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Despite the massive scale of the Great Southern Reef, which hugs the coastline from New South Wales to Western Australia, many residents are unaware of its existence. Even fewer residents understand the large amount of biodiversity found in this interconnected temperate system characterized by kelp forests and rocky reefs. Efforts to publicize the area and gain traction for funding and conservation are in their infancy. Conservation funding remains disproportionately low compared to the Great Southern Reef’s counterpart, the Great Barrier Reef. Visibility is a tool that can be used to generate greater awareness, and by extension, balance funding and protection for the Great Southern Reef. To raise awareness, this project uses science communication tools and engages with local communities across the Great Southern Reef. By utilizing illustrative storytelling through film, this project looks through SeadragonSearch, a specific community that has come together to protect the endemic seadragon through photography. The goal in documenting this community is to enhance understanding of the Great Southern Reef while also encouraging the public to find their own community science action that can spark a movement of change.

Although documentary ethics is a fairly well discussed subject, there is a need for discourse on the ethics of working with archives, particularly film-based archives. This paper seeks to encourage discussion as to the ethical ramifications and responsibilities of working with archive material. Arguments on the nature of archive and what archive represents are explored, and the delineation between documentary, journalism, and archive is investigated. Examples of what might be considered ethical and unethical usage of archive material are investigated for insight into what any code of archive ethics might need to consider. The Ethics of Archive in Documentary Filmmaking explores the use of archival materials and the ethical responsibilities inherent in using such a resource, including the challenges posed by the blending of historical truths with artistic representations. It discusses the tension between objectivity and artistic licence, reflecting on the role of documentary as a mediator of reality. By raising these ethical questions and emphasising the importance of understanding the meaning and purpose of an archive, Ethics of Archive in Documentary Filmmaking prompts media practitioners to consider the broader implications of their work in a world where the line between fact and fiction can become blurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to understand how the application of theoretical approaches in documentary filmmaking improves students' conceptual and analytical skills. Through the delivery of a theoretically orientated documentary module, the motivation of the study emerges from the authors' own observations that the integration of practice can support students to better conceptualise theoretical approaches. Notably, the module is delivered at a Sino-British University within the School of International Communications, where most students are of Chinese nationality. The originality of this article arises from inclusion of data encompassing Chinese students' views enrolled in a theoretical documentary course as part of their communications degree, data that is lacking in current literature. The article contributes to knowledge specific to how higher education instructors delivering a theoretical documentary module can better serve students pedagogically from Mainland China. The significance of these findings should not be underplayed, particularly as higher education students from Mainland China in the fields of the social sciences, humanities and the arts find critical thinking and debating skills demanding. Conclusions reached are strengthened by the employment of deductive thematic analysis to unpack the gathered interview data, which is crystallised by the application of Kolb's experiential learning model as the theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Courtroom art, as in comics, self-insertion and self-portraiture invite a metatextual discussion of the relationship between the artist and the reality they seek to depict. Courtroom art is an under-theorised medium discussed, almost exclusively, in the history and practices of law. The tools of comics studies, I seek to show, can provide a language to discuss the sociological and formal aspects of the work of courtroom artists. As such, in this paper I argue that, despite the apparent unsuitability of drawing as a documentary method, courtroom art is an effective vehicle for truth claims. Courtroom artists not only mitigate but leverage the lack of objectivity of their medium to offer a different kind of documentary from technological reportage; they record not only an impression of what occurred but how an event was experienced. In the sections below I offer an overview of the history and practices of courtroom art and theories of documentary comics, a discussion of the relationship between courtroom and comics art, and a series of close readings of examples of courtroom art which effectively leverage the form's interpretive capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Filmmaking is an unconventional, but supremely rewarding career path for criminal justice educators. The author chronicles his career as he transitioned unexpectedly from a traditional path involving legal analyses and policy research to the very unusual enterprise of documentary filmmaking. Each of his film projects emanated directly from his teaching or research experiences, experiences that might just as appropriately have culminated in articles for publication. But he chose a different mode for disseminating his research and insights. The author reviews the myriad challenges he faced as a filmmaker—both inside and outside of the film industry, itself. Throughout, he describes—and outlines his efforts to overcome—the staunch resistance by