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.
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.”
I consider documentary fieldwork and filming as a space and time in between. By in between, I mean the combination of certain characteristics that make the space and time of documentary fieldwork both part of everyday life and at the same time removed from it. Before a documentary film becomes representation (something about the world) it is an event (something that happens in the world) In other words, before a documentary film becomes a product that can travel around the screens, it is a creative and social process rooted in the place and time where it happens. Documentary filming is a lived time as well as an imagined, speculative and desired one.
