Autonomia Maró Fábio Márcio Alkmin

Restoring the Spirit Lisa Palmer
ABYSSAL Pedro F Neto & João Baptista

Beyond the Dam's Reservoir W. Nathan Green & Polen Ly 

Student Hunger: A Silent Crisis Jane Dyson & Kate Jessop

Örö Rob St John
Droughtlands Anjali Jayakumar, Omkar Khandagale & Aditya Thakkar


2021 Program

PLACE, LABOUR AND BELONGING


Healing Fire Yanama budyari gumada research collective

A Millennia of Seepage Amelia Hine

Workers Jay Gearing & Ben Rogaly
Spirit Jane Dyson & Ross Harrison

Nadirah: Coal Woman Negar Elodie Behzadi & Kate Jessop

Withering Refuge Pedro F Neto

Tidal Choreography Gina Moore & Michele Lobo

Posthuman Landscapes Candice Boyd & Elizabeth Straughan

Holding Tightly: Custom and Healing in Timor-Leste Lisa Palmer & Susanna Barnes
Water at the Margins Maria Rusca

Drum Village Primary School Vickie Zhang
Losing Ground Holding Place Iqbal Barkat, Richie Howitt, Kath McLachlan, Garima Misra, Nathan Moulds, Phillip Osborne & Matalena Tofa





IAG Film Shorts is a screening event showcasing films made by geographers.

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Full details of each year's films with videos (where available), synopses and bios.
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2022 Program

AUTONOMY, MOVEMENT AND THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN


For our 2nd Edition, we are screening seven films from around the world that centre on interrelated themes of Autonomy, Movement and the More-than-human.

We start on Tuesday morning in the Amazon with AUTONOMIA MARÓ, before tracing Timor-Leste’s healing springs in RESTORING THE SPIRIT. In the afternoon we head to Portuguese underwater territory with ABYSSAL, then downstream of Cambodia’s Lower Sesan 2 dam with BEYOND THE DAM’S RESERVOIR. On Wednesday, we swap for dryer lands, washing up on the Finnish Archipelago of ÖRÖ, and into the growing deserts of DROUGHTLANDS and STUDENT HUNGER: A SILENT CRISIS.

In their own way, each film explores people’s relationships to place, to power, to environment—and to people’s struggles to navigate and find their place within ever more precarious worlds. We thank all the filmmakers for submitting their wonderful films, and hope you enjoy this year’s shorts.

Note: Several of this year’s films are screening in-person only.

Autonomia Maró

Fábio Márcio Alkmin





In the Maró Territory, in the Amazonian region of Pará, the Borari and Arapium peoples are organising themselves in an autonomous way to contain deforestation and teach new generations about the decisive importance of the standing forest for the future of humanity.


Fábio M. Alkmin is a doctoral candidate in the Postgraduate Programme in Human Geography at the University of São Paulo, with a Master's degree and a degree in Geography from the same institution. He is currently doing a split-site doctoral at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), UK. His current area of interest is the Brazilian Amazon, especially in issues related to indigenous autonomy, climate justice, socio-environmental justice, regional inequalities and territorial issues involving indigenous peoples.

Restoring the Spirit

Lisa Palmer



Watch Restoring the Spirit from Wai Mata Films on Vimeo.

In Timor-Leste spring water is central to people’s connections to each other and the ancestral spirit world. Underground flows are the carriers of spirits and the providers of life and well-being to the living. Restoring the Spirit follows Simião, a university student, who had been very ill and had almost died when something had attacked him and taken his spirit. With the water’s help, the family had recovered it, and his spirit had been restored to his body. Through ceremony the debt to the ancestral spirits of these healing waters is repaid and connections to more distant coastal springs are honoured.


Lisa Palmer teaches and researches on indigenous environmental knowledge and practices at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely and is the author of an ethnography on people’s complex relations with water in Timor-Leste titled Water Politics and Spiritual Ecology: Custom, Environmental Governance and Development (2015, Routledge, London). Her most recent book is Island Encounters: Timor-Leste from the Outside in (2021, ANU Press). Working also through visual methods she has directed two films, Wild Honey: Caring for Bees in a Divided Land (2019, Ronin Films) and Holding Tightly: Custom and Healing in Timor-Leste (2021, Ronin Films).

ABYSSAL

Pedro F Neto & João Baptista





Which territories are yet to be annexed, which borders are yet to be defined? What is nature? Departing from the Portuguese odyssey in the Atlantic depths, ABYSSAL explores the present of that country as well as of humanity writ large. There is an epic side in this new expansionist endeavour. It all happens far from the view, in the darkness of the deep sea. Machines and robots, but also imagination and hope, invade places that until recently belonged to no one.


Pedro F Neto is an architect, anthropologist and filmmaker, research fellow at the ICS-U. Lisboa. His other most recent films are YOON (feature documentary, 2021) and Withering Refuge (essay, 2020).