the academic community to filmmaking by faculty who reside outside traditional departments of theatre and film. He also urges colleagues to consider the path for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I engage in a discourse analysis of National Geographic's docuseries "9/11: One Day in America" to argue that the series' multi-layered effort at commemoration, geared as a long-awaited "full" telling of the 9/11 story, but committed to honoring a specific group of victims and survivors, is enabled by a disorienting temporality that raises questions about the role of national memorials and archives at this moment. Temporality is essential to the development of narrative, and with narrative a central element in the making of memory worlds, temporality cannot be underestimated as a key factor in how memories take shape. "One Day" depends on structural instantiations of time to develop its narrative as authentic memory, reflecting a paradoxical linear yet circular pattern that simultaneously authenticates and undermines the veracity of the story it tells. "One Day" transports viewers into lower Manhattan and through the events of 9/11 via a vividly illustrated timeline. But while a linear version of time in "One Day" supports the telling of survivor stories and the memorialization of the dead, the overarching effect of the timeline for viewers is circular, transporting viewers back in time to 2001 and a state of fear and confusion, forcing collective memory to exist in a repetitive temporality that excuses a turn away from history and consequences. The resulting circular mechanism for commemoration allows cultural institutions, like the ones represented in "One Day," to emphasize the past at the expense of more critical understandings of both history and the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The earthquakes that occurred in Turkey on 6 February 2023 have been one of the most important disasters of recent history. In the aftermath of the earthquake, various segments of society wanted to witness the devastation first-hand, and YouTube documentaries became one of the popular forms of this testimony. The aim of this study is to map YouTube documentaries about these devastating earthquakes, focusing on the content and creators, and thus to draw a framework for the multidimensional situation of the disaster based on this witnessing. The documentary content shared on YouTube during the year following the earthquake was analysed through quantitative content analysis, categorizing the predefined video features of the platform and codes related to documentaries and documentary makers. The data shows that most of the documentaries were created in a participatory mode and a significant increase in the number of documentaries uploaded in the immediate aftermath and on the anniversary of the earthquake. The study also underlines the scope and diversity of the desire to witness the major disaster, while documentaries with an oppositional approach that criticize official discourses are associated with higher levels of audience engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes two strikingly different documentaries by Michael Liu which were included in the “Northeast China Yao-at-work Photography Exhibition” (dongbei yao zhanjie richang in Taipei 2017) on the lives of cross-dressed and transgender (male-to-female) sex workers in Dongbei and the way they discuss their futures and “yao” or “trans” identities differently according to the different modes of documentary employed. In Magic (nü yao er, 2014) we see their practices of everyday life, improvised queer forms of kinship and survival, their dark sense of humor and their business ambitions, whereas in Trans to a New Life (2016) they address their hardships and dreams of the future to the compassionate “NGO gaze” that demands testimonial about being a victim of discrimination (from family members, hospitals, and in employment). Understanding these rhetorical differences helps to intervene in a major debate in contemporary China over the role of NGOs, especially regarding transgender identity, sex work, HIV, and queer forms of kinship. I also connect these recent documentaries to films about queer sex workers in Beijing by Cui Zi’en [2005; 2012. Queer China, “Comrade” China. Brooklyn, NY: dGenerate Films], debates over the testimonial and ethnographic format of an influential U.S. documentary about transgender women of color and sex workers, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990), and current debates in China and the U.S. over trans cultural production, respectability politics, and the politics of visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some Kind of Liberating Effect is a documentary dedicated to research freedom in the academic study of religion in Central and Eastern Europe. This essay examines the techniques used to develop a script and a screenplay. It will show how the documentary integrates screenwriting with the question of freedom of research in this academic field and region. First, the essay presents the raw footage filmed between 2022 and 2023, then the screenwriting techniques used for plotting a story. Finally, it discusses the shift from the history of the academic field to storytelling, particularly with regard to the frame story included in the film. In conclusion, it presents some remarks concerning the interdisciplinary and intersectoral approaches between religious studies and the film industry implemented in the documentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Korean documentary film has historically both been designed as a contribution to political life and also as a creative exploration in the growing film industry. Documentary in the service of political mobilizing, which occupied a large place in early documentary, has evolved into a wide range of expression, without losing the overall character of social commitment. As seen at the Jeonju Film Festival 2024, documentary work continues the longstanding politically-engaged character of