SIC: Boundary Encounters

From 21 to 23 October, SoundImageCulture invites you to Boundary Encounters: Fictional strategies in reality-based film – a weekend-long program of screenings, presentations, shared meals and conversations, to collectively reflect on the incorporation of fiction within reality-based film. Their aim is to explore how fiction is employed to negotiate issues of access and navigate boundaries between private and public space, memory and history, poetics and politics. Boundary Encounters will present a series of thematic screenings of short and feature-length films, discussions and work-in-progress presentations with the filmmakers: Salomé Lamas, James Newitt, Nicolás Pereda, María Molina Peiró, and Stéphanie Roland, along with SIC participants and Stefanie Baumann from the Thinking Documentary Film research group at CineLab/IFILNOVA (New University of Lisbon).

Within the space of the boundary – a potentially contested zone that divides categories and territories – the program proposes a coming together to watch and reflect on films that explore subjects of territory, borders, the sea, technology, memory and history. In this zone, forms of documentary and fiction are interwoven to produce new narrative configurations and where issues of access, visibility and truth are negotiated. The program proposes to consider how strategies of fiction are used within documentary in order to engage with reality, or as Trinh T. Minh-ha observed how, “In ‘documentary’, one has to go through fiction to show reality”.

The films shared over the weekend reveal encounters with ghosts from the past, made by tracing now-dispersed borders. They tell stories – that may or may not be entirely true – by people waiting for their asylum hearing. They speak of testimonies told through the voice of an actor who struggles to recount someone else’s trauma. They describe places that have not been mapped, or that are beyond sight. They give access to technological utopias and autonomous zones. They trace invisible lines on the earth, observe us from beyond the atmosphere and disappear into the sea.

Beginning Friday afternoon and continuing until Sunday afternoon, the Focus program consists of two evening screenings at Cinema Nova and four themed screening sessions with open discussions throughout Saturday and Sunday, hosted at Projection-Room, along with shared meals, key-note presentations and the sharing of films-in-progress. 

More information and registration here.

Image: Extinction (Salomé Lamas, 2018), design © Miriam Hempel / daretoknow