[-empyre-] Week 4 of the April 2018 discussion: New Media Documentary Practice

Sat Apr 28 20:19:26 AEST 2018

Thanks, Sarah.

This is a great story on how you came to this subject for the film. I love that the football coaches actually helped in its conception. It’s the speaking alongside rather than speaking for quality of the film that I found so engaging.

Best,
Dale

> On Apr 26, 2018, at 22:17, Sarah Shamash <sarah at sarahshamash.com> wrote:
> 
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> Hi Dale, it’s sort of a long story (re. how I came to make this film) so I will try and be brief here. It starts with an anecdote. When I was in my early twenties, I went along on a road trip with two friends, one of whom was doing some research in Alert Bay, one of whom was also First Nations and had a connection to Alert Bay. I knew nothing about Alert Bay at the time, yet I agreed to accompany this friend. To make a long story short, we ended up partying with the women’s soccer team and I realized how powerful and important soccer culture was in Alert Bay. It gave people status that didn’t come from important families in the Kwakwaka'wakw system. Coming from a mixed Latin American background, this was the first time I had seen the fervour of "the beautiful game" (or football or soccer) in Canada. It was a strong experience and it stayed with me. The land itself, this remote island, resonated with me in an inexplicably powerful, spiritual, and energetic way. Many years later, I received a grant for another project and I naively thought I would stretch it and start this documentary. So that was the genesis of the project. The choices of who and what to film were done in a fairly cinema direct style where the characters often led the action. I made contact with the coach of the women's soccer team and we have since developed a beautiful friendship. So she agreed to the project and it went from there. I remember, one of the former coaches, Honey, would often say, you should film this person and you need to talk to so and so. And, in fact, everyone I talked to had suggestions on who and what I should film and I sort of went with it. And that's how it evolved and then of course editing required a lot of choices. 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Apr 26, 2018 at 10:28 AM, Dale Hudson <dmh2018 at nyu.edu <mailto:dmh2018 at nyu.edu>> wrote:
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> Thanks, Sarah.
> 
> I’m curious to know more about how you came to make this film and what governed some of your choices. 
> 
> Did you set about highlighting the role of football for these women and men, or did it develop as a larger part of the film in the process of making it?
> 
> Best,
> Dale
> 
> 
>> On Apr 24, 2018, at 10:55, Sarah Shamash <sarah at sarahshamash.com <mailto:sarah at sarahshamash.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Thanks for the invite to share here Dale. My very DIY documentary project is also about people and place and that inextricable relationship. Although I’m not sure what constitutes a "new media documentary practice", Kwanxwala-Thunder is about transporting the experience of a particular geography, history, community, and people. Namely, Alert Bay as part of traditional Kwakwaka'wakw territory on Canada’s Northwest coast and the island’s predominantly Indigenous, Kwakwaka'wakw soccer community, is explored through an experimental, impressionistic, essayist, cinema direct lens and ultimately a single-channel cinematic experience. There are genuine considerations for the ethics of documentary practices, methodologies and contexts of creation, formal treatments of images which comment on histories of representations and connect to the more general theme of the integration and indigenization of soccer into Kwakwaka'wakw contemporary culture in Alert Bay.  
>> 
>> 
>> On Mon, Apr 23, 2018 at 10:59 AM, Dale Hudson <dmh2018 at nyu.edu <mailto:dmh2018 at nyu.edu>> wrote:
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Thanks, Steve, Marianna, Daniel, Max, Philip, Adam, and Rachel, for participating in last week’s discussion, which I hope will continue and intersect with this week’s discussion.
>> 
>> This week’s guests are Armando Minjarez Monarrez (MX), Ellie Beaudry (US), Dawn Dawson-House (US), Sarah Shamash (BR/CA), Liz Miller (US/CA), and Erin McElroy (US). All have participated in the “Invisible Geographies” exhibition for the twentieth edition of FLEFF. 
>> 
>> Armando Minjarez Monarrez’s _Ulysses: New Hope in the Heartland (AlieNation)_ documents the economic recovery of a village in so-called heartland of the United States due
>> 
>> Ellie Beaudry’s _Past, Present, Future Bund_ makes visible and visceral the waxing and waning of air pollution in Shanghai. By dividing the screen into three fields, she shows how some residents and tourists use financial resources to help them adapt to differing air qualities, whereas others must simply carry on.