South Korean documentary, while demonstrating sophisticated approaches to the challenge of developing narratives of remembrance. This work is undertaken with techniques ranging from animation to strategic use of silence and absence, reflexive archival use and memoir. Documentary choices testify to professionalization and innovation in the field and also to the enduring identity of documentary filmmakers as storytellers of a fraught, contested and still in formation Korean identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss how documentaries were used for the promotion of industrial production in socialist Albania and Yugoslavia through a discussion of two short non-fiction films, Në turnet e natës/The Night Shift (1970, Albania) and 25 Godina. Jugoplastika/25th Anniversary of Jugoplastika (1977, Yugoslavia). The discourse of Albanian and Yugoslavian socialist ideologies of modernisation and industrial production, and the notion of everyday socialism are constructed and visible in the films' representational strategies. The analysis of the two previously overlooked archival films along with the press, and non-film materials and documents from film and state archives allow us to compare and contrast the similarities and differences of Albanian and Yugoslav socialist ideologies toward industrial production, labour and gender relations. In doing so, we aim to better understand the complexities of the state socialist discourse vis-à-vis Western capitalism and consumerist ethics during the Cold War period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores via John L. Austin's speech act theory the poetic manifestations of three Baltic documentary films: Bridges of Time, The Old Man and the Land and Ruhnu. The aim is to illustrate the way in which the Austinian division between the constative and the performative articulates the meaning-making process in these documentaries. This is done on two levels: on a larger scale the analysis looks at how Bridges of Time serves as a single performative speech act, establishing the Baltic New Wave phenomenon through its own aesthetic style; in a more detailed level, the article examines two examples from the aesthetic movement to demonstrate how they avoid reproducing a given reality by creating a semantic shift away from the surface structure in order to connote a rustic pre-occupation sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to study how historical documentaries handle the development of a tale. The initial premise is that documentaries are not a mere compilation and recounting of data but rather a narration constructed based on the perspective of the audiovisual language. To understand how filmmakers create the story, we studied documentary feature-length films on the Spanish Civil War between 2000 and 2014. The sequence has been taken as the unit of analysis, and a breakdown has been made of the types of images and sounds used according to duration, order, and predominance of plot or characters. The research bears on the concept of narrative strategy, which helps to understand the format's internal mechanism, considering three issues: the production approach, the visual solution, and the narrative decision. The study of the selected corpus detected eleven narrative strategies-eleven ways to portray the same event from the past, with different purposes and intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relationships between documentary-makers and their subjects are a core concern of the scholarship, typically analysed in relation to issues of power and exploitation. This article instead considers documentary relationships as a form of work, examining what it means when a job entails the production of intimate connections, which are also subject to commercial pressures and imperatives. Relationship-building is an intrinsic part of the filmmaker's job, but takes place around its margins: often unpaid and unacknowledged by the media industries. A consequence of this lack of status and recognition is that an appropriate professional framework has yet to be developed, with worrying implications for training, regulation and duty of care. Drawing upon in-depth interviews conducted over a period of 4 years, this article conceptualises the work of documentary relationships as a practice of creative labour, by considering how they function interpersonally, procedurally and organisationally. Through a discussion of emotional labour, I will explore how the permeability between work life and intimacy impacts both filmmakers and contributors alike, considering the various ways their experiences take shape within the structural context of contemporary media production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current discourse on the representation of genocide claims that we are currently experiencing 'the shift from the era of the witness to the era of the perpetrator'. This raises ethical concerns over why and how documentaries engage with perpetrators. Based on an assessment of 203 documentaries on seven genocides, my article makes three kinds of contribution in addressing these concerns: (1) It discusses the ethics of representing perpetrators in archival footage, reenactments or interviews in a wider corpus than those covered in recent discussions. (2) It uncovers a broad range of ethical reasons for why documentary filmmakers engage with perpetrators, rather than seeking to establish a singular ethical ground for this engagement. This approach can do better justice to the varying cultural, historical and political contexts of the respective genocides, the different production contexts and target audiences of the documentaries, and the different styles and types of documentaries that inform the ethics of perpetrator representation. (3) It introduces two broad categories of perpetrator representation in documentaries that conceptualize the ethical purposes of this engagement differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Iluminuras is the property of Revista