FILMING LAB 1

Decolonial Gender Approach

Granada, May 23 to 27, 2022

Filming Lab I is conceived as a research and audiovisual production laboratory with an anthropological, gender and decolonial approach.

The aim of Filming Lab is to explore and generate filmmaking practices from an anthropological and decolonial, intersectional gender perspective. In its first edition, this initiative aims to contribute to the creation of cinematic narratives that highlight both a gender (decolonial) perspective, with a special emphasis on intersectional analytical frameworks, and the theoretical and methodological contributions of social and cultural anthropology.

It proposes spaces where researchers, filmmakers and students from different fields and disciplines (social anthropology, audiovisual communication, philosophy, among others) can come together in a creative way. The idea is to share, co-create and learn from each other, promoting critical, feminist and decolonial knowledge between professional and research fields. The participatory and laboratory-based methodological approach contributes to the experiential and experimental nature of different creative agents in the construction of knowledge and audiovisual material.

It forms a multidisciplinary work meeting over five days, with 2 master classes, 19 laboratories and 1 research space, to be held from 23 to 27 May 2022 in different locations in the city and at the University of Granada. Participating filmmakers and artists include Iciar Bollain, Eva Valiño, Laia Colet, Isabel Lola, Beatriz Mbula, José Sánchez, Francisco Montoro, Cecilio Puertas, Federico Olivieri, Daniel Hurtado and Luciano Medina. Researchers include: Marian del Moral, Lidia Bocanegra, Soledad Vieitez, Ana M. Muñoz, Aurora Álvarez Veinguer, Ana B. Estrada, David Martín, Miguel Ángel Espinosa, Adelina Sánchez, Orianna A. Calderón, Gerardo Rodríguez, Miguel Lorente, Beatriz Revelles, Angela Harris, Javier García Castaño, Andrés Blanco, Lucía Lerma, Yuchen Jiang and Radia Dahkchoune. Students from different programmes include: Marta Marín, Carla Alba Pulido, Clara Roldán, Marina Sánchez, Verania Montenegro, Manuel Correa, Elena Ivars, Helena López-Rieumont, and Lourdes Peguero.

LABs

Directing Lab with Iciar Bollain

Characters are often the driving force in the stories we tell. What they seek, what they desire and what stands in their way of achieving their goals is what structures the narrative. In this lab we will focus on the practice of creating characters. Participants will create their own characters based on the same scene provided for everyone, they will portray them and direct themselves. Starting from the same simple and open dialogue, the participants, organised in pairs, will construct who their characters are and the situation in which they find themselves. Once defined, the participants will act to present their characters to the others. The group will then analyse the work of each pair, their process of characterisation and their performance.

If time permits, two further exercises will be carried out in which the participants will practise constructing characters and situations, but this time without prior preparation, through improvisation. In these exercises the participants have to find out who they are in a given situation and react to it.

The exercises will allow us to analyse, on the one hand, the reproduction (or lack thereof) of stereotypes and clichés, as well as the originality (or lack thereof) of the approaches. On the other hand, we will analyse the essence of dramatic narration: conflict, or the lack of it.

Media Anthropology Lab with Marian del Moral
Media Anthropology is concerned with the study and understanding of the various agents and social and cultural aspects that make up media, in this case film, through ethnography (a research method that systematically describes, interprets and analyses the culture of different societies).

The question addressed in this laboratory is To what extent can anthropology, with its techniques and conceptual and theoretical background, help us to approach and understand society, and thus facilitate the work of filmmaking with a critical perspective?

This lab will focus on the relevance of social knowledge for the creation of cinematic stories that do not reproduce gender, race or class stereotypes, nor use an ethnocentric perspective. The emphasis will be on creating narratives based on anthropological observation and study of social realities, thereby promoting fictions that portray societies in their complexity, without gender or cultural stereotypes. The methodology will be participatory and collaborative. It will be developed in two parts:

1. Ethnographic understanding process: Through "cultural zoom" exercises, using techniques such as interviews or participant observation, along with the viewing of audiovisual materials.
2. Cultural storytelling: Co-creation of the seed of a cinematic story. Synopsis and creation of a film script.

