A Cinema Without Passport: Learning from non-state/transnational film communities, and reimagining non-institutional/trans-institutional film studies.

Application summary

The field of anthropology, with its remnants of colonialism, has marginalized communities such as queer, feminists, people of color, forced immigrants, and indigenous filmmakers. Therefore, it's vital to take the initiative and change those institutional structures in academia and the film industry. We can devitalize the dominance of the western gaze when narrating cross-cultural stories by highlighting transnational film practices, especially from non-state nations. My research will investigate the possibility of "A Cinema Without A Passport" by focusing on the filmmaking experiences of two non-state nations, and their creation of a film industry without a nation-state. Using my filmmaking practice as a starting point with an autoethnographic approach, my case studies include Kurdish cinema, Sami cinema as a Nordic comparison, and the Academy of Moving People and Images as a non-institutional film academy. My dissertation will be article-based. Its artistic component is an ethnographic documentary film; focusing on my filmmaking practice, the practice of Kurdish and Sami filmmakers, the practice of the aforementioned academy, and the archives of those three communities. During my research, I will mostly focus on anarchist theories, especially postcolonial anarchism which I believe will allow me to view the communities at hand as historical subjects, because “anarchists, autonomists, abolitionists, and anti-authoritarians of color can not afford to be swept up by theories that have never bothered to view non-white peoples as historical subjects” (White, 2005:5,6). How could a non-state, non-institutional approach to film studies challenge existing structures to be more inclusive, participatory, and ecological? Gaining knowledge from the experiences of non-state nations with film and film studies, I contemplate the possibility of an alternative non-institutional pedagogy for filmmaking studies to demystify filmmaking within a non-institutional filmmaking program.