Homeland (in)securities

At times of significant social change, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, committed moving image documentary practice comes more than ever into its own as perhaps the most literally and metaphorically ‘telling’ of forms by which to engage both the subjects and themes of its enquiry.

Its ability to prioritize those marginalized by mainstream, commodity film-making, and the means it can employ to enable an open narrative space for individuals, communities and ways of being, becoming and belonging through enduring dialogue with its participants is exemplary.

The subtly polemical way it can build its argument through enduring encounter – outside of the template requirements of television production, whether in process or product – means that it offers time, the duration of shared experience, as well as space (the arena of its theme as well as the actual material environments of its content) as active components in its palette of tools. This combination, when allied to its specific role of advocacy, makes engaged social documentary one of the most energized in contemporary moving image practice.

I am currently in development with two major feature-length documentary works, hybrids that challenge conventional genre boundaries and seek, rather, a heightened register of telling that is explicitly participatory and collaborative. Both projects are centred on locations in major world-cities, long-inhabited by their communities, territories whose identities are at stake within the unfolding and accelerating narrative of globalised gentrification or ‘development’, and zones whose buildings, functions and populations (human and otherwise) are being challenged by ‘incursionist’ forces – of speculative capital, architecture and commerce – in ways that challenge the current diversity of ways of being in these locations.

In this presentation I will present work-in-progress sequences from both projects detailed below and contextualise them within both my own practice and the wider social documentary forms described above, tracing parallels and divergences in current approaches nationally and internationally.