Iluminuras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay reflects on the significance of documentary filmmaking in the context of Latin American documentaries, in general, and Chilean films, in particular. It also reflects on how Latinas' diasporic memories of place affect identity and how we think of the past through language and images. Feminist film activism is a way to build an archive of women's lives and voices revealing how gender shapes them. The short documentary La chispa en la pradera (Spark in the Meadow, 2023) displays feminist activism and feminist memories that cut across different generations of women fighting for equality and justice in contemporary Chile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an audience ethnography, focusing on the documentary The Work (dir Jairus McLeary and Gethin Aldous, US, 2017), which depicts a four-day therapeutic programme involving men from the community and men from a high security prison. The film was screened to audiences of people who live and work in an English prison-based therapeutic community. Previous prison-based audience studies have highlighted the significance of the media text and the characteristics and experiences of the audience, but have not specifically addressed the salience of the context in which the media is consumed. By conducting the research in an atypical penal environment, the intention is to illuminate how consumption is affected by different penal contexts. The audience offered macro, meso and micro level responses to the documentary. At a macro level, they recognised the reforming intentions of the film, but also revealed the limitations of popular culture, with its emphasis on spectacle. At a meso level, the audience offered a sophisticated and expert analysis of the content and omissions of the film's representation of therapeutic processes and cultures. At a micro level, those serving prison sentences used the content of film as therapeutic material, reflecting on their own emotions and experiences, while the prison staff used the content to explore their professional identities. The audiences viewed the film through a therapeutic habitus, and media consumption was a way of enacting and reinforcing the expectations and practices of therapeutic community life. By highlighting the salience and variability of penal contexts, the study extends prison-based audience scholarship, but also highlights a factor that should be considered in the planning and design of media and arts programmes in prison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, filmmaker Su Friedrich comments on a wide variety of projects, as well as her labour-intensive work process, the crucial role of feedback from friends and fellow filmmakers, and the importance of being specific. She also describes her experience researching unusual archives, her views on the current media landscape, and the satisfaction of creating Edited By, a website dedicated to honouring the many women who revolutionised film editing, playing a key role in cinema history that has yet to be fully recognised.

Copyright of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación is the property of Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseno y Comunicacion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This image-based essay reflects upon the author’s experience of running an experimental filmmaking workshop titled Climate Futures, Cities Past in the spring of 2023 at MIT’s School of Architecture featuring stills from four student films set in Greece, Italy, Pakistan, and Syria. It explores how architectural pedagogy can intersect with filmmaking to offer a critical space outside the studio or seminar paper. Engaging eco-critical and narrative approaches of Stefanie K. Dunning, Jennifer Fay, Ursula K. Le Guin, Donna Harraway, Saidiya Hartman, Adrian J. Ivakhiv, and Ousmane Sembène, it explores how ‘cinema might teach us to die’ or rather, embrace a different eschatological paradigm that moves beyond individual authorship, accomplishment, and post-mortem legacy towards more mutualist, collectivist, and anarchic models of existence. It argues that filmmaking as inquiry can offer a way to collect different kinds of stories that help facilitate the messy, uncomfortable, and wildly creative processes of unworlding and reworlding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on Leur Algérie, a 2020 documentary about remembering and representing the Algerian experience of immigrating to France's "rural desert"—or to what geographer Roger Béteille calls "la France du vide." The context for this analysis lies in the decline of the aging chibanis (North African "elders" or "grey hair") population in France. While the social issues they face (ranging from lodging, to pension, health, and social benefits) have received media and political attention, questions about their memory and its place in contemporary France point to a "vide mémoriel" (memory void) that has largely been filled by French cultural figures of Maghrebi descent. Thus, with Leur Algérie (2020), filmmaker Lina Soualem delves into the history of her paternal grandparents. Originally from the Laaouamer area in rural Kabylia, they raised their family in France, specifically Thiers, a small French town in the sparsely populated mountains of the Massif Central. This essay examines how Soualem uses scenery and silence to symbolize a memorial void and absence. It relates images of desert-like emptiness and "non-places" in both Thiers and Laaouamer to the gaps in the grandparents' narrative. Ultimately, it explores tensions between the experiences of Algerian immigrants in France and what Soualem identifies as their "invisibilization" in France's memorial space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author explores current perspectives on contemporary art projects through the concept of the archive. By applying a theoretical framework termed "concern for the archive", the author aims to elucidate complex relationships between the archive as a medium and the situated practices of