Participants in this lab will simulate being members of a society (created for the purpose of the exercise) and storytellers of cinematic narratives. Through a process of interaction, knowledge and collaboration, they will arrive at the idea seed for the story they want to tell. Throughout the process of working together, reflection will focus on gender stereotypes, race, ethnocentrism, social imaginaries, exoticism, etc., integrating the use of cultural approach tools in the very first step of filmmaking: knowing the story to be told.

Sound Lab with Eva Valiño
Cinema, sound and desire 

When cinema fulfils its purpose, the film takes place in the consciousness of the spectator, not in a theatre and even less in a loudspeaker. Sometimes the audible is isolated from the visual, as if image and sound were two vital organs without any relation to each other. Listening and giving. To give attention, to give thought, to give a precise and unique meaning to an image. The sound recording in relation to the image should do justice to its intentional and creative character.

Coetzee says that what he remembers about a book is its tone, its aura. The aura is something that cannot be expressed in words. The same thing happens with sound. The sound fades away, it is not the thing itself but the sensation it creates.

This workshop looks for sound at the origin of the cinematic idea, in the desire to speak, in the memory of what has not yet happened. Discovering what sound does there, knowing why and for what, and then thinking about how to record it. We will approach sound as a directable aesthetic entity, as a wild body capable of caressing and destroying an image. Through collective listening to audiovisual material and active listening exercises, each participant will compose the sound score of a personal and untransmittable story.

Art Lab with Laia Colet
The art department's contribution to a film project begins with the text, with the script, with the words that immerse us in the different imaginaries of each reader. The production designer's job is to ground this text in a specific imaginary. We look for an environment, an energy, we try to position ourselves in a specific socio-cultural reality that supports the narrative of the script, that helps to tell the stories of the characters, their journey and their past.

Sometimes we talk about worlds we know, sometimes we have to invent them. Sometimes we look to the past, sometimes to the future, but it is always important not to stray from the 'why' of what we are proposing. Sometimes the work of art becomes an obvious character, present in its plasticity, shapes or colours. At other times it merges subtly with the characters, but it should always support the energy we want to convey.

In the first part of the workshop we will explain how this creative process works, we will see concrete examples and we will explore how the film Perfume was made. We will also talk about working with other departments, such as photography.

In the second part, you will carry out the process yourself. We will read a text and decide what we want to emphasize, what and why we want to tell and how we can shape it to achieve this.

Script Lab with Isabel Lola
Through the stories we consume from an early age, whether orally or through cinema, literature, music... we construct our reality and our identity.

The screenplay is another tool through which we create narratives. When it comes to writing, if we want to find our own voice, it is important to deconstruct ourselves and analyse the narratives we have internalised about who we are, our place in the world and how we relate to the world based on our idea of ourselves.

We will talk about different aspects of the script: idea and theme, genres, structure, characters, levels of conflict and writing methods. We will also do individual exercises related to each of these aspects which, once completed, we will share and help participants to develop their stories together.

Each participant will write about a moment in their life and each person will be the protagonist of the story they develop. We will look for the idea and theme of their story, choose the film genre in which they want to frame it and look at how to structure the script of their story. They will decide which characters will appear in their story and the levels of conflict for each. Finally, we will discuss the writing method - how to write a script and put the words on paper.

Participants can use a notebook and pen (preferably not loose sheets) or a laptop, whichever is more comfortable for them. Each participant should come to the workshop with an idea of a moment in their life that they would like to script. Examples: how they got into university, winning a karate tournament, a family member's wedding or their own, the birth of a child, a trip with friends...

Acting Lab with Beatriz Mbula
We are going to travel with "Sofonisba in the Golden Age"
"Sofonisba in the Golden Age" is a project of research, dialogue and creation based on the introduction of African characters in the literature of the Spanish Golden Age. It leads us to rediscover one of the origins of the presence of African people in the Iberian Peninsula, through a physical dramaturgy and a dramaturgy created from fragments of classical literature of the Golden Age.

Sofonisba is an Ethiopian girl who, through reading, is able to feel her impending past and yearn for her dreams of the future. But the books she reads turn into nightmares when slavery overtakes her present. This rupture forces her to create a physical and mental mechanism to survive. Sofonisba's identity is embodied in her body, which is considered demonic because of its sensuality and desire. This subjugation leads Sofonisba to madness and to the creation of a tiny world that inhabits a corner of her soul and allows her to change the course of an oppressed era.