João Baptista’s work focuses on the sea, located at the intersection of geography and anthropology. He is a research fellow at the ICS-U. Lisboa.

Beyond the Dam's Reservoir

W. Nathan Green & Polen Ly




Beyond the Dam's Reservoir documents social and environmental changes associated with the construction of the Lower Sesan 2 dam in Cambodia, the country's largest hydroelectric dam project. It follows fishing communities, activists, and NGO workers who have been intimately involved in advocating for more socially and environmentally just development.


W. Nathan Green is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His scholarship critically examines the political ecology of agrarian finance and infrastructure in Southeast Asia, focusing particularly on Cambodia.

Polen Ly is a Cambodian film director. He has made numerous short films, many of which have won accolades in international film festivals. His movies portray the intimate experiences of social and environmental change in Cambodia.

Student Hunger: A Silent Crisis

Jane Dyson & Kate Jessop




A significant proportion of students at Australian universities face difficulties accessing sufficient and nutritious food. Many institutions and universities across the country do not have programs or policies in place to support food insecure students. In Student Hunger: A Silent Crisis, we’ve brought together our own research with students in Victoria with current research on food insecurity in universities around the world to start a conversation about this silent yet critical issue. 

Learn more at www.studentfoodinsecurity.com.


Jane Dyson is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Melbourne. Her long-term research in the Indian Himalayas on childhood and youth, work, politics and gender has been presented in her book (Working Childhoods CUP 2014), journals in Geography and Anthropology, and her two award-winning films, Lifelines (2014) and Spirit (2019).

Kate Jessop is a multi award-winning animation filmmaker whose work spans across narrative shorts, artists’ film and comedy. She represented the UK in the Best of Women in Film&TV, was a Virgin Media Shorts Finalist & a Berlinale Talents 2019 participant both as director & with her comedy series Tales From Pussy Willow in the Project Lab, which has subsequently been picked up for production by Hipster Films. She has exhibited extensively internationally, undertaking artist residencies in Berlin, Istanbul and Reykjavik. She is a Senior Lecturer in Animation & has taught in China.

2021 Program

PLACE, LABOUR AND BELONGING


Welcome to the inaugural IAG Film Shorts, part of the 2021 Institute of Australian Geographers & New Zealand Geographical Society Combined Conference.

Building on longer traditions of geographical film, geographers today are increasingly embracing filmmaking as an integral part of their research practice. Geographers are finding recognition in and out of the discipline for their creative outputs, and reaching new and diverse audiences for their research endeavours. Indeed, the rapid development of consumer videographic technology means that it has never been easier for geographers to make a film.

Our two sessions for this year’s program are curated around the geographic themes of Place, Labour and Belonging, with all of the films speaking to these themes in diverse and cross cutting ways. Across the sessions there are a total of twelve short films, including from Australian, English, French, Iranian, Portuguese and Swedish filmmakers. These films reflect on these geographic issues in places such as Australia, China, Europe, India, Mozambique, the former Soviet Union, Timor-Leste and Zambia.

We hope you enjoy the curation and online format of this year’s program. We recommend watching the films in two sessions following the order suggested here, but the online format means you are of course able to skip back and ahead; to pause, rewind and rewatch. We imagine this conference session a time to be moved and inspired, to reflect on the potentials and opportunities of this expressive medium, and to celebrate the spirited, ground-breaking and beautiful creations of our filmmaking-geographer colleagues around the world.

Healing Fire

Yanama budayri gumada research collective






Healing Fire documents a cultural burn of Yellomundee Regional Park in Western Sydney in July 2019, led by Darug custodians along with NSW NPWS, Koori Country Firesticks, NSW RFS, and NSW Local Land Services, and supported by Yanama budyari gumada research collective. The ‘Healing Fire’ film is a collaboration between the Yanama budyari gumada research collective, led by Darug custodians Uncle Lex Dad and Aunty Corina Norman-Dadd, and professional film-maker Klas Eriksson.


Yanama budayri gumada research collective is led by Darug custodians Uncle Lex Dadd and Aunty Corina Norman-Dadd, and includes members of the Blue Mountains Aboriginal Culture and Resource Centre, and researchers and PhD students from Macquarie and Newcastle universities (including A/Prof. Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Dr. Marnie Graham, Dr. Paul Hodge, PhD students Harriet Narwal, Rebecca Scott, and Jessica Lemire; and Blue Mountains ACRC Community Development Officer, Paul Glass).

Klas Eriksson is a professional film-maker originally from Sweden and now based in Australia. Klas is an integral member of the Yanama budyari gumada research collective, and has made collaborative films with Indigenous groups in both Scandinavia and Australia.