contemporary art. The paper examines contemporary art as a form of temporary memory storage, particularly through the analysis of Tomáš Rafa's documentary films. It addresses two key questions: What specific aspects of concern for the archive can be identified in political or activist contemporary art? How does concern for the archive differ from archival care, and why is this distinction important?. In the first section, the author discusses the "zones of contact" in political activist art, highlighting the formation of dialogical structures and distinguishing them from scientific research and purely documentary creation. The second section traces the layers of artistic training in Grzegorz Kowalski's renowned studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, where the author gained experience in organizing and documenting collective workshops. This part reveals the specifics of documentary video creation with its activist and archival overlaps. In the final sections, the author outlines a theoretical framework for interpreting documentary video pieces in relation to the concepts of archive, cultural trauma, and cultural therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study articulates the motives, craft, practice, and urgent needs of creative independent investigative documentary as a distinct field of practice that utilizes both the subjective expression of artistic cinema with the objectivity-based legacy practices of watchdog journalism. Leveraging community of practice theory, based on in-depth interviews and a two-year investigation of ten of the inaugural films supported by the International Documentary Association (IDA) Enterprise Documentary Fund award—launched in 2016 as the first contemporary institutional recognition of creative investigative documentary as a distinct sub-genre—this study demonstrates how recognizing the unique experiences of this distinct dual journalistic and artistic practice is vital in order for scholars to more widely appreciate the potentiality and significance of this journalistic practice, and to more widely engage with the unique security challenges and needs that it faces, largely overlooked in prevailing conversations in journalism today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of O Social em Questão is the property of Faculdades Catolicas - Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 2021, three documentary series revitalised the unsolved murder of Sophie Toscan du Plantier in 1996 in West Cork, Ireland, for a global audience of true crime enthusiasts. This article analyses the podcast West Cork (Audible 2018/iTunes 2021) and two streaming series, Murder at the Cottage: The Search for Justice for Sophie (Sky Crime 2021) and Sophie: A Murder in West Cork (Netflix 2021) and argues that they conferred documentary celebrity on their central figures, Sophie Toscan du Plantier and Ian Bailey. The celebritisation of these individuals as victim and villain, was achieved through the development of a convergent narrative across the three series, one salted with the plot twists, end-of-episode cliff hangers, emotional confrontations and supernatural speculation familiar to viewers of true crime, reality television and serial drama. Moreover, the gendered discourse deployed by these documentaries posthumously transformed Sophie Toscan du Plantier into a world-famous victim while providing an opportunity for Ian Bailey, who remains the prime suspect, to self-brand as a Gothic villain. Bailey's 2022 announcement that he would launch a podcast and television series and his self-promotional activity on TikTok confirm the cultural capital associated with documentary celebrity, even, or especially, for the infamous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obstinate memory is an insistent resource for communities. Migrant Media advocates the methodology of a "documentary of force" as a research tool for filmmakers and academics. As a U.K.-based collective of filmmaker-activists involved in community struggles, Migrant Media's resistance-based work uses cameras and screens to challenge racism and police violence. Drawing on film documentary history from figures as diverse as Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc Godard, Black Audio Film Collective, and Third Cinema, the Migrant Media story is revealed through attempts to ban the 2001 film Injustice and a more recent series filmed with nurses during the coronavirus pandemic. We suggest some directions for further research at the end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If Gaelic has been symbolically appropriated to represent Scotland, then it follows that we need to look more closely at the part played by documentary film both of and from the Scottish Hebrides, in furthering the dissemination of what is an idealised and contested identity. As documentary is a negotiated contract between the producer and those they 'represent', the discussion needs to consider whether the representation of a Hebridean identity, and by extension a mythical Scottish identity, is constructed by the filmmaker, and if so, how filmic constraints and practices inform this representation. Within this framework is an acknowledgement of the extent to which Hebridean identity has been mediated by books, photographs and films for the past 300 years. This article will deliver the findings of a research project undertaken in the in the Outer Hebrides (also known as the Western Isles and Lewis & Harris). The research investigates the extent to which interviewees themselves collude with documentary makers in presenting a view of the Gael that reflects the Gaelic-speaker's own self-assigned role as guardian of the land and traditions. As this research marries practice with research, it will present it in a semi-autobiographical style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentaries have frequently captured journeys to places audiences might not have seen before. The first documentary film Nanook of the North (1922), often referred to as a