Lovers in Time: An Essay Film of Contested Memories

This chapter is in two parts – part one is by Thomas Elsaesser commenting on the unstable form of the essay film and making the case for practice based research to count as an essayistic form, exemplified by Agnieszka Piotrowska’s film Lovers in Time or How We Didn’t Get Arrested in Harare (2015) and her complementary book Black and White: Cinema, Politics and the Arts in Zimbabwe (2016). Part two consists of Piotrowska’s reflections on the making of her film, on the nature of postcolonial trauma in psychoanalytical terms and to what extent it can be worked through or ameliorated by creative collaborations. Piotrowska offers some further ‘behind the scenes’ insights into the experience of making a film in a post-colonial, post-traumatic environment, and the knowledge gained through this experience.