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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/37656 |
| Date | 04 April 2023 |
| Creators | Nisenson, Ann |
| Contributors | Valley, Dylan-Wade, Maasdorp, Liani |
| Publisher | Faculty of Humanities, Centre for Film and Media Studies |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MA |
| Format | application/pdf |
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