Plymouth, UK English Face of the Other is an essay film and a series of moving portraits shot in the coastal city of Plymouth, England. The project is a response to social and political divisions in the UK. What is often missing in fractured political debates is the face of the other. The title of the work comes from the philosophy of Emanuel Levinas. For Levinas, “the face [is] a source from which all meaning appears”. The film situates the film in the landscape of Britain’s Ocean city, and reflects on its history and its varied natural environment.

Ghent, Belgium English, German, Dutch While the pandemic evoked questions of housing and home in the past year, some of those who don’t have access to decent housing remained nearly unmentioned. In summer of 2020, Monica and Katharina thematized the housing conditions of newcomers in Ghent, Belgium, who are placed in "OC RENO“, in a short film. The living conditions for the 250 newcomers on an old prison boat in the northern outskirts of the city were already carried to a minimum. Yet the latest news of the very high numbers of corona-infections of the RENO inhabitants once again shows how little newcomers are taken into account as citizens.

Poplar, London, UK "50 years ago today they landed on the moon... and I'm still waiting for that future". Jimmy's Archive is a collaborative short film by anthropologist Robert Deakin and James ('Jimmy') Watters – a lifelong resident of Poplar, a working-class neighbourhood in the former docklands of east London. Rebuilt according to a modernist masterplan after being heavily bombed in World War Two, today Poplar is undergoing another round of intensive redevelopment in the form of ‘urban regeneration’. Against this backdrop, Jimmy delves into a cupboard of carefully kept artefacts to tell stories of class, place, music and (still) waiting for the future.

Over 50 countries are actively seeking to expand their territories via the ocean through technoscience and international law

Philadelphia, USA English It’s another weekday for the crew at Bennett Compost. Hundreds of paying customers have left buckets-full of food scraps and other organic waste on their front curb across Philadelphia city. The crew set out in trucks to gather these heaps of organic waste materials and then there’s the patient work of processing the waste into nutrient rich compost. Can this ecologically beneficial work be done in the absence of robust city infrastructures and clear codes? Can it be done while paying workers a decent wage and providing them essential benefits? Can all this be done while making a profit to keep the enterprise sustainable? This is the story of The Composters, a story of an enterprise that strives to achieve these aims.

Based on the stories of women who dip, dive and swim in rivers, lakes and seas

Sinai, Egypt UK In Guest Star members of the Mzeina tribe reenact a traditional story of hospitality. Bedouin hospitality is internationally well known and used in tourism marketing and identity branding in many Middle Eastern and North African countries. Hospitality has evolved because it is essential. Not offering a visitor water or food in such a harsh environment could be fatal. Hospitality goes beyond tribal affiliation and is also the basis for diplomacy between different families and groups. In this story of the Guest Star the 'borders' of hospitality are defined both spatially and temporally. Members of the Mzeina tribe are settling down for the night around a fire, when a visitor from another tribe - looking for his goats - joins them. The hosts welcome their guest and offer him a drink. But what are the boundaries of the hospitality they should provide? Should they also offer him a meal? All they need to do, to see what is expected is to stand up to check to see if a particular star, called the 'guest star' is still in the sky, or it has already disappeared from view. When they check, they find the star is still visible in the night sky. So they know what to do and offer their visitor a full meal. Part of a series of films from A Different Sense of Space: How Bedouins Mapped the Sinai https://bedouinborders.org/

Spanish with English Subtitles A central component of the research project of which this film is a product, was the aim to establish relations of trust between social groups in the region who have historically been in conflict over access to land. Bringing together peasants, indigenous, Afro-Colombians and ex-guerrilla fighters in the same space, allowed them to share their own views and experiences while listening to others. Consequently, a potent inter-cultural and inter-ethnic space was created that allowed for difference to exist, while at the same aiming for the construction of a shared history and future. In that sense, the project aimed to de-politicize difference and de-escalate tensions between the various ethnic communities, encouraging to see the benefits of increasing cohesion and the breaking down of borders. PazAltoCauca describes an engaged research project on peace and state building in Colombia in the aftermath of the Peace Agreement with the FARC-EP guerrilla. It addresses the historical violence and the intercultural challenges in the Cauca region, and explains how our project attempted to contribute to peace-making with research methods based on popular education, participatory action research and social design. We hear the voices of rural inhabitants, who live in areas heavily affected by the armed conflict, which gives an emotional face to a research on geographies of peace.

Producer Sonja Marzi Crossing borders in participatory video research transnationally remotely and with the use of digital tools. ‘Reinventadas’ is a collaboratively produced film visualising the everyday challenges of 12 women in Medellin, Colombia, during the COVID-19 pandemic 2020/2021. The film is based on participatory video methodology adapted by using a remote and digital approach. Using smartphones women participants filmed, edited and discussed the filmed material online, facilitated by a team of researchers and filmmakers in the UK and Colombia. The topics discussed in the film provide information about the issues that women struggle with during the pandemic, but also highlight how they were able to reinvent themselves.