travel film, took viewers to the Canadian Artic for the first time. In 1929, The Man with a Movie Camera revealed the rhythm of the Soviet cities through the Kino-Eye. Now the documentary film genre, the City Film is taking viewers on a virtual tour into new digital synthetic domains as they contain artificially generated images produced by GenAI. In response to this emergence of the ‘AI eye’, a computational vision of the world, the following attributes of AI as an asset, tool and collaborator shape the discussion of novel creative documentary processes that are emerging when Gen AI is integrated into computational non-fiction. This article explores a computational vision of the world in relation to the City Film documentary genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unremitting phenomena of appropriating Dalit Lives on screen has activated responses among caste-aware directors, which led them to engage in certain ethical commitments in the filmmaking profession. The article interlineates with the recent Netflix documentary film Daughters of Destiny (2017) directed by Venessa Roth which engages with the narratives of post millennial Dalit women and their journeys from passive victimhood to the formation of their agency while confronting casteism and patriarchy simultaneously. The documentary is set in Tamil Nadu in South India and the narratives revolve around post-millennial Dalit women who try to liberate themselves through education. The article attempts to highlight 1) the private philanthropic initiatives to address the question of caste in post-Mandal India 2) analyze the classroom as a space of dissent 3) portray post-millennial Dalit women as glocal subjects in documentary films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue is inspired by the life of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by an Israeli soldier in Jenin in May 2022. It was compiled during the deadliest time for journalists anywhere in the last three decades. During its ongoing war on Gaza, Israel has killed well over one hundred Palestinian journalists and media workers. The contributions to this volume address how diverse media forms shape and express Palestinian lifeworlds and politics. Palestinians practice media—through documentary production, photography, art, animation, social media, and journalism—to defy the media stereotypes that seek to reduce them to perpetrators or victims, and to mobilize imagination for liberation. By attending to the materialities and conditions of production of everyday media forms as part of broader political and social struggles, this special issue seeks to amplify and contextualize Palestinian media work as Palestinians strive to survive and flourish in the midst of ongoing Nakba. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, codirectors of the sci-fi documentary Lyd, Rami Younis and Sarah Ema Friedland, describe the impetus for making the film that imagines a Palestine never colonized by the British or Zionists. Drawing on research into Palestine's rich and pluralistic history, the authors share the creative process behind producing the film's imagined scenes of a Lyd that never experienced the Nakba or the exile of its people. They conclude with reflections on how Lyd provides needed inspiration for imagining alternate realities amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I recut an observational documentary about a woman called Bekti into a more conventional hero's journey for a broadcaster. The hero's journey narrative requires large obstacles to be overcome by the hero in their search for their ego. In this documentary the obstacle is connecting experimental science with communities with the aim to reduce dengue fever, and the hero's 'ego' is to be an effective communicator. Using the hero's journey style of narrative reduced the importance of the domestic aspects of Bekti's life because these scenes did not contribute to overcoming obstacles or finding ego. To explore these changes use feminist critique of the influence of the hero's journey on narrative structure and character creation. Alongside this, I use a decolonising lens to challenge the universality of the monomyth. I then bring into this debate work on value in the economy to explore how the hero's journey used in the recut documentary corresponds to neoliberal values. This critique adds to the current debates around heroic characters and story structures in non-fiction films via rethinking story in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The breadth of Australian-born British-domiciled investigative journalist John Pilger's journalism was staggering. Over five decades, he covered wars and/or social conflicts in Australia (frequently) Burma, Cambodia, Chagos Islands, Chile, China, Czechoslovakia, Iraq, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Okinawa, South Africa, Timor Leste, Vietnam, the UK and the US etc. He produced powerful documentaries about these issues. He was truly a globe-spanning journalist. He died aged 84. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A unique feature of Pacific Journalism Review, compared with many other journalism and media research journals, has been a particular focus on photography and documentary. Contributors have been eclectic and varied, ranging from activist photojournalist John Miller (Ngapuhi), who charted the new wave of Māori assertiveness from the first Nga Tamatoa protest at Waitangi in 1971 and who offered a research portfolio on the Ngatihine Land/Forestry legal dispute in Northland Aotearoa, to Ben Bohane's 'Melanesian mythical places with unreported conflicts', to Kasun Ubayasiri's 'Manus to Meanjin' study of refugee migration, to Filipino Fernando G. Sepe's stunning but shocking portrayal of President Rodrigo Duterte's extrajudicial 'war on drugs' (in reality a 'war on poverty'), through to Todd M. Henry's Tongan 'Gangsters in Paradise' and the realm of kava in New Zealand. At least a dozen portfolios have been published by the journal and this article examines and reflects on some of the highlights. The photoessay is completed with a portfolio of protest photographs from the seven months of Israel's War on Gaza. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an account of an independent filmmaker's work in documenting some of the stories from the global Indian diaspora. Based in Aotearoa New Zealand, with ancestral connections to Fiji, East Africa, UK, US and India, and using documentary making with both its journalistic and artistic purposes, the author firstly refers to the literatures that identifies documentary-making as journalism, diaspora, and the caste system. She then situates herself within the South Pacific Indian diaspora, before describing her experience in the making of the documentary entitled Hidden Apartheid: A Report on Caste Discrimination. The article concludes by reflecting on her role and the role of documenting hidden discrimination where it exists throughout Indian communities of the diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tropelías: Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada is the property of Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Babylon Center for Humanities Studies is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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Copyright of Revista Fotocinema is the property of Revista Fotocinema and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Fotocinema is the property of Revista Fotocinema and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article considers the epistemic value of Iraqi first-person documentaries of family life, or domestic ethnographies, during the Iraq War (2003–2011). The article analyses Life After the Fall (Abid 2008) and Homeland: Iraq Year Zero (Fahdel 2015), two documentaries about the everyday life of the videomakers' family members in the advent of the US-led 2003 invasion and shortly after the occupation. The article examines how Iraqi domestic ethnographies dispute and complement dominant (Western) media, filmic and historical discourses of the conflict. I argue that these videos provide a nuanced understanding of the complex social, cultural and historical dynamics of this period, exceeding essentialisms and hegemonic discourses of violence, terror and victimhood. In addition, I demonstrate how this approach facilitates the participation of historically marginalized voices of young female family members, particularly in the representation of the conflict, and situates otherwise unusual discussions around Iraqi women's rights and gender issues at the core of everyday life in post-invasion Iraq. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The documentary La belle d’occident, en quête de l’Indochine d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (2023, 47’) discusses the place and investment of women in research and in the way that they see others, whether from an anthropological, artistic (particularly cinematographic), literary, gendered, post-colonial (i.e. historical) or involved point of view. The starting point for this research is the novel The western nice woman, by Mrs Huỳnh Thị Bảo Hòa written in 1927, a love story between a French woman and a Vietnamese man. This novel is based on a true story that praises the place of women and denounces certain colonial behaviours. Thi Phuong Ngoc Nguyen, a teacher-researcher at Aix-Marseille University, translated the novel in 2021, so that it could be used in the field to find clues about the customs of the period in relation to the soldiers involved. A teacher-researcher also at the University of Aix-Marseille, and as a documentary filmmaker, I accompanied her to Alsace and Verdun in France, and Vietnam, to make this documentary about this adventure and capture current realities while, at the same time, searching for traces of the colonial era. It takes now the form of a creative documentary. [...]

This essay explores the intricate interplay between documentary and narrative elements in the film Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no Sōretsu, dir. T. Matsumoto, 1969). The film centers on the character of Eddie, a queer individual working as a hostess in a gay bar in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. The narrative intertwines Eddie’s romantic relationship with the bar owner Gonda and his conflict with the establishment’s manager Leda. Flashbacks to Eddie’s childhood and the revelation that Gonda is his long-lost father have led many Western scholars to interpret the film as a loose adaptation of Oedipus Rex. However, this essay challenges such readings, proposing an analysis of the film through the lens of gender and sexual identity in 1960s Japan. The study integrates elements of Western theory (Ch. Baudelaire, W. Benjamin, G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, S. Sontag) with research on the specificity of Japanese culture (D. Desser, A. Jacoby, M.J. McLelland, A.M. Nornes, D. Richie, T. Satō, T. Schmidt, I. Standish), as well as insights from the director (T. Matsumoto) and his interpreters (M. Ko, M. Raine). The chosen methodology facilitates an exploration of the relationship between the individual and reality as depicted in documentary form. By employing the concept of the flâneur to capture the essence of Shinjuku, the author emphasizes the film’s eclecticism, which, through diverse conventions and cultural influences, creates a nuanced portrayal of Japan’s sexual minorities and offers a commentary on the impact of foreign influences on Japanese collective society.

Writer and director Elaine McMillion Sheldon begins her latest documentary, King Coal , with a funeral rite. A multigenerational, multiracial procession of people in black clothing walks slowly up a country road. All is quiet except for the sound of insects and a steady drum. Who are these mourners? Sheldon lets the mystery linger. But we learn eventually that the solemn rite is for a king—King Coal—or perhaps for the past he represents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]