The physical dramaturgy is based on the conclusions of Beatriz's thesis entitled "Negrificada", in which she followed a line of research on the gestures of African ethnicity and studied the first appearances of Africans in Spanish literature.

Research Lab I with Lidia Bocanegra
The aim of this lab is to work on group dynamics in order to design a prototype research project in the humanities and social sciences that seeks to implement participatory methodologies in its execution through citizen science. Participants will be divided into groups where they will have to choose a topic related to gender with a decolonial approach. Based on the chosen topic, they will design a participatory methodology to carry it out. The aim of this micro-lab is to train people interested in implementing participatory strategies in scientific/social research with an open science approach.

The skills to be acquired by the participants are related to crowdsourcing: the ability to work in teams and horizontally, as well as to learn digital or hybrid participatory strategies, which will be demonstrated by the facilitator during the session.

Public participation in research is one of the pillars of Open Science and is implemented by the European Commission in most of the new Horizon Europe programme calls. Knowing how to implement these citizen strategies in scientific-social research will not only lead to greater public engagement with the research being conducted, but will also train future researchers in methodological innovation.

• Citizen science
• Open science
• Crowdsourcing
• Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship

Research Lab II with Miguel Ángel Espinosa and David Martín
Women, Cinema, and Advertising: Gender Identities during Francoism. A Revisited History.
This research laboratory aims to rethink the role of women and gender identities during Francoism through cinema and advertising, using a participatory, horizontal and active methodology. We will also attempt to revise the perspective with which democratic Spain has viewed this period. Different sessions will encourage interesting debates among all participants through feedback and joint analysis of different proposed cases and situations. The aim is to take a holistic, multidisciplinary and almost subversive view of the history of cinema and advertising, revisiting, through examples, the different forms, stereotypes and formulas of the time, which were apparently real, at least on the big screen.

Women and Francoism

• The Image of Women in Advertising: A Paradigm Shift?
• Women and Cinema during Francoism
• Subversive Sexual Identities in Francoist Cinema
• The Gaze towards Francoism from Spanish Democratic Cinema

Photography Lab I and II with Cecilio Puertas
“You Are Light”
Light is essential to the visual language; it is a tool that enhances the artistic expression of characters, emphasising them and giving them character. When we consciously shape light, we can create powerful psychological effects and different emotions in the audience: tenderness, hardness, joy, fear or hate. In this inclusive lab, we will create cinematic portraits that break away from stereotypes through the use of different light sources and a collaborative methodology.

"Without light, there is no photograph. Without you, there is no light".

Film Fest Lab with Federico Olivieri
African Cinema Festivals, Contexts for Other Views: Decoloniality and African Women’s Cinema in the case of FCAT.
Since the 1990s, the number of film festivals dedicated to the presentation of African cinema and its diaspora has increased worldwide. While this growth can be linked to the "festivalisation" of global audiovisual culture, analysing the evolution and characteristics of African cinema from the perspective of these specialised events allows us to reflect on decoloniality and interculturality not only as concepts, but also as processes that help to appreciate the diversity of alternative points of view. As an example and practical proposal, the Lab will analyse the case of the Tarifa-Tangier African Film Festival (FCAT) and the films by African women filmmakers programmed in this event.

Production Lab with José Sánchez
Cinemas of the South

The Genesis of the Festival: Reasons for the Selection
The Conflicts in Programming and Understanding
Gender in Southern Countries
The insistence on the Real Presence of Women: The Position of Southern Women Filmmakers
Colonialism and the Supremacy of the Narrative: Anthropology and Folklore vs. Reality
A Success Story and a Disappointment

Documentary Production

From Paper to Narrative
Telling Our Own Stories and Reflecting on Others’
The Complexity of an Eternally Incipient Industry
Living on the Margins and Periphery

Workshop Experience

Participant Project Studies (if any)
Phases of a Production
Development and Production Memory: Key Elements
Pitching Techniques and Structure Analysis
Women in Creation and Executive Production

Ethnography Lab with Marian del Moral, Lidia Bocanegra, Marta Marín, Carla Alba Pulido, Clara Roldán, Marina Sánchez, Verania Montenegro, Manuel Correa, Elena Ivars, and Lourdes Peguero
We are a multidisciplinary team drawn from anthropology, history and communication, -among other disciplines-, and our mission is to record the collective experience of Filming Lab 2022 using various techniques. From this perspective, we understand the possibility of creating a circle of knowledge in which the encounter itself becomes a source of live creation, while at the same time allowing it to be studied.

