Compassion in Kim Longinotto’s documentary practice

Kim Longinotto’s documentary work avoids many of the weaknesses often associated with crosscultural documentary, such as the tendency toward voyeurism, or exploitation of an exotic “Other.” While other scholars have recognized her attention to transnational feminist solidarity, there has been no discussion of the emotional qualities inherent to her work. I argue that Longinotto’s working practice can and should be acknowledged as exercises in compassionate filmmaking. My analysis focuses on the emotional and ethical qualities of her film texts and also addresses questions of authorship as it appears on screen as well as off screen in the relationship between the filmmaker and participants.     

“Out of place” bodies and gender: urban exclusion and emplacement as documentary method in My Own City

In this paper, I investigate Indian filmmaking that emerges from the encounter between urban experience and documentary practice to examine how Indian feminist critique responds to neoliberal discourses of urbanism and gender. I consider the analysis of urbanism in Sameera Jain’s documentary My Own City (2011) which depicts how women become “out of place” in neoliberal cities by focusing on the gendering of urban temporality, mobility and belonging, in relation to which women’s subjectivities and performances are mediated in the nation’s capital New Delhi. In the second section, I conceptualize the use of a deliberate strategy of place-specific performance in the film as “emplacement” which enables a visible field of gender performances and observable mutations of both, subject and space. In contrast to documentary staging or re-enactment, conceptualized as emplacement, the audiovisual recording of complex relations of “becoming” allows place-specific ecologies of material, sensory and social environments to be considered together in the construction of gender. Following the film, the paper outlines provocations regarding critical ways of conceptualizing place in how cultural forms like documentary represent gender in relation to geographies and environments.