Don't Play With That Girl

Strangers Within is an anthology exploring the idea of documentary as encounter through essays, stories, interviews and other creative responses by filmmakers, artists, and writers. The texts engage with the risks of encounter, unsettling assumptions about the distinctions between host and guest; stranger and friend; self and other; documentarian and protagonist. Opening up a series of questions about the mystery of another person, whose difference and unknowability is already a part of one’s self, the anthology offers a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the convergences between encounter, hospitality and autobiography.

with Khalik Allah, Ruth Beckermann, Jon Bang Carlsen, Adam Christensen, Annie Ernaux, Gareth Evans, Jane Fawcett, Xiaolu Guo, Umama Hamido, Therese Henningsen, Marc Isaacs, Mary Jiménez Freeman-Morris, Juliette Joffé, Andrew and Eden Kötting, David MacDougall, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Toni Morrison, Bruno de Wachter and Andrea Luka Zimmerman.

My contribution 'Don't Play With That Girl' (6500w) surveys the process foundational to my filmmaking practice. Through examples I explore radical possibilities emerging from a rigorous, collaborative, non extractive fimlmaking practice. Seeking ways of refusal in relation to persistent cultural tropes, such as the ways in which my and others’ pasts are so often represented as only realist, abject, in need of charitable support – that perpetuates a way of being visible based on erasure. Towards an otherwise to what writer and artist Morgan Quaintance calls a ‘marginal melancholy’, where structures demand an ongoing performance of lack, to enter visibility. To produce counter memories, and imagine otherwise.