A deeply personal film about anxiety, privilege, and the tricky business of bad things happening to us while even worse things happen to others. Shot entirely on an iPhone and narrated by a human and a computer voice, the film is a meditation on how fast-paced, goal-oriented, and measurable our lives have become. Does seeing the world through the lens of your phone breaks down or reinforces the boundary between the self and what surrounds it? Do you remember that year? strives to think away from the idea of a border as a mere geographical or political demarcation (although it features those too). Even though it contains footage from multiple countries and continents (Cambodia, Spain, Italy, United Kingdom), the film aims to explore the real and imaginary borders between the self and the world around it – based on experience, perception and positionality. Borders are also investigated through film form through the use of split screen.

24:00 Soledad tells the story of a young woman from Central America who was imprisoned in the Eloy Detention Facility when she sought asylum in the United States in 2017. Soledad set out on a perilous journey from her homeland after enduring horrific persecution where she was kidnapped, sex-trafficked, tortured and nearly killed. Attorney Shefali Milczarek-Desai, who took the case pro bono, mobilized a dream team of professional women, all of whom agreed to work for free on the case. Together, they secured Soledad's release from Eloy and ultimately prevailed on her asylum claim in a rare victory for an asylum seeker in the U.S. This film contains some sensitive content.

A man drifts through transitory spaces on the way home.

Border regions lie always in critical harsh situations, affecting on their communities. Especially if they are one living ethnic community, divided by the border existence. The border porous status level plays a significant role regarding that, and on the border interrelations and networks. The project is interested in measuring culture networks of the border regions, and comparing them from centrality point of view, in relation to ethnicity existence. It can be deduced that ethnicity has a huge effect on the culture networks of the border regions. These high border interrelations might be used for border region future developments.

This film is an ethnography that shows a journey of a young migrant to find one's identity. Throughout various struggles of societal expectations and norms of the mainstream culture, reflected as "You" voices in the film, the protagonists encounters a breakthrough, and therefore becomes to fully accept and love oneself holistically. Director Soo Kyung Min explains: 'My film aimed to capture the hidden voices of immigrants who are standing amongst the intersection of 'to be or not to be a Canadian.' Despite of Canada's public image as a nation that promotes multiculturalism and inclusion of diversity, numerous individuals who do not belong to the mainstream culture undergo identity crisis as they are expected to abide by societal norms, behaviours, and beliefs, while upholding family values from the culture of origin. Identity crisis is often not captured in the media and I wanted to explore ways to represent such kind of experiences in order to educate the larger public, and also to send a message of empowerment to various groups of cultural minorities.'

Donna Haraway paraphrases Marilyn Strathern when she suggests that “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with” (2016). If an interview is a method (or matter) that we use when filming humans, what would occur if that method is applied to the non-human? This film results from an exploration of what an audio-visual interview with a tree could be like. Once I settled on the format of using the written questions to evoke the method of the interview, I found that this changed the way I cut the material together. Now the images needed to ‘answer’ rather than ‘be’. I went back to shoot new material because the ‘coverage’ I need for an interview differs from that of observational material. For instance, I shot new images of the sky, the nearby creek and the nearby road, as these were important parts of answering the question about place that I asked the tree. In an observational version of the edit these shots would form distractions from the central theme of the tree, and would never make the cut.

Tetum (with English Subtitles) Melbourne Australia Healing in Timor-Leste is rarely straightforward. Timorese people acknowledge and embrace multiple pathways to healing in a complex interplay between spiritual care, comfort and personal connection. Through lifelong observation and learning, they trial a variety of practices and pass down their knowledge to the next generation. Holding Tightly is a contribution to longer-term research between the directors and a diverse set of healing practitioners in Timor-Leste. The film asks viewers to consider what we understand health and wellbeing to mean, showing how healing is intimately entangled with forms of belief and care grounded in deep connections between people and their environments. This film explores the significance of customary health and healing practices in the young nation-state of Timor-Leste. Between 2013 and 2015, Barnes and Palmer along with Ritsuko Kakuma initiated an interdisciplinary scoping study in partnership with the Timor-Leste Ministry of Health and the National University of Timor-Leste (UNTL). Led by global mental health expert Kakuma, this study aimed to improve understanding of Timor-Leste’s customary health and healing practices, and to explore the potential of integrating these practices with modern psychological and clinical methods. The findings of this research informed the ideas for this film, its structure and approach.

