Most unlikely sweetheart: Pedro Costa

Seminar scapegoat: Allan Sekula

Most racist comment: “Jane Austen voiceover”

Most likely to develop a multiple personality disorder: Alison Kobayashi

Best DJ: Sherae Rimpsey

Most consistently, awesomely snarky: The Russians

Person most often prompted to stand up and speak up: Maya Han Weimer

Most supportive of scared-shitless youngsters: Linda Lilienfeld

Most all-encompassing, thorough comments: Patti Zimmermann

Character with most awesomely disgusting cough: Vanda

Most priveledged white woman filmmaker: Laura Waddington

Hippest progammer: Chi-hui Yang

Our Flaherty experience is hard to categorize because we came in not knowing what to expect and found ourselves changed forever.

By the way, the lyrics to the White Girl Migration Rap are as follows:

Migration… In your face… In your nation… Migration
I’m just a priveledged white girl in your culture, I’m like a vulture
Suppressing your voice, it’s a choice
If you’re offended by my rappin’
I’ll get ya snappin’ with my Jane Austen voice ovah.
All ovah.

For me this film brings up the issue of social responsibility and change, a topic referred to a few times but not fully addressed. Do documentary producers want to affect change? Is it enough to simply “leave a document,” probably to be archived in a collection, as in Laura Waddington’s “Border,” or in Alan Sekula’s “A Film For Laos”? There are many different kinds of practices that involve documentary tendencies, as Dan Streible pointed out, and some are more a part of the art world than the world of filmmaking. Laura’s artistic honesty that she spoke about follows a specific set of “rules,” her own rules, just as Pedro Costa developed his own approach which he felt was artistically honest, and Renee’s personal guidelines probably vary greatly but likewise reflect what she considers an honest approach. I think we just started figure out how to talk about these varying types of artistic honesty on Thursday. How does artistic honesty relate to social responsibility? And do some people think artistic honesty is mumbo jumbo?

I’m sure many of us could relate to the sheer will and obsessiveness, to the point of absurdity, that it takes to do what we do. The disjuncture, for many of us, between the obvious or attributed “value” of our work and the effort, time and energy we put into it.

What I kept waiting for (and maybe this is the difference between irony and self-irony that Irina referred to) was for the artists to embrace the messiness they found, and find a way of incorporating the Nigerian sugar, this “inferior” production with all its “imperfections”, into their art, rather than insisting that it fit the European mold (literally). Rather than see it all as an impediment or a nuisance to their (admittedly absurdist) project. Why go to Nigeria to work unless you want your work to be affected in some deep way by the experience? Instead, there was a reproduction of rather classical colonialesque production relations, with Nigerian workers providing manual labor for a product which was completely alien to them (I wasn’t sure what the Nigerians could “learn” from this process).

Caitlin Manning
Sorry I don‘t remember the title of the film
I think people should sign their posts.

All three works by Oliver, Alison and Lonnie/Siebren were wonderful reminders that perhaps the most complex and important elements of migration is the migration of meaning and thought, its transformation.

Like the clever quote in “Monument of Sugar,” these films illustrated how objects and ideas (e.g. films/media) become “things that interact with the world.” I appreciated how all of these films highlighted the importance of transformative intent and the immense, positive impact and resistance to adversity that it can have, even on failure. It was truly inspirational.

I was also touched by the preoccupation of these works to go back to an origin and to own that origin in order to embrace transformation. This is also a concern at the heart of the migration experience.

Wednesday night’s program encapsulated best the answer to this question for me.
All three works by Oliver, Alison and Lonnie/Siebren were wonderful reminders that perhaps the most complex and important elements of migration is the migration of meaning and thought, its transformation.

Immigration often comes out of conflict and most always causes conflict.
As a filmmaker, I am distraught by this fascination/need that we have to represent the conflict of others over our own, particularly because its depiction makes us feel safer and better about our own personal conflicts. Yes, this fascination sometimes exists alongside other more noble reasons, perhaps, such as awareness and a need to eradicate it, but the underlying reason seems to me a very personal one always. A constant need to contextualize our experience and to console ourselves in the presence of situations outside our control drives this fascination. I find this a tragegy. It proposes that this vicious cycle cannot be broken.