>> 
>> Dawn Dawson-House (US) is senior project leader for the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission’s online travel guide _The Green Book of South Carolina_, which recovers African American histories that are at risk of being lost and evokes the terror faced by African Americans who wanted or needed to travel on U.S. roadways in past decades. 
>> 
>> Sarah Shamash’s _Kwanxwala-Thunder_ recovers the history of the Kwakwaka’wakw and stitches it together with contemporary stories of football and potlach in Canada. 
>> 
>> Liz Miller’s _The Shore Line_ allows users to navigate the effects of climate change on coastal communities around the globe. Users gain insights into ways that local populations who are most vulnerable confront global problems.
>> 
>> Erin McElroy (US) cofounded the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, which attempts to combat the dispossession of communities to gentrification projects in the Silicon Valley by visualizing data, aggregating narratives, and mobilizing resistance to eviction-friendly platforms like Airbnb. 
>> 
>> I look forward to hearing more from them about these projects.
>> 
>> Best,
>> Dale
>> 
>> 
>> Bios:
>> 
>> Armando Minjarez (MX) is a Mexican interdisciplinary artist, designer, and community organizer. His practice is guided by themes of displacement, collaboration, and empowerment to open up spaces for the development of social change strategy and creative expression. He is cofounder of The Seed House~La Casa de la Semilla, founder of the art collective ICT ARMY of Artists, and co-founder of the North End Urban Arts Festival. Minjarez has traveled, conducted research, and facilitated workshops and trainings on racism, displacement, migration and creative expression in Canada, Europe, México, and the United States. His work has been featured on the _New York Times_, _Buzzfeed_, _C Magazine_, and published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. 
>> 
>> Ellie Beaudry (US) is an undergraduate student at Cornell University (United States), where she studies environmental engineering and fine arts. Born in Shanghai (China) but raised in New Jersey (United States), Beaudry’s videos draw upon her experience when she returned to Shanghai in high school. She seeks to address environmental issues through art and engineering.
>> 
>> Dawn Dawson-House (US) is an ex-officio member of the Commission from the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism and a senior project leader for the Green Book of South Carolina. The South Carolina African American Heritage Commission identifies and promotes the preservation of historic sites, structures, buildings, and culture of the African American experience in South Carolina. It also assists and enhances the efforts of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History.
>> 
>> Sarah Shamash (BR/CA) is a Vancouver-based media artist and Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Studies program at the University of British Columbia (Canada). Her experimental projects typically explore identities and geographies as personal, political, feminine, and dynamic, while critiquing and subverting fixed, colonial, and hegemonic demarcations of the body, territory, and space. She has exhibited in art venues and film festivals internationally. She currently teaches film theory and programs films for the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. Her work as an artist, researcher, educator, and programmer can be understood as interconnected and whole; they all revolve around a passion for cinema and social justice.
>> 
>> Liz Miller (CA/US) is an independent documentary-maker, trans-media artist, and professor at Concordia University in Montréal, who lived in Central and South America for more than six years. She is committed to producing work that connects individuals across cultures. Over fifteen years of community media experience and a background in political economics, electronic media art, and Latin American studies fuel her exploration of new media as art and as an educational tool for community collaborations.
>> 
>> Erin McElroy cofounded the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project in 2013, and continues to co-lead the project today with a team of volunteer activists, data scientists, cartographers, oral historians, programmers, and more. She is also a doctoral candidate in Feminist Studies at University of California Santa Cruz, working on a project on techno-utopics, racialized dispossession, and postsocialist analytics in the Bay Area and in Romania. Some of her writing on the project can be found at https://ucsc.academia.edu/ErinMcELroy <https://ucsc.academia.edu/ErinMcELroy>.
>> 
>> 
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