Guarani, Spanish Filmed in Paraguay Griffith University, Brisbane Australia 70 mins The filmmakers say: Yuyos is an audio-visual ethnographic project lived together with the peasant family Franco Gauto, in Colonia Luz Bella, rural Paraguay. Yuyos are plants. Trees, shrubs, herbs that can be medicinal. They are wild or cultivated. There are yuyos that can be toxic and other that are beneficial for health. The film documents the family’s ethnobotanical knowledge in relation to their daily life. By revealing the cultural importance attributed to medicinal plants, the protagonists enlighten their idea of agroecology as a way to face current ecological issues and crises. Colonia Luz Bella’s community is socio-environmentally at stake due to continuous deforestation to make room for industrial plantations and pastures. These not only threaten biodiversity—directly influencing the access to yuyos—, they also determine a notable cultural loss. Born to recover and value the natural medicine’s heritage of one family dedicated to agroecology, the ethnographic film aims to speaks for a whole community in cohabitation with deforestation. In a context of familiar sharing, eased by the social beverage of tereré, the yuyos become narrative agents of stories of commitment and eco-resistance. Our idea was to recollect audio-visually ethnobotanical and ethnopharmacological knowledge of one family living in rural Paraguay, where they struggle against deforestation to maintain their cultural and biological heritage and knowledge of different plant species.

Germany Supporting local transformations with the Grandhotel Cosmopolis: cultural politics, care and collaboration beyond the pandemic The film is an emotional, visual and narrative dimension of a collective learning process of a cultural institution that took place in the pandemic. The directors say: We aimed to interpretate provisional findings of an activist-research project that took place at a cultural institution in Augsburg (Germany) during the pandemic. Symbolised as “Grandhotel Cosmopolis Transformation Process” the project relates to the current crisis of culture production, raising questions on purpose, strategy and participants for the so often claimed need for cultural change towards more just, sustainable and fair urban life. Based on several municipalist engagements, it assembles in a post-structural interpretation what was learned on enabling and limiting conditions for the co-creation of collective actions towards urban transformation. Dwelling on self-organisation, collective reflection and re-signification, the architects for transformation experiment with practices of co-production. Understood as prefigurative practices they might serve as suggestions for urban planning in Augsburg and more specifically they intent to inform the following collective re-design of the 2600qm building that cultural institution wants to maintain as real world lab. When this film narrates the phase of deliberative orientation about this institutional re-design, a second film will accompany the implementation of hopefully co-designed modifications. The film itself was produced in collaboration of people who participated in and made sense in different ways of the “Grandhotel Cosmopolis Transformation Process”, but directed by the activist-researcher herself. The aesthetic form reflects its discontinuities, envisioned fears and hopes and ambiguities that belong to this collective learning in support of urban transformation beyond the pandemic.

English, Te Reo Maori Aotearoa New Zealand Rapid urbanization, intensifying natural hazards, glacial retreat, exponential tourism growth, and expanding dairy farms are having an unassailable effect on Aotearoa New Zealand’s (NZ) natural and cultural landscapes. The Spatial Awareness Project short film sets out to explore and challenge New Zealands's land use classifications and the values that underpin them. As both an educational resource and a community discussion prompt, the film offers questions - rather than answers - to environmental problems and the ways in which we might solve them. The Director: The Spatial Awareness Project short film set out to visually represent the main land use categories in Aotearoa New Zealand and question the values that underpin this classification system. Filmed at over thirty locations across the country, the film showcases a variety of examples of each land use category, incorporating private, iwi (tribal), and publicly administered land and water. In the beginning, our goal was to showcase different land use types and the stories that go along with them (through a complimentary podcast series) to students who had rarely traveled outside their hometowns. We hoped that by bringing these places, stories and questions into the classroom we might create space for discussions that could bridge the disconnects between our students: generational, rural/urban, farmer/climate activist, etc. Yet, the film's narrative is ultimately informed by those podcast interviews, the team's own experiences and academic research, and my conversations with the landowners at each filming location. Over time, it became less about pointing out 'bad' land use types or highlighting a particular alternative to the land use classification system and more about raising awareness of those disconnects ... about sparking conversations in the broader public sphere that might lead to new collaborative solutions.

Bearing follows the frustrations, heartache and joy of everyday motherhood through observational vignettes of the filmmaker’s life as a new mum over the first five years of her daughter's life. From the Director: The research set out to understand the experience of early motherhood in relation to place using sensory film and photography. As a work of autoethnography I set out to document sensory experiences of early motherhood in relation to the places in which they were experienced. The focus of this documentation was an exploration of mental wellbeing, breastfeeding, mobility and identity; and the interrelation of these themes with place. In the film component of the research I wanted to focus on and unpack the public/private binary and draw attention to the activities involved in crossing the threshold to go from home, to public space or outdoors with a child. I also intended to document the comparative freedom of movement I have as an agent without my child with me, and highlight the ways in which the city and public facilities are inhospitable to small children and those caring for them. The research sought to use sensory storytelling to observe everyday mothering activity highlighting the tensions of living life in one’s maternal identity in relation to other non-maternal identities and activities. The film intended to visualise how these identities are closely associated with place. Building on the research of feminist geographers such as Kate Boyer which use more conventional qualitative methods, my film intended to enrich this existing critical discourse on motherhood and place by using film and visual methods and an autoethnographic approach.

