DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
What does take for two international graduate students of color to make a film together in the United States? For Faith (Kenyan disabled scholar activist) and myself (Malaysian queer filmmaker), it takes a lot more than what we had originally anticipated. The journey began when I approached Faith with my hope to make a social justice film together, addressing ableism as the center focus of the story by reenacting past events of my ableist practices based on our friendship, while showing both our commonality as international ‘graduate student of color’ at a northeast US private institution of higher education and our differences in navigating gender, race and disability. What transpired however, was realizing how my initial fixated approach on the execution of film is rooted in the very same issues I was trying to address.
My original plan of doing reenactments meant both of us would be “acting” as ourselves. The plan fell apart fairly quickly in the early stage of the production, turning the film into a “documentary” instead. This also means not having a scripted story to follow. But it was precisely because of not having a script that allowed us to have the ‘brilliant conversations’ when conflicts arose (as seen in the film), opening doors for us to be vulnerable and show care for each other in the midst of navigating trauma and pain. The editing process also allowed me to reflect and sit with my discomfort and complicity as I went over the footages, discovering more layers of my ableist practices as I watched myself pushing hard to show Faith’s disability from my able-bodied perspective by putting her in vulnerable positions. I also recognized that I was also committing what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 2003).
‘Epistemic violence’ is a term that describes the interpretation of the ‘Other’ by the imperial gaze, putting the ‘Other’ in inferior positions, keeping patriarchy and colonial hegemonic power in dominance and unchallenged. To remove ourselves from the imperial gaze, we have to unlearn this gaze which is deeply embedded in our subconscious mind. In this particular scenario, my imperial gaze was from the able-bodied perspective. “Part of our ‘unlearning’ project is to articulate that ideological formation - by measuring silences, if necessary – into the object of investigation” (Spivak, 2003, p. 92). Acknowledging that unlearning is a process and not just a final destination to arrive at, I center my object of investigation on the ethics around telling this story. It began with the questions of “why did I choose to do this project with Faith” and “how did we end up in the conflict as shown at the end of the film”. As the editor of the film, I also have to ask myself, how honest do I want to be and how vulnerable should I put myself and my collaborator into? How do I represent my collaborator without misrepresenting them? What are the potential risks of causing more harm to disabled bodies? If I center it on my own reflection and subjectivity, how can I do it without making it all about me and my voice, who is already in the position of power as the storyteller?
South African artist Gabrielle Goliath once told me, “representation always involves violence, and our job as artists is to make the violence lesser. What is the point of making the work if it’s not ethical?” The editing process was also guided by indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s questions for researcher (and storytellers): Whose research is it? Who owns it? Whose interests does it serve? Who will benefit from it? Who has designed its questions and frame its scope? Who will carry it out? Who will write it up? How will its results be disseminated? (Tuhiwai, 1999).
References:
Tuhiwai, S. L. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. Zed Books.
Spivak, G. C. (2003). Can the subaltern speak?. Die Philosophin, 14(27), 42-58.
Crenshaw, K. (1991). Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity, and Violence Against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review. 1991;43(6):1241–1300
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