All these three women have diverse motivations for filmmaking but they meet at the common point that if a person desires to make a film, she would definitely find a way to do it no matter where she lives, or where she arrives.
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.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
As such, the “technological promise to capture time” opened the cinema to confront all sorts of social and natural limits, from “the denial of the radical finitude of the human body” to the “access to other temporalities.” In collusion with capitalism’s ideological fetish for progress and infinite growth, the emergence of cinema was accompanied with stories and fables that would introduce and legitimize “the recognizable tropes of orientalism, racism, and imperialism essential to the nineteenth-century colonialist imperative to conquer other times, other spaces.”
According to award winning author Juha Hurme: ”Everything is in constant flux. Individuals rush from the cradle to the grave, the land raises, water opens new routes, flora and fauna change, human shapes environment, societies change, states form and change, languages and faiths change information takes over spaces, consciousness changes, fashion changes”
