Ethnofictional filmmaking workshop

This year’s Riga Pasaules Film Festival workshop will introduce the concept of ethnofictional filmmaking to tell the audiovisual stories with a help of performativity, improvisation and play.

Ethnofictional filmmaking workshop “Love the Future – The Future of Love” will be led by the professor Martin Gruber (Bremen, Germany) in the cinema Kino Bize.

Audiovisual storytelling involves the creative and experimental use of audiovisual media and narratives. The approach can be applied in a wide range of settings, for example for documenting and presenting projects, as a method of research, or in artistic / social interventions. The outcome may be documentary films, multimedia presentations, animations or photo essays.

In this workshop we will focus on ethnofictional filmmaking, an approach going back to the early work of Jean Rouch. The idea behind the approach is to enhance documentary filmmaking by introducing fictional elements. It is based on performativity, improvisation and play. The protagonists are inspired by their everyday lives, their dreams and fantasies. More recently, Johannes Sjöberg has shown how ethnofictional filmmaking can be especially suited to enquire about the future.

Martin Gruber, the tutor of the workshop, works as an anthropologist and filmmaker at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen. Currently Martin conducts multimodal research on the entanglements between humans and honeybees in Cameroon, Japan and Germany. Moreover, Martin specialized in collaborative and ethnofictional approaches of ethnographic filmmaking.

APPLICATION

Participation fee: 15 EUR / 10 EUR*
* pupils, students
Contact: festival@kinobize.lv

Participants do not need any filmmaking or anthropological background. Participants will work in small teams and produce films of up to 5 minutes duration with their own camcorders, smartphones and Laptops.

PROGRAMME

This practical seminar introduces the concept of ethnofictional filmmaking. We first open up a methodological toolbox by viewing and experimenting with ethnofictional storytelling and different film genres. Then the workshop participants will conceive and implement their own film projects. Following the festival theme, we inquire about the concept / phenomenon of love – with a focus on the future.

Monday, 24.04.
14:00 - 20:00 Workshop with all participants

Tuesday, 25.04.
14:00 - 20:00 Workshop with all participants

Wednesday, 26.04.
Independent group work

Thursday, 27.04.
Independent group work
14:00 - 16:00 Feedback and Editing Support
16:00 - 18:00 Workshop with all participants
18:00 - 20:00 Feedback and Editing Support

Friday, 28.04.
10:00 - 13:00 Feedback and Editing Support
15:00 - 17:00 Final Film Screening

Published: 07.03.2023.