#4 Archive repair

Nzingha Kendall, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
with Camila Rodriguez Triana

Film scholar and programmer Nzingha Kendall and filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich propose to explore alternative narrative-making grounded in radical black intellectual production, responding to what Saidiya Hartman refers to as “silence in the archive”. They ask how can black storytellers work in the realm of reality when traditional records of reality historically rendered black subjecthood invisible? How might the transparency imposed on minoritized subjects be resisted by employing gaps and fragments to achieve strategic opacity? By interrogating film form and genre, they seek to extend possibilities for moving images to resuscitate embodied, spiritual, and coded understandings of black experiences.

En cenizas | Camila Rodriguez Triana | 2019
Spit on the Broom | Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich | 2019

25 OCT / from 10.30 to 13.00, Culturgest – Room 4

About the UNDO Fellows

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich
Her work is about the private lives and worlds of black women. Her practice is rooted in archival research and field research, which then gets translated through a writing process, and then finally a filmmaking process that includes narrative, documentary and experimental film techniques. This means working closely with archives that until recently did not preserve or respect black voices and thinking about how to represent histories that have been neglected.

Nzingha Kendall
Film scholar and programmer. Her work focuses on moving images by black women from across the diaspora. She has a PhD in American Studies and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

About the invited directors

Camila Rodríguez Triana
Has a degree in integrated arts and a master’s degree in cinema and contemporary art. Her first feature film, Atentamente (2016), was awarded at FIDMarseille, Lisbon International Film Festival and Lima Independent Film Festival, among others. Her second feature film, Interior (2017), was presented at Doclisboa, nominated for the Doc Alliance Award and acquired by ARTE – WDR and Tënk. Her third feature film, En cenizas (2018), will screen at Doclisboa’19.

Filmmaking Seminar