Italian and Chinese Middle LandsFavourite Sara's homework for summer holidays is to grow and take care of a little tomato seedling. But her family lives in a flat, so she will plant it in a small vegetable garden that her grandparents raised in an abandoned and hidden land between town and countryside. The idea of the film is the tip of the iceberg of an etnographic and visual research led in the last years. It is the output of a series of traces, experiences, sensations, listened and imagined stories that take place in the urban-sprawled area of Veneto region of Italy. The research intends to pay attention to the spatial and relational dynamics that affect the margins, understood as interstitial spaces, in this case segments of the "third landscape", spaces that they are usually not considered as identifying and invested with meaning, often invisible places. Sometimes, however, it seems precisely the suspended, hybrid and indecisive status of these spaces to welcome - and in a certain sense reflect - liminal situations, becoming a sort of laboratory and alternative space for relationships: some of these spaces are "adopted" and by individuals or groups are grafted onto them, which activate processes of re-signification, re-appropriation, re-qualification, tracing some points of a new one phenomenology of care. The short film aims to tell one of this experience and how it relates to the surrounding context. - The Chinese female workforce responds perfectly to the logic of industrial production of modern mushroom farms. In particular, the qualities that are appreciated by employers are those of dexterity, precision, speed, resistance to effort, large availability to work and flexibility. Furthermore, “they are not very unionized”. It can be said that the demand for Chinese labor is deeply embedded with the characteristics of the food industry and scale-economies: it constitutes a relatively low-cost, easily replaceable, non-unionized and "silent" labor force, which it allows high and constant production levels, which in turn allow to reduce consumer prices. Shooting a short film allowed me to speak almost freely about these delicate issues. It was a great challenge because both the cast and the crew were Italian-Chinese, in order to live a multicultural and exchange experience. It also was not so easy to find a mushroom farm who allowed us to film.

An African American woman lives in a women's residence in a posh New York City neighborhood. Every resident in her building had access to the last private park in Manhattan, which was across the street. She was never racially profiled because the average onlooker likely thought she was a housekeeper, nanny or caregiver. She discovered a tragic and ironic freedom in living like this. The structure is now a fancy condo. I mixed archival photographs and raw footage captured with my smartphone in order to provoke memory of a particular place that poses tensions with other places when I have found myself the "other." As a woman of color, I have discovered being easily narrated and/or the only one, or one of a few who look like you, lessens the threat you pose to the dominant culture. Further Reading: Sharony Green, “When I First Wore Fish Leather, Or Black Girl in Iceland,” Pan African Spaces: Essays on Black Transnationalism, Msia K. Clark, Phiwokuhle W. Mnyandu, and Loy Azalia, eds. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019)

English with Telugu Philadelphia (USA) and Hyderabad (Indivar) In this film essay (a visual rumination), I set out to explore the implications of living in the USA and carrying out fieldwork in another city. I synchronized audio and still images from Hyderabad, with video montage of my everyday life and surroundings in Philadelphia to draw visual and sensory parallels.

Filmed in Bruxelles. A woman places a poster in public space with a phone number and the caption "Women Pissers Wanted!". Eight women answer the ad and go to the meeting point: an abandoned basement where a "strategist" waits for them. The strategist gives each woman an envelope containing the coordinates of the places where to intervene by performing a particular act: urinating in the space to leave a mark and to territorialize it. Mark by mark, they territorialize the entire city of Brussels. Will the effect of gender appropriation spread to all the cities of the planet? Director Alice Salimbeni 'In this film, the other co-authors and I sought to explore and represent the feeling of being out of place in the public space of the city of Brussels, as women. To do so, we put ourselves in the position of the Foucauldian "potentia" instead of the "potestas" and we wrote an ironic and parodic urban tale to comprehend our urban feelings. Considering that in Brussels there are many possibilities to urinate standing up (urinals, hidden corners, bars) and few possibilities to do it sitting down (toilets, bars) we have identified the act of urinating as a symbolic container. Urinating in the street means laying bare one's body and not respecting the rules of common living and at the same time it means feeling in a position of power strong enough to be able to do so. Urinating is also a symbolic act that metaphorically evokes the territorialization of the space in which this act is performed. Given the greater ease of men to practice this act, in the film we subvert reality, we identify meaningful spaces that express gender inequalities in Brussels, and we stage a collective act consisting of serial “urban piss-ups" to conquer the city. With the act of urinating, the video represents an exemplification of the denial of a right through a scenario in which that right is distorted, sarcastically acquired by those who do not hold it, and then ironically put into practice.'