DOCUMENT
THE RADICAL ROAD
As the Document Human Rights Film Festival gets ready to showcase radical fi lm in all its forms, particularly in relation to the Middle East, Katie Goh asks programme producer Sam Kenyon what exactly makes a fi lm radical
W hat makes a i lm radical? Does it need to be experimentally radical – a new kind of form for i lm – or does it need to be politically and socially radical in its content? Or, perhaps, it’s both. These are the questions that Document Film Festival, Scotland’s international human rights documentary i lm festival, will ask with this year’s central strand – Radical Documentaries in the Middle East: 1967 and its Afterlives.
‘The project looks at some of the events that radically changed politics in the Middle East and the ways in which representations of Arab life – both in the media and by i lmmakers – have been, and arguably continue to be, shaped by them,’ explains Sam Kenyon, Document’s programme producer. ‘We’re focusing particularly on the Six Day War of 1967 and women i lmmakers, such as Ateyyat El Abnoudy, who were at the vanguard of a group of artists who launched the New Arab Cinema manifesto at the Damascus festival in 1968. The manifesto called for a more realistic portrayal of Arab life in i lm, and a more intersectional approach to representation.’ Showcasing a rich variety of work – from contemporary narrative i lm, such as Palestinian i lmmaker Azza El- Hassan’s road-trip movie Kings and Extras (2004), to archival footage, such as a i lm curated by the Creative Interruptions research committee at Shefi eld Hallam University – what brings the project together is that umbrella label of ‘radical’.
‘A radical i lm is one that makes a decisive break with, or poses a signii cant challenge to the dominant language of the medium in a way that invites the viewer to perceive a subject in a new way,’ explains Kenyon. ‘But, I’d dei nitely qualify that by saying that whether a i lm is radical or not depends mostly on the context it was made in, because what constitutes the dominant language of the medium very much depends on where in the world the i lm is being made, and under what circumstances. ‘Looking at archive work – and also thinking about archives themselves as extremely fragile, sometimes intangible and
always explicitly political things – tells us a great deal about the world today, but also prompts a lot of complicated questions,’ he continues. ‘One of the things that strikes me the most is what they articulate about our collective memory – how we remember and how we forget. Notions of what is remembered and forgotten are particularly relevant to identities that continue to be preserved in exile and / or under occupation, such as in Palestine. But, I think they are also relevant in other contexts, and in different ways, including those closer to home when we consider what the histories of race and class relations in Britain might tell us about Grenfell, Windrush and the hostile environment.’ Working on the project, Kenyon has noticed a direct correlation between form and content. ‘I think a lot of radical i lmmakers are also united in their conviction that there is no real distinction between political struggle and artistic expression – that the constraints placed on both often mirror each other.’ In radical i lmmaking, artistic and political expression go hand-in-hand.
While explicitly political i lms have a reputation for being disdainfully reprimanding, Kenyon’s experience working on the project has been anything but that. ‘[Radical i lms] look to stimulate an imaginative response from the viewer rather than a purely literal reading; in other words, they don’t tell us what to think, but ask us to look differently.’ Document has focused on a collaborative approach to the project, working with Dr Stephanie Van De Peer, a scholar in African cinema, to help illuminate the interweaving histories of Middle Eastern politics and cinema, and Samar Ziadat, who runs dardishi, an online magazine written by Arab women, to produce a publication launching at the festival. What they’ve achieved is a project that will illuminate a strand of i lm history rarely brought out of its archives and a festival that actively works to be inclusive, empathetic, and collaborative. What could be more radical than that?
Document Human Rights Film Festival, CCA, Glasgow, 18–21 Oct.
36 THE LIST 1 Sep–31 Oct 2018