A Millennia of Seepage

Amelia Hine






A Millennia of Seepage is a three-part film exploring a speculative more-than-human underground. The series expands current work in subterranean geopolitics that pays attention to volumetric geographies and accumulation and dispossession below the earth’s surface. It takes up the challenge of building a visual vocabulary of the underground while sidestepping visioning technologies commonly used by extractive industries to ‘see’ below the surface. Such technologies apply a ‘geologizing’ intelligibility over the subterranean to make it useful to the state project. In testing an alternative method for seeing below ground this series uses collage to construct a lively and richly populated subsurface.



Amelia Hine is a postdoctoral researcher in the QUT Business School. Her current research focuses on understanding the drivers and networks behind stakeholder engagement in mining projects to better understand how differing stakeholder perspectives emerge. She has a particular interest in the making and un-making of extractive landscapes, and in understanding nonhuman contributions to landscape alterations. Amelia’s background is in design and museum studies, and she has an ongoing professional practice as an artist and visual communicator.

Workers

Jay Gearing & Ben Rogaly




In Workers, ten individuals give personal and sometimes moving accounts of warehouse and food factory work, and reflect on their creative lives within and beyond the workplace. Their stories reveal some of the harsh employment conditions in contemporary capitalist workplaces in these sectors, and confirm the power inequalities inherent in them. Taken together, the films evoke a story of how workplace experiences have changed over a forty-year period with intensified pressure on agency workers in warehouses through higher productivity targets, longer distances to cover each day, and computerised policing of breaks. Using multiple and varied narratives, the ten chapters of the film disrupt taken-for-granted and common sense categories often used to stereotype people such as ‘factory workers’, ‘warehouse workers’ or ‘migrants’. It is hoped that the solidarity to be found in this can contribute to challenging oppressive workplace conditions.


Jay Gearing is an independent film-maker based in Peterborough under the guise of Red 7 Productions. He directed and co-produced Workers.

Ben Rogaly teaches in the Department of Geography at the University of Sussex, UK. He researched and co-produced Workers.

Spirit

Jane Dyson & Ross Harrison




When Saraswati arrives as the first educated daughter-in-law in a Himalayan village, she wonders how she will ever feel at home. But faced with the scepticism of an older generation of women, she grows determined to succeed. As the village’s vibrant Pandav Lila festival approaches, Spirit offers a window onto the daily work and spiritual practices that bind people to each other and the land. Spirit is an intimate story of longing and belonging from a remote community in the thralls of change.

To learn more about Spirit visit www.spiritdocumentary.com.


Jane Dyson is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Melbourne. Her long-term research in the Indian Himalayas on childhood and youth, work, politics and gender has been presented in her book (Working Childhoods, CUP 2014), journals in Geography and Anthropology, and her two award-winning films, Lifelines (2014) and Spirit (2019).

Ross Harrison is a filmmaker based in Bristol, UK, working internationally. He combines original storytelling, immersive audiovisuals and smart distribution to create videos with impact.


Nadirah: Coal Woman

Negar Elodie Behzadi & Kate Jessop






In Kante, a small village perched at 2000 metres in the Fann Mountains of Tajikistan, the work of the 19 female miners who go mining everyday in the illegal coal mines is considered as ‘ayb’ (shameful). Based on a collaborative feminist art-research project between the animation artist, Kate Jessop, and the geographer and ethnographer, Negar Elodie Behzadi, Nadirah: Coal Woman makes visible otherwise invisibilised stories of shame. The animated ethnographic portrait raises awareness of issues around gender, work and exclusion, women’s restricted access to natural resources, and their stigmatisation in a desolate extractive landscape.


Negar Elodie Behzadi is a French/Iranian lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Bristol, UK (DPhil University of Oxford/ MA King’s College London). In her research, Negar brings the insights of a feminist geographer, the sensibilities of an ethnographer and her passion for visual and art-based methodologies to explore questions of resource struggles, exclusion, migration and labour with marginalized communities in Central Asia. Negar is also co-directing an ethnographic video-documentary on resource extractive violence, Komor (Coal), and is the co-creator of the VEM (Visual, Embodied methodologies network launched at King’s College London). Nadirah: Coal woman draws on Negar’s ethnographic research in the village of Kante, Tajikistan.

Kate Jessop is a multi award-winning animation filmmaker whose work spans across narrative shorts, artists’ film and comedy. She represented the UK in the Best of Women in Film&TV, was a Virgin Media Shorts Finalist & a Berlinale Talents 2019 participant both as director & with her comedy series Tales From Pussy Willow in the Project Lab, which has subsequently been picked up for production by Hipster Films. She has exhibited extensively internationally, undertaking artist residencies in Berlin, Istanbul and Reykjavik. She is a Senior Lecturer in Animation & has taught in China. Her paper on Animation as Activism has been presented at Goldsmiths College & Queering Animation the first ever conference on Queer Animation.

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