Relational filmmaking

Abstract

It is an honor to be part of this inaugural film symposium. We send our sincere thanks to all the contributors. The care and attention you brought in watching, sensing, and reflecting with our film has really touched us and inspired us to revisit with fresh eyes the making of Unwritten Letters. The film in its entirety is available online as a supplement. For the first few months, the process was driven not only by the desire to document Abd’s moment of transition, but by a desire “tomake a film” and to be in a space of active creation. Films like Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin (as Christian Suhr picked up correctly), Notebooks on Cities and Clothes by Wim Wenders, or In the Last Days of the City by Tamer El Said pointed us to a direction of filmmaking as a process of testing, whereby filming a scene and together watching the material became the central gesture. This act of recording and revisiting allowed us to see, feel, and witness Abd’s experience of forced migration but also served as a mirror to our own process of filmmaking. Reconvening every two to three months to continue the ritual of filming and watching that we had started in Beirut, slowly the form of our film started to emerge. As Eda Elif Tibet beautifully describes, the camera became a mediator and holder of the space we had started to cultivate and commit to. This space we always referred to as our