Our main objective is to collect and systematically deepen the information generated during the various labs and masterclasses, as well as other interstitial spaces. We will use ethnographic and lab methodologies to address the internal dynamics from a broad perspective, with a particular focus on the general theme of the event: gender and decolonial filmmaking practices.

Image Lab with Orianna A. Calderón, Angela Harris, Miguel Lorente, Beatriz Revelles, Gerardo Rodríguez, and Adelina Sánchez
The ImageLab is part of the Junta de Andalucía I+D project "P20_00337: Responsible Teaching Labs with Gender Perspective. The interaction between literary and visual cultures as an agent of social interaction". This multidisciplinary project, involving researchers from different departments of the UGR and other social agents of equality and NGOs, explores the transmedia link between visual and literary cultures in order to research, disseminate and implement curricular strategies both inside and outside the classroom. Its intention is to generate responsible visions (capable of responding) to the challenges we must face in order to build a more just, equal and supportive society.

During the Lab, 6 members of the research team will present examples of the actions they are developing within this project and propose activities in three of its lines:

Feminist Counter-Visualities and the Feminist Agenda in Recent Spanish Cinema (fiction and documentary)

1. Adapting Literature to Audiovisual Media
2. Gender Temporalities and Visual Performativity

The lab is conceived as an inverted workshop where knowledge is generated and located horizontally by the participants. Methods used include group feminist "close readings" of selected sequences from Spanish fiction and documentary films, music videos, video performances, and diffractive readings of audiovisual and literary texts. The aim is to build a feminist counter-visuality toolbox to relearn how to return (or hold) the gaze, transforming our “re-gazes” into a form of feminist activism in pursuit of social transformation.

Living Lab with Carla Alba Pulido, Marta Marín, Marina Sánchez, Verania Montenegro, Clara Roldán, and Helena López-Rieumont
Gender, Clothing, and Identity. Theoretical-Conceptual Approaches.

Living Lab is a working space in which different social collectives and scientific disciplines participate in a research-action process to reflect on, question or evaluate the phenomenon of fashion and clothing as social practices that shape notions of Africanity and gender. In a reflective, experimental and co-creative environment, the lab aims to create an alternative visual discourse to deconstruct the inequality that manifests itself in various ways through the social representation of the body.

The works that have approached the study of clothing or the phenomenon of "African fashion" have highlighted a complex social practice in how Africanity is constructed, represented and understood, along with the canons that characterise "femininity" and "masculinity". We propose this space of reflection and co-creation to think about decoloniality and gender from the study of the dressed body.

1. African Fashion Photography. Analysis of a Visual Discourse.
2. Ethnographic-Visual Experiences.

The methodology of the Lab is based on a horizontal, active and participatory approach, following the principle of “thinking together”. The proposed content is presented and worked on through a feedback dynamic with other participants.

Migration and Cinema Lab with Javier G. Castaño, Andrés Blanco, Lucía Lerma, Yuchen Jiang, Radia Dahkchoune
Javier de Lucas said: "Immigration has been in the spotlight of cinema almost from the beginning. Therefore, the possibilities offered by the history of cinema to reflect on human movements, on migratory flows, are enormous". Perhaps this important relationship is better explained when we consider that the Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration devotes nine entries to the convergence of migration studies through cinema. These works discuss how cinema represents migration and how migrations can be better understood through their representation in film. Given this significance, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) launched the Global Migration Film Festival in 2017 to promote critical awareness of the phenomenon. In the lab, we will analyse Spanish fictional films with migration as a central theme, focusing on how migration is represented or related aspects. Participants will work with specific sequences from the films and will be encouraged to do their own analysis.

Making Off Lab with Daniel Hurtado and Luciano Medina
The aim of this lab is to provide guidance and the necessary tools for participants to present their vision of how the Filming Lab sessions should be documented. Each participant can choose their tool: audio recorder, mobile microphone, camera, DSLR or any other tool they prefer.

