Collaborative filmmaking: lessons learned from the Cissie Gool house film project

From 2019 until 2021, I directed and produced a twenty-two-minute film about a housing occupation in Cape Town, South Africa. Setting out on this project, I had several concerns. One, the ethics of being an outsider filmmaker making a film about a community from which I'm neither from, nor to which I belong. Two, I did not want to contribute to a long-practiced, Western documentary tradition of making images of people in need of saving. Although I'm neither the first nor last to raise these dilemmas in documentary filmmaking, I was interested in making the film ethically by drawing on a set of practices and ideas from participatory and collaborative filmmaking. In the making of this film I was also influenced by my own values and political commitments. This paper will first examine what the ‘participatory' term means – both the origins and development of the term and its varied significance – and then situate the Cissie Gool House project within this mode of representation and reflect on the filmmaking process.

Grantor

Centre for Film and Media Studies

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Nisenson, Ann

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Valley, Dylan-Wade
• Maasdorp, Liani

• media studies

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/37656

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/37656