This is the first screening of the collaboratively produced film ‘Volviendo a Vivir’. The film tells the stories of displaced and conflict-affected women, now living in Bogota and Medellin, Colombia. Through their voices and gazes it illustrates how they have resisted the different forms of forced displacement and violence that many experience(d) and live(d) through in the country.
With this film they provide an account of their experiences, learning, perseverance and empowerment from moments of displacement, in the defence of their rights in the cities of Medellín and Bogotá, up to current negotiations and aspirations of their urban futures. By sharing their pasts and urban presents, they aim to unite their voices to show the reality of many Colombian families with the hope that their (her)stories will not be repeated in next generations.
The film was produced by an innovative remote participatory video research design by using women’s smartphones for filming. Over a period of 10 months, a team of researchers and filmmakers in the UK and Colombia, and the 24 directors, met in weekly online workshops to train women in filming techniques, review and discuss film material and make editorial decisions. In this session we will show the film followed by a Q&A with the research team and women directors.
This is a bilingual event and we welcome English and Spanish speakers to attend.
Meet our speakers and chair:
Dr Sonja Marzi
Sonja Marzi is a lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Glasgow. She is also an Associate Academic of the LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on gendered urban challenges and inequalities in Colombia, cutting across the fields of geography, anthropology, and sociology. She aims to push the boundaries of collaborative and participatory research designs under remote conditions as a means of (re)conceptualising gendered urban challenges in Colombia. Building on cutting-edge methodological applications of film and video in co-produced research, her work centres the voices of marginalised women and contributes to new understandings about their relationship to urban space.
Professor Rachel Pain
Rachel Pain began her career as a Lecturer at Northumbria University where she directed the undergraduate Geography degrees, before moving to Durham University where she served as Director of undergraduate and postgraduate Geography degrees, Deputy Head of Department, and was Co-Founder/Director of the Centre for Social Justice and Community Action and the Participatory Research Hub. In 2017 she joined Newcastle University, where she has recently held the post of Newcastle Director of NINEDTP and Deputy Dean of Postgraduates.
Dr Michele De Laurentiis
Michