INTRODUCTION

 

I don’t think of my films in terms of categories – documentary, fiction, film art, educational or experimental – but rather as fluid, interacting movements. The first is to let the world come to us through an outside-in movement – this is what some call ‘documentary’. The other is to reach out to the world from the inside out, which is what some call ‘fiction’. But these categories always overlap. I wrote ‘there is no such thing as documentary’ because it’s illusory to take the real and reality for granted and to think that a neutral language exists. (Trinh in Balsom 2018)

 

The strikethrough of “Documentary” in this title is obviously intentional. It signals our desire to challenge and deconstruct the often-problematic connotations associated with the term, many of which are rooted in imperialist, colonial, and patriarchal power structures. At the same time, this book aims to reclaim the documentary gesture for art practices across disciplines, genders, and continents that traditional Western literature on documentary often excludes, which is largely based on a Eurocentric canon. 

We propose a documentary gesture that attends to the traces of reality that are fleeting, unstable, and perpetually in motion. This insistence on movement and the constant possibility of change comes from our deep belief that reality itself resists the static paradigms so often imposed by the classic documentary. Therefore, we see the gaps, contradictions, and tensions that emerge during the making process not as shortcomings, but as a necessary part of documentary practice. Rather than smoothing them over, we want to keep them visible, because they can expose the power relations that shape the work and hold open the transformational capability of the arts. We adopt uncertainty and messiness as productive strategies for engaging with documentary: a medium that both forms and is formed by the historical and social relations it inhabits, and of which we’re all part.

While we argue for a reclaiming of the documentary gesture, we do not do so without hesitation; any attempt to define its boundaries is necessarily provisional and open to debate. As filmmaker and ethnologist Safi Faye put it: “All these words – fiction, documentary, ethnology – have no sense” (Faye in Ellerson 2004: 191), responding to critics who tried to slot her work into tidy Western categories that never quite fit. Many of her films, according to curator and scholar Janaina Oliveira, “represent a shift not only in the ways of perceiving cinematographic genres, but also in the relationship between subject and object that is a feature of Western ethnology. Faye does not make films on, she makes films with” (Oliveira 452). 

This may be a stylistic preference, but it is foremost a political distinction: to make a film on someone is to reproduce the extractive logic of Western ethnographic and documentary cinema, in which the filmmaker arrives, observes, and departs with material that others will shape, interpret, and consume elsewhere. To make a film with someone, by contrast, is to redistribute the power that is otherwise built into the filmmaking process itself. 

This shift in cinematic approach directly challenges the conventions of documentary and ethnographic genres that have historically served as instruments of colonial knowledge. Refusing the detached observer’s position destabilizes the genre’s claim to neutrality and exposes it as a constructed stance; one that has long worked in concert with geopolitical structures of dominance. The question of how a film is made is inseparable from the question of for whom and at whose expense. Faye’s practice suggests that transforming the cinematic gesture from within, by rethinking its genres, its hierarchies, and its methods is an ethical and political necessity.

With this in mind, the book moves away from scholarly debates on power and race that have traditionally centered on analyzing completed works and their socio-cultural implications. While that product-centered lens retains real value, it often bypasses the complex, layered negotiations embedded in the documentary gesture itself. Unpacking Documentary Strategies. Classroom dialogues during the Covid-19 Pandemic builds upon the long-standing research of An van. Dienderen, inviting the strategies deployed in the documentary process—from conceptualization to authorship—as essential sites where power, race, and representational authority are constructed, challenged, and renegotiated (van Dienderen A. & H. DeBlock forthcoming; Bellinck T. & A. van Dienderen 2020; De Cleene M., Pinckers M., Bellinck T. and A. van Dienderen 2019; van Dienderen 2019; 2017; 2008; 2007; 2003). 

We want to reorient ourselves from fixed outcomes toward the process of exchange on the documentary gesture. Such reframing shows how hierarchies of representation are not only reflected in the final work but are actively embedded in the deliberate choices made throughout the creative process. Documentary strategies thus become key tools to interrogate positionality, ethics, authorship, and the politics of visibility, making the invisible mechanics behind the construction of ‘truth’ and the ‘staging of the real’ visible. 

Our book also breaks away from conventional documentary literature through its dialogical and pedagogically grounded format. It brings together classroom dialogues from the course ‘Documentary strategies’ led by An van. Dienderen in the film department of KASK & Conservatorium, School of Arts, Ghent, in 2021-2022. The dialogues are recorded courses we conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic, where all sessions had to be online. Although the context seemed unproductive, the conversations paradoxically held a very high level of insight, exchange, critical accuracy, and social engagement. The course method is not hierarchical, in which An van Dienderen, as the teacher, would proclaim what a documentary should be. Instead, she offers films, texts, and quotes to stimulate open conversation, with her voice serving as mediator. In this space of trust, particular and critical exchanges emerge.

These conversations form the core of our belief that documentary practice is not rigid but fluid and dialogical. In our view, documentary lives through discourse, dialogue, critical engagement, and social involvement. It cannot be fundamentally defined by a meaning frozen in time and discourse; instead, with this publication, we ask the reader to participate in the discursive and polyphonic elements that the documentary gesture may carry.

The collaboration between editors Noah Berhitu and An van. Dienderen brings an intergenerational perspective that makes the book more layered and, hopefully, more interesting to read. Noah Berhitu (b. 1996) is a Dutch-Moluccan filmmaker whose work explores the intersections of social identity, memory culture, and diaspora. With decoloniality at the core of her practice, she seeks to craft counter-narratives that challenge incomplete histories. Noah was one of the students in the class of ‘Documentary strategies’ in 2021, before she completed her Master’s degree in Audiovisual Arts with the highest distinction. Her participation in these group dynamics adds another layer of complicity to compiling and editing the recorded conversations. An van Dienderen (b. 1971) has made several award-winning films screened worldwide, published internationally, and is a professor and senior researcher at KASK & Conservatorium, School of Arts, Ghent. She works at the intersection of documentary, anthropology, and visual arts. While exploring various documentary strategies and the relation between self and other, she also studies the medium in a self-reflective way.

 

Deconstructing documentary’s pretensions

Prior to delving into the conversations that make up the book, we begin with some general observations on the documentary gesture. Documentaries are constructed entities, yet viewers persistently associate them with truth, reality, and validity. This tension, as media scholar Brian Winston has argued, demonstrates a broader cultural addiction to realist modes of representation much in contrast with the amounts of efforts to construct, develop and design devices to perceive reality: “The technologies of seeing bring us ever closer to a sort of Borgesian map of reality – one that corresponds at all points with the external world – but as they do so, they do little to help understand their own historical and social realities. On the contrary, their basic illusionism disguises their artifice, their cultural formation and their ideological import” (Winston 1996, 44 & 118).

Working for an independent production company, An van Dienderen was assigned to direct a documentary episode for Canvas (the in-depth broadcasting channel in Flanders) about a Turkish family searching for a house in Belgium. To her surprise, the series editor handed her a fully written script — complete with scenes, quotes, and stereotypes — before An had even met the family. In that script, the family was portrayed in a highly problematic way, reinforcing clichés about migrants in Belgium and exposing the production’s underlying ideological framework. When she refused to mould reality to fit the xenophobic character of the series and proposed to make a documentary based on exchange and connection instead, she was dismissed.

This story shows that documentary “facts” are (often) manufactured through actual production decisions. From the viewer’s perspective, crucial information about that process is obscured. In this case, the script built an ideologically charged perspective from the start, with no meaningful connection to the family’s reality. The family themselves became unwelcome guests in their own story, with little control over how they were represented. This raises an ethical question for authors, producers, and editors. The point is not that documentary should somehow be free of ideology, since that would frankly be impossible. The more important questions are: why is reality treated as something to be scripted rather than observed? What is obscured from viewers, and at what cost to the people being filmed? And how can filmmakers create space for genuine critical reflection — for the author, the subject, and the audience alike?

The anecdote also illustrates the aforementioned cultural addiction to reality with particular clarity: the ideological framework was embedded in the script from the outset, yet stayed entirely opaque to the audience, who trusted the channel’s prestige as a guarantee of truthfulness. This cultural addiction expresses itself through several recurring pretensions of the (mainstream) documentary form (van Dienderen 2006).

The first pretension is positivism: the assumption that the medium is neutral, that reality exists objectively and independently of those who observe it, free from historical, social, or ideological conditions. Applied to documentary, this produces what we might call “image positivism,” or the “window on the world” conceit (van Dienderen 2008). Because the photographic image bears an indexical resemblance to reality, the mediating role of the camera — and of the person behind it — is easily forgotten. The consequences are significant: what is shown appears to refer directly and unproblematically to experienced reality; persons are reduced to objects; the representation turns ahistorical and depoliticized; and the viewer is offered no critical tools to reflect on the production process.

The second pretension is that of ventriloquism: the idea that documentary can simply “let people speak for themselves” and offer an inside view. This suggests that the filmmaker and the subject can somehow disappear into one another, leaving the subject’s words unaffected by the filming process. Nevertheless, the filmmaker still decides what to record, what to include, how to frame it, and who it ultimately addresses. The subject may speak, but that speech always reaches the audience through a particular set of choices.

The third pretension is equality between author and “other”: the suggestion that the documentary relationship is one of equivalence and mutual representation. In practice, documentary always involves selection and transformation: of crew, material, the linear production of time, narrative structure, and editing. These selection processes are typically not shown within the documentary itself, which is something of great consequence: authorship is never localized. The film presents itself as if it simply found reality, rather than constructed it, masking the power relations that influenced every decision made in its production.

The fourth pretension is moral superiority: the assumption that the documentary filmmaker occupies an ethically elevated position relative to their subject. This presents the filmmaker as a benevolent witness; someone who travels to where injustice occurs and offers the suffering of others to a distant audience as an act of conscience. In fact, this gesture reproduces the very power asymmetries it claims to critique: the filmmaker arrives, films, and leaves; the subject remains. And because it presents itself as morally motivated, it is particularly resistant to scrutiny; questioning the filmmaker’s intentions can look like opposing the cause itself. Yet it is precisely this moral framing that can immunize documentary against the self-reflection it most urgently needs.

Together, these four pretensions — positivism, ventriloquism, false equality, and moral superiority — constitute what might be called the ideological infrastructure of mainstream documentary practice. Each reinforces the others, and together they naturalize representation and depoliticize the gaze. They conceal the filmmaker’s active role and render invisible the web of choices, values, and power asymmetries that every documentary embodies. Good intentions do not change this. For the people being filmed, this can mean becoming strangers in their own story. They may recognize the events shown, but not how they are framed or what meaning is attached to them. Unlike the filmmaker, they usually have limited control over what happens to their story after filming ends. Parts of their experience may be emphasized, others left out, and the final version may tell a story they do not (fully) recognize as their own.

 

Documentary as a Tool of Western Imperialism

Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is an early and emblematic example of this infrastructure. The film was long celebrated as an early model of participatory documentary — according to figures such as filmmaker Jean Rouch and film scholar André Bazin — based on claims of shared rushes, extended fieldwork, and “true collaboration between Flaherty and the Inuit.” Media scholar Fatimah Tobing Rony dismantles this myth (Rony 1996). The Inuit were presented as having no knowledge of Western technology, producing a voyeuristic pleasure that reassured Western audiences of the contrast between the “primitive” and the modern. Crucially, this was a fabrication: the Inuit did know about gramophones, rifles, and Western clothing, all of which Flaherty banned from appearing on screen. The women in the film were in fact Flaherty’s own partners. Flaherty’s self-fashioning as an ethnographic filmmaker, admired by Rouch for his apparent closeness with Nanook, was thus built on deliberate staging.  

This analysis shows how documentary film can serve Western imperialism through a pretense of objectivity, which can be defined as the institutionalization of neutrality. Rony introduces the concept of the taxidermic operation in this context: just as a taxidermist removes an animal’s vital organs and arranges the remains to look alive for display, Flaherty strips the Inuit of their contemporary reality and presents them as a living museum piece for Western consumption. Its audience was already familiar with the “Eskimo” through world exhibitions and human zoos. Rony situates Nanook within a tradition of romantic conservatism in documentary: the filmmaker as savior of a vanishing people, closely mirroring what anthropology calls salvage ethnography. The paradox of this documentary romanticism lies in what anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls the conflation of space and time: by traveling far geographically, the filmmaker pretends to travel back historically, staging the “other” as untouched by the West and therefore available to be discovered, studied, and exploited (Fabian 2002). This positions the filmmaker as the savior of a vanishing people — the “salvage” impulse — while producing the illusion of observing an earlier stage of human history. This construction is not limited to Nanook; it runs through countless mainstream documentaries to this day. As media scholar Rey Chow writes: “… documentary immediacy has long been a means of fixing the other-in-precarity in the position of a wounded noble savage, replete with condescending underpinnings that are now updated with fashionable do-it-yourself and supposedly “reflexive” media technologies” (Chow 2020: 201).

Far from purely theoretical, these are urgent political concerns. When a documentary film constructs the “other” as primitive, timeless, and in need of saving, it actively participates in reproducing the ideological conditions that have historically justified exploitation, colonial violence, and dispossession. Media scholar Pooja Rangan claims that “… the aesthetic of feral innocence and other humanist tropes of documentary immediacy exploit the concrete material circumstances and labors of disenfranchised individuals—and do so in a manner that reinforces their status as other” (Rangan 2017: 5). The exoticizing gaze not only misrepresents; it consolidates power. It feeds dominant accounts that position certain communities as objects of curiosity, pity, or intervention rather than as political subjects with agency and voice. In a present where these narratives continue to underpin geopolitical decisions, and where framing “underdeveloped” or “at-risk” peoples can legitimize extraction, military presence, or humanitarian paternalism, documentary cinema is never innocent. For communities already living under the pressure of such violence, being misrepresented on screen is not a symbolic issue: it is able to reinforce the very structures that endanger them. As a result, Pooja Rangan convincingly argues: “… documentary, especially in its most benevolent, humanitarian guises, is thoroughly implicated in the work of regulating what does and does not count as human” (2017: 8).

 

Constructing a documentary gesture

The only art which deserves the term realist is that which confronts the audience with the material conditions of the work. Work which seeks to portray a ‘reality’ existing in another place at another time is illusionist. Malcolm Legrice (in Palacios Cruz 2025)

At the heart of the documentary is a basic philosophical question: how do images relate to reality? Much of the debate has centered on two opposing positions. Realists understand documentary as a way of recording facts that exist independently of the camera, while constructivists stress that social, ideological, and political conditions shape what we recognize as truth. Yet both positions are ultimately problematic. Realists are either naïve, resting on a false belief in objectivity, or cynical, unable to distinguish between facts and fabrications. Constructivists, meanwhile, risk a cynical relativism that dissolves any meaningful claim to truth altogether.

Documentary is perhaps best understood as a form defined precisely by its uncertainty about what it is. As artist and media scholar Hito Steyerl writes: “The constant doubt about whether what we see is consistent with reality is not a shameful lack, but is the decisive quality of documentary forms. They are characterized by an often subliminal, but still nagging, uncertainty, as well as the question: is this really true?” (Steyerl 2011). This uncertainty is not a flaw to be corrected but the constitutive condition of the form itself.

This tension also runs through historical definitions of documentary. In 1926, film critic John Grierson famously described documentary as a “creative treatment of actuality,” (Grierson 1926), adding with characteristic candor: “It is a clumsy definition but let it stand” (Grierson 1932–34). Two decades later, in 1947, the World Union of Documentary Filmmakers gave a more expansive formulation, defining documentary as “any film that documents real phenomena or their honest and justified reconstruction in order to consciously increase human knowledge through rational or emotional means and to expose problems and offer solutions from an economic, social or cultural point of view” (Painlevé 2000 (1953): 148).

Both definitions acknowledge, in different ways, the productive tension at the heart of the form: amid reality in all its mutability and uncertainty, and the authored nature of documentary construction. This tension constitutes the documentary’s founding paradox. Reality, with its changeability and uncertain status, is set against the fixity of construction. From the moment one films a subject, this subject transforms, mutates, and changes reality ‘as it is’. The documentary tradition has therefore always been one of uncertainty, contestation, and contamination proceeding from an attitude toward the multiple and shifting realities of our world (Balsom and Peleg 2016).

We therefore propose to approach the documentary gesture in various interrelated ways. It can be viewed as the mediated and variable relation between the author and the other, in which the viewer is already presupposed. It can suggest the result of a performative interaction between maker, other, and subject. It is certainly defined by the context of a “viewing technology,” itself the product of specific technological, social, and ideological forces. Moreover, it carries a substantial ethical dimension: the maker’s responsibility toward the subject and the other with whom they work, a dimension that fundamentally distinguishes documentary from fiction. Together, these dimensions create a complex framework of interaction that operates throughout the film’s making, reception, and consumption.

This understanding finds an interesting articulation in the concept of the ‘documentary gesture’, as defined by film scholar Patrick Leboutte. Paraphrasing his words, the documentary gesture is an act that intervenes in the world and shapes the image through which that world expresses itself. In this gesture, the filming subject sets aside everything it knew in advance about the filmed subject, opening the possibility of a new relationship—one that emerges from the cinematographic act itself, within a framework of recording and editing, and remains open to whatever surprises may arise. A film conceived this way, as it is gradually assembled, becomes the very thing that simultaneously documents the world, the cinema, the filmmaker, and ultimately the viewer in front of a screen (Leboutte 2002). 

 

Situated knowledge, situated writing

Unpacking Documentary Strategies. Classroom Dialogues during the Covid-19 Pandemic positions itself at the intersection of contemporary documentary studies, visual and performing arts, critical pedagogy, and decolonial theory. The book confronts the traditional, often medium-specific boundaries of the documentary genre by approaching it as a performative, transdisciplinary gesture. Our publication reimagines documentary practice as an open-ended, speculative process that resists rigid genre limits and claims to objectivity. This expanded view draws on the “documentary turn” in contemporary art, a shift that began in the 1990s as visual artists increasingly turned to documentary strategies to interact critically with social, political, and historical realities. This “documentary turn” has been formed by publications that reframe documentary not simply as a mode of representation, but as a performative, political, and epistemological practice. This interest runs — not coincidentally — parallel to the rise of critiques of Eurocentrism and postcolonialism. It constitutes a break from a postmodernist tendency in which artworks primarily staged signs that referred only to themselves, in favour of once again taking the ‘world’ into consideration (Balsom & Peleg 2016: 15). Key works such as Documentary/Verité (2006) by curator and critic Okui Enwezor, The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art  (Lind & Steyerl, 2008) and Documentary across Disciplines ((Balsom & Peleg 2016) position the documentary as a site for interrogating truth, visibility, and global inequalities in a variety of disciplines, genres and gestures. Hito Steyerl’s essays (2012) further complicate the category by emphasizing documentary’s instability in the digital age, while Claire Bishop (2006) critiques the ethical tensions of socially engaged practices frequently aligned with this shift. T.J. Demos (2013) and Ariella Azoulay (2019) contribute decolonial and archival perspectives, pointing out how artists mobilize documentary strategies to oppose dominant historical narratives and reclaim cultural agency. 

Building on this legacy, our project seeks to advance the discourse by engaging contemporary decolonial practices, including the work of diasporic voices who mobilize documentary methods as forms of resistance and knowledge production. These practices question established ideas about whose histories are preserved, how memories are passed on, and who has the authority to tell them. Within this context, the documentary gesture becomes a political act; one that insists on process, relationality, along with the ethical dimensions of visibility and mediation. 

In the words of filmmaker, researcher, and professor of cinema Rosine Mfetgo Mbakam: 

“My experience as the only Black student at the INSAS film school in Brussels shaped my understanding of contamination. I felt like an intrusion within an overwhelmingly white environment, one that showed only a single African film over five years of study. Later, as the only Black professor in the film department at KASK & Conservatorium, I came to understand contamination as an act of survival: a way of introducing other imaginaries into spaces that would otherwise erase them. Today, contamination is no longer a stigma but a methodology. It is a way of inserting African cinema into institutions that would otherwise remain closed to it. It is a strategy that acknowledges how references, pedagogies, and artistic traditions can be expanded and transformed through presence and friction” (Mbakam forthcoming).

There are essential publications that critique mainstream documentaries’ complicity in reproducing colonial, patriarchal, or capitalist narratives, such as Trinh T. Minh-ha’s When the Moon Waxes Red (1992). The award-winning filmmaker and theorist challenges dominant Western frameworks of knowledge. She favors a multicultural reimagining of knowledge production; one that moves beyond ideology toward a politics capable of genuinely transforming reality. By intervening in the contested and always already distorted terrain of representation, such work seeks to ‘beat the master at his own game’. With each work, she invites us to reexamine our relationship to reality. Its resonances, vibrations, exchanges, and reflections undermine any pretense of fixed identity, historical truth, or prescribed territory.

We are also much indebted to Feminist worldmaking and the Moving Image by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg (2022), which offers intersectional, intergenerational, and international perspectives on nonfiction film- and videomaking by and about women and revisits major figures, contexts, and debates spanning a polycentric, global geography. We are more specifically influenced by their gesture of combining non-fiction and experimental works, “ranging from activist tapes to avant-garde experiments, from essay films to docufictions, from personal testimonies to observational documentaries. Some survey the harm of living under what bell hooks calls ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’, while others fabulate liberatory ways of being otherwise” (Balsom and Peleg 2022: 20). 

While these inspirational authors certainly influence our book, it differs from their work in its joint, dialogical, and pedagogical format. Loosely inspired by Bill Nichols’ influential typology of documentary modes (Nichols 2001; Nichols 2010; Nichols 2017; Nichols & Bairon 2024)—which categorizes documentary practices into modes, such as the expository, observational, poetic, participatory, reflexive, and performative—our project adopts these schemes as conceptual starting points. While drawing on these established gestures, it intentionally extends the documentary vocabulary by introducing additional modalities such as the sensorial, the speculative, and the expanded. These new categories respond to changes in media practice and theory, including embodied spectatorship, collaborative authorship, and intermedial forms that blur the boundaries between cinema, politics, performance, and installation art. Rather than applying Nichols’ modes as prescriptive categories, this publication invites a more critical and playful engagement with them, making room to reflect on and negotiate your own arts practice.

 

Toward a critical practice

With this book, we aim to both problematize and reclaim the documentary form, distancing ourselves from the commercialized, mainstream documentary industry that often perpetuates neoliberal ideologies under the guise of social critique. Too often, such works boost careers and box-office results, rather than meaningfully engage with or empower the marginalized communities they claim to represent. Our book aims to reclaim documentary from its instrumentalization by capitalist media industries, questioning how “critical” documentaries commonly reinforce the power structures they pretend to oppose.

Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow (2017), a documentary about the global refugee crisis, offers a revealing case study. Despite its ostensibly activist intentions, the film ultimately reduces its subject to a familiar humanitarian trope, moving audiences emotionally without prompting structural change. The formal strategies Ai Weiwei employs leave the power differentials between filmmaker and subject unaddressed, offering neither the viewer nor the people on screen any meaningful form of agency (Bellinck T. & A. van Dienderen 2020). More than 200 crew members and 25 cameras were needed to make this high-production-value film, which was praised for its combination of cinematic quality, social criticism, and powerful activism. The film toured major festivals, won several awards, and was shortlisted for an Oscar — cementing Ai Weiwei’s status as a filmmaker of international standing and generating considerable returns for the film’s production company. None of this, however, reached the people the film claimed to speak for, nor did it amount to any genuine criticism of the geopolitical conditions responsible for the crisis.

The book responds to the colonial, patriarchal, and neoliberal legacies that still shape mainstream documentary practices by examining the documentary gesture as a way of producing knowledge. It problematizes standard narratives that foreground Western authorship and exploit marginalized subjects, urging dialogical, reflexive, and politically engaged approaches instead. There is no denying the danger of ‘mainstream’ documentaries as a representation of reality that frames imperial powers such as the United States as champions of the ‘free West.’ In this depiction, the ‘East’ or, more generally, the Global South, is consistently portrayed as the victim or antagonist. This kind of media framing has real, material consequences we can see on our smartphones every day. It costs lives, tears apart families, and erodes cultures. By sharing knowledge-making processes, we have the chance to not only fight the ignorance of others but also our own. 

Furthermore, in an age of vast image and narrative circulation on social media, ethical questions around documentation have become sharper. Digital technologies are altering documentary practice, pushing us to think harder about the choices we make in creating and sharing our work, and about the role we play in shaping public perception in an interwoven world. As Reem Shilleh and Gawan Fagard note in their 2024 essay, images of the ‘real’ operate on two levels: on one hand, they appear at film festivals and cultural institutions; on the other, they circulate through social media platforms such as Instagram (Shilleh & Fagard 2024). Activist filmmakers and journalists have become liberated from certain technical restrictions, institutionalized styles, and their accompanying ideologies, mastering their own means and visions. These social media reels, posts, and videos are driven by a distinct motivation: to encourage viewers not only to bear witness but to take action to prevent the next image on their timeline from occurring.

This publication ultimately aims to inspire and provoke the reader’s sense of active engagement, particularly with the pervasive geopolitical violence that characterizes our present. That violence demands we confront uncomfortable truths and reassess what we think we know. Through peer-to-peer exchanges and analyses, this work seeks to catalyze a deeper awareness and understanding of the complex dynamics of power, conflict, and documentary practice. We ask readers to critically examine their own roles and responsibilities in this geopolitical landscape through the lens of the documentary gesture.

 

Editing collective dialogues

The material for this book comes from 32 hours of classroom dialogues, recorded over two academic years during the Covid-19 pandemic: 2020–21 and 2021–22. The pandemic confined people to specific spaces, restricted social contacts, and pushed entire dimensions of collective life onto screens. Teaching was no exception. At the students’ request, the online sessions were recorded so they could watch them back afterward. 

At the time, recording the sessions was very much a practical arrangement. Looking back, however, Noah and An came to see the 32 hours of recordings as precious documents.  They documented not only a unique and disorienting moment in time, but something that emerged almost in spite of it: moments of connection, shared thought, and a sense of togetherness around issues that mattered deeply to all of us. The screen, so often a symbol of distance and isolation during those years, became something else entirely; a space of unexpected closeness, a window onto other people, other thoughts, other ways of seeing.

The online classroom became a place where people could speak openly and without feeling constrained. When we transferred these conversations to the book, we decided to keep the students’ names anonymous out of respect for the trust that had developed within the group. We did, however, keep An’s name because, as their lecturer, she facilitated and mediated the conversations.

Some sessions were conducted in English; others in Flemish. We have since translated the Flemish-language sessions into English. Because none of the participants are native English speakers, we have sought throughout this process to retain the informal, spontaneous quality of spoken dialogue rather than converting it into more formal written English, to stay faithful to the original tone and rhythm of the discussions.

To give the dialogues their own space, we have compiled filmmaker biographies and film synopses at the end of the book. If you already know the film being discussed, or prefer to approach the dialogue without preconceptions, you can dive straight in. But if you’d rather have context first, start with the filmmaker’s biography and the film’s synopsis. Either way, the structure leaves room for your own reading experience.

Interestingly, while editing the transcripts, we noticed strong parallels with the very subject this book describes. We too had to choose, select, and frame these documents; processes not unlike those at work in the making of a documentary film. We too are positioned within power relations similar to those between a filmmaker and the reality they engage with. We are also constructing something, based on what actually happened, to invite the reader to engage with the dialogues in a particular way. The dialogues presented here are not exact reproductions of what took place in the classroom. We focused on specific themes, exchanges we consider most relevant, and questions that emerged from our conversations.

In that sense, this book offers collective thinking in action; thinking that is unfinished, sometimes contradictory, always in process. It does not present conclusions so much as trace the movements of minds engaging with difficult questions together. And in doing so, it enacts the very tensions and responsibilities it sets out to explore: the tension between the one who frames and the one who is framed, between what is selected and what is left out, between the desire to represent faithfully and the impossibility of ever doing so completely. The book, like the documentary gesture it describes, is itself a construct; and it does not pretend otherwise.

We are deeply grateful to the following students, whose thoughtful engagement, curiosity, and dedication made this such a meaningful experience. Thank you for showing up wholeheartedly and bringing such critical insight and generous warmth to every discussion.

In 2020-21: Asel Bakchakova, Anne Baptist, Noah Berhitu, Robin Boissevain, Lisa Coene, Morgan Cosemans, Lyn De Weijer, Emilien Dubuc, Maaike Jaspers, Thieu Kessels, Valeria Koroleva, Lore Loyens, Louka Morren, Raouf Moussa, Laura Persijn, Ena Podgorac, Alejandra Rogghé, Giacomo Speyart van Woerden, Bao Van Hoe, Sélin Van Laethem, Maarten Van Lier, Flore Van Sparrentak and Fernando Vandekeybus.

In- 2021-22: Liesje Baltussen, Martin Crasborn, Aaron Denolf, Mon Dewulf, Kumail Gasiewski, Marius Huguenin-Dumittan, Helle Huisman, Eline Jansen, Charlotte Jodogne, Szaga Lauwers, Dries Marchal, Stijn Meijer, Marthe Perret, Pam Rierink, Juul Schopping, Warre Simons, Annemarijn Vanes, Carol Vandekinderen, Maarten Vanlier, Lender Vandevelde, Sophie Veelenturf and Stijn Verschelden