The aim is to reflect on where different people position themselves when narrating what happens, and what gender and decolonial perspectives they apply. Viewers will experience the Filming Lab workshops through a making-off filtered through each participant's personal perspective. Participants will carry an audio system to record their explanations of the choices they make, such as why they choose what to film, the position of the camera or audio, and how they feel during the process.

Creative Labs I and II with Francisco Montoro

RESEARCHERS’ SPACE
Ana María Muñoz
This presentation discusses part of a broader investigation into the figure of the singer and dancer Consuelo Tamayo Hernández, artistically known as La Tortajada. We analyse two fono-scenes recorded at the Gaumont Studios in Paris in 1908, and what the internalisation of her image meant around the world through the chronomegáfono, including places she never visited. The aim is to contextualise the appearance of the Spanish artist in early cinema as possibly the first woman filmed with sound in the Spanish genre.

Ana B. Estrada
The Radical Creation of a New Humanity: Collaborative Practices in Decolonial Cinema as a Form of Autonomy.

The aim of this communication is to provide a brief genesis of collaborative practices related to decolonial cinema in the Third World through the analysis of various manifestos such as the Santa Fé Film Manifesto (Birri, 1962), For a Cinema with the People (Sanjinés and Grupo Ukamau, 1979) or For an Imperfect Cinema (Espinosa, 1970). In contrast to current participatory practices in cinema and audiovisual creation - depoliticised and filtered through a humanitarian ethic and rhetoric ("giving voice") - this communication argues that the roots of collaboration in cinema had its own function within struggles for Third World autonomy in a global context, where cinema maintained a set of knowledges produced by the emancipatory practices of a specific community, thus embodying renewed expressions of the political.

Aurora Álvarez Veinguer

Collaborative and Engaged Ethnography: Experimenting with Radio Fiction
We would like to share the experience we have developed over the last few years in using radio fiction, resulting from a collaborative ethnography with the Stop Desahucios Granada 15M movement - a collective fighting for the right to decent housing in the city of Granada. This experience allows us to explore different ways of approaching social research, both in terms of the process and the products in which research findings are materialised.

We turn to community narratives to experiment with other types of registers and grammars that are not common in the academic context. Throughout the experience of using radio fiction, we have tried to overcome and transcend the boundaries between subject and object of research (mainly by resorting to group and collective participation in the production of knowledge), and we have aimed to overcome the strict separation between writing and performativity by immersing ourselves in a process and product that has sought to combine the textual and performative dimensions simultaneously. A creative fiction product and process that incorporates memory, research and imagination (Bruce, 2003), transforming personal experience into a collectively constructed narrative plot. A fictionalised story that starts with the 'I' and the lived experiences of the group, which then transforms into other ways of telling stories.

MASTER CLASS with Anthropologist Soledad Vieitez
In the creation of cinematic narratives, and in the creation of knowledge itself, it is inevitable to consider cultures and cultural diversity, and to include the intersectionality of gender, and also to highlight the importance of intersectionality. However, all of this must come from a critical decolonial vision that dismantles homogeneities, stereotypes and universalisations. It is true that culture (as we will define it in the session) tends to be the lost dimension and what we use to differentiate ourselves from others (or rather to distance ourselves from others): us. Culture is a "catchy" and "trendy" word that is often used without consequence, although there is no cultural neutrality or stagnation attributed to those cultures that we wish to omit and make invisible, denying them agency or justifying socio-economic, political, etc. interventions to "save" them (from themselves and their traditions?). In this session, we will address these issues through some contextualised African narratives that challenge stereotypical notions of tradition, point to alternative modernities, and even reveal insurgent and subaltern cosmopolitanisms. Cinematic narratives, like life itself, should ideally reflect this myriad of personalities and facets, not always easily reconcilable and often far from our respective comfort zones.

MASTER CLASS with film director Iciar Bollain
A journey through Iciar Bollain's filmography through her female characters. From the young friends in Hello Are You Alone?, to Trini and the Girl, to Maixabel Lasa, Iciar Bollain will describe how she approaches the different characters, how they are created, how they are written, the research and writing process, and the representation of their relationships: friends, mothers and daughters, colleagues, partners, sisters... Women in situations of oppression, inequality, but also women in support networks or in solitude. Forced migrants and women who choose to emigrate, women who face their own prejudices and those of others. A journey through the different themes of her films in which women and their perspectives are the protagonists.

Master class de Iciar Bollain, directora de cine