vulnerabilities.”

SIDING WITH THE WEAK: Empathy and film editing

“Documentary film has a long tradition of siding with the weak. It is difficult to film in the real world without recognizing the obvious injustices.” Siding with the weak: I think Pagh Andersen’s vision of cinema in general and editing in particular, is all here, in those sentences. Everything is political, that’s what you get from Pagh Andersen’s account. Making a movie is political. Editing a movie is very political because editors have the power to shape the image of the world. They can make their protagonist into victims, and their antagonists into pure evil. They can also fake reality, as we see these days. “On the contrary, we need to constantly question how we humans shape our world, but at the same time, we also need to constantly question our own-motivations and methods when we are depicting this world.”

Some thoughts on documentary ethics in no particular order

Using others’ personalities, histories, stories, emotions and thoughts as material for your art is a strange occupation. Documentarians are not the only artists to do this, but we do it in a way that is more obvious and consistent than any other art that I’m aware of. We expose our sources – often their name, but also their face, body, voice, presence and way of being. And if we find a way of not showing any of those things, we still use a combination of moving image and audio to make the audience view their personhood our way.

“Village of Women”, Tamara Stepanyan and Minou Norouzi in conversation

That’s just the beginning of a feminist tale about the effects of migration set in the backwaters where no one considers themself feminist. Feminist lives, however, are lived. Even as we hear weary declarations about a husband’s absence, such as “he is the centre of my universe”, we witness scenes of coded liberalism. For example, a picnic gathering in the hills among three older women serves as a reminder of the empowerment these women, too, are capable of. In a campaign of laughter, they defend the actions of a sixty-year-old fellow villager losing her virginity in the mountains: “It’s a natural need. She has never experienced this in her life, the poor one (…) she wanted to know what it was.” But I want to leave aside the transnational feminist reading that the film inspires for now. Village of Women brings something more unique to the plethora of documentaries about migration. Namely, it turns the spectacle of migration on its head by avoiding the topic altogether.

Turkish-Kurdish-German today: In conversation with mobile filmmakers of Germany

As imaginable, one conclusion that can be made immediately is that there are as many perspectives as there are filmmakers and each perspective is subject to change at any moment. I kept in mind that definitions are labels that help us understand things but also have tangible, material effects on the phenomena they are attached to – sometimes detrimental ones. And in our case, many filmmakers are aware of the danger of ghettoization and their personal struggle to make their films goes hand in hand with a constant fight for un-labeling themselves.