Manifesto for Coexistance

My manifesto for co-existance in film and life, written after the release of my film Taskafa, Stories of the Streets, explores ideas of non extractive filmmaking, community and questions structures and narratives of violence deemed 'inevitable'. The book entry outlines my response to a film chosen, where i ask for unconventional stories to be at the forefront of any stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, and find ways to ask these in ways that they can be asked, to imagine a future, regardless, and otherwise. The 10 points of the manifesto conclude the entry.

In addition to the book entry, it is also read by a child as part of Schtinter's project, currenlty hosted online at the Whitechapel Gallery.

Manifesto for Coexistence in Film and Life (grand titles are a prerequisite of the medium):

1. Life is a work in process: unfinished, provisional and uncertain. Film must reflect this or it has no purchase on reality.

2. A work seeking internationalist reception – through content, form, aesthetic or technology – without a specific grounding in the lived experience of people and place, is not internationalist.

3. All filmmaking that is worth the name, regardless of its apparent construction, is a process of making through community; on screen, behind the camera, and in the intention of all its makers. There is such a thing as society.

4. The budget and production structure of a film should always be in proportion and humane relationship to its protagonists, its theme, and its intention. It should be modest.

5. The most productive form of filmmaking today, regardless of its outward expression (fiction, documentary, etc) is the sketch, the essay, from the French, essayer, to try.

6. Heightened realism in filmic expression is both desired and the making manifest of what is latent in the material, waiting. Sometimes metaphors need to be expressed literally.

7. Braudel identified three strata in time – the personal, the social and the natural. The fourth dimension is empathy. Film is this fourth dimension, gently held.

8. All films must feature animals. Without them, it is like a camera without tape, without a reel. It ignores the majority world. It is not legitimate.

9. In the same way, a world - and a film - without hope, is invalid. Hope is the thing.

10. Consider and respond.

• http://importantbooks.co.uk/
• https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/impor...
• https://lux.org.uk/event/the-liberated-f...