Užice National Theatre
Small Stage
August 22, 2024 
06:00 pm

Free entrance

This workshop explores the relationship between documentary and ethics. In this highly interactive session, participants will be encouraged to consider how documentary expresses ethical ideas, as well as reflect on ethically salient aspects of the filmmaking process. Both of these approaches to the relationship between documentary and ethics will be exemplified in relation to the theme of migration, as explained below.

The first approach concerns cinematic ethics, where we will consider documentary as ethics. This entails an understanding of cinema as a medium of ethical experience, and the study of its capacity for ethical interrogation and valuation in and of itself. We will transpose the question of ethics from the long-standing focus on truth and authenticity in documentary studies to cinema’s capacity to enact other ways of being in the world, especially in response to unsustainable conditions. A contemporary first-person film about migration will serve as a case study for a discussion of this approach. The second approach concerns production ethics, where we will discuss some of the ethically salient aspects of the labour involved in documentary production, such as the vulnerability of filmmakers, the value of trust in collaborations, and the negotiation of filmmakers’ rights. Existing research on production ethics in relation to first-person filmmaking about migration in Europe will anchor the discussion.

Speaker: Nadica Denić, researcher from the Netherlands