Presentation and documentary: 'Opening gates and windows'

The Centre for Cultural Diversity and Wellbeing presents Opening gates and windows: The ethics and aesthetics of representing a cross-cultural parenting relationship via documentary, a 20-minute talk accompanied by a 4-minute film.

Paola Bilbrough will discuss the representational concerns involved in making Separation (2013), a four-minute ‘documentary-poem’, which constitutes part of her creative PhD completed in 2015. Separation tells the story of an improvised parenting relationship she had with “Abe”, a fifteen-year-old Sudanese-Australian. Making Separation raised various ethical issues for her; such as the dilemma of how to articulate a personally and politically important story while respecting Abe’s privacy. In its reliance on real people’s life stories, the documentary genre is ethically fraught: in addition to this, cross-cultural factors in her project contributed extra complexity. Ultimately, representing her own auto/biographical experience in combination with a poetic approach to storytelling provided a partial answer to these concerns.

In a contemporary context, ethnographic and art/media practice are increasingly combined to arrive at new theoretical and representational insights. While her primary intent behind Separation was to make a creative work, the film also constitutes research via the practical exploration of how to represent emotionally sensitive material in a way that addresses both ethical and aesthetic concerns. The issues she raises have relevance for arts practitioners, cultural producers and researchers who represent other people’s stories in any medium.

Register your attendance

Please RSVP your attendance to Isabelle de Solier: [email protected].

About the speaker

Paola Bilbrough is a documentary maker, poet, community cultural development worker and researcher whose work focuses on issues of identity, culture, representation, and social inclusion. She recently completed a PhD in cultural studies/creative practice (2015) at Victoria University, which focused on ethical practice in documentary making, particularly in auto/biographical cross-cultural contexts.

Her essays and poems have been published in international journals. In 2010 she made a collaborative documentary No One Eats Alone with 12 Sudanese-Australian women and New Hope Foundation in response to reductive representations of Sudanese-Australians in the media. This project informed her PhD study and her experiences with participants continue to influence her work. NOE has screened at a number of past Refugee Week celebrations in the western region and has been used by organisations as diverse as the National Bank and Foundation House as part of cultural awareness training.

Paola is currently writing about SBS’s “Living with the Enemy: Episode 3 Immigration” as part of a book project with a group of scholars on representations of people from refugee and asylum seekers backgrounds in the Australian media.