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Changing the world through documentary
MEDIA: Cultural anthropologist Sherry B. Ortner provides an easy-read introduction to the logic and visions behind Brave New Films, whose documentary production is non-profit and distributed through social and political networks with the articulated goal of mobilising resistance against capitalism, racism, and fascism.
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A world not just of facts, but of possibilities
IDENTITY: Özge Baykan Calafato has collected a fascinating photo archive in the markets of antiquities and rarities of Istanbul. Through a selection of these photographs, she analyses the relation between population and state ideology during the emergence of the secular Turkish republic in the 1920s and 1930s
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The allure of work as process and pleasure
GENRE: In a deliciously written book, Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky delineates, dissects, and names a visual genre we are all familiar with but have not yet learned to appreciate its full potential and implications.
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On the dark side of truth
MEDIA: The struggle for truth – and thus for documentary – has become brutal. A new book analyzes how truth claims and digital culture shape our political realities.
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Saying something substantial about others
PHOTOGRAPHY: World renowned photographer Fred Baldwin has published his memoirs at the age of 90. Is this a peculiar insight into a person who, through everything and everyone he meets, first and foremost sees himself?
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On the dark side of the truth
TRUTH: A new book on documentary practices post-9/11 begins with an often-repeated (idealistic) blaming of the media for the election of Trump, but develops into a complex analysis of how digital culture shapes our political realities
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A female imam struggling for community
ISLAM: In 2015 the Syrian–Finnish Dane Sherin Khankan decided to create a woman-lead mosque in Copenhagen. Director Marie Skovgaard has followed her struggle between individual vision and the challenge of creating a collective.
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A permission structure for mass murder
DRUGS: What happens when you don’t just give the executers of state monopolized violence license to kill, but also a promise of impunity?
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From the frontlines of the war on refugees
REFUGEES: Chinese artist and filmmaker Ai Weiwei follows up his documentary Human Flow with a reportage from the warzones that await refugees in Europe. The Rest is about the millions who came for shelter but found none.
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The anatomy of neo-nationalist misogyny
JAPAN: Miki Dezaki set out to understand why a network of powerful people find it so important to shut up the women who demand justice for the sexual labour they were coerced into during WWII.
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Colonial voyeurism revisited
COLONIALISM: It is hard to tell if the archival documentary African Mirror is a rehabilitation of a colonial mind, a critique of colonialism or a piece of essayistic nostalgia over the colonial gaze. Probably it is a mix, and as such, nothing new.
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Taking down a regime
South Korean citizens made history when – armed with lighted candles and demands of justice – they brought down president Park Geun-hye and her conservative party in 2017. Director Nungcool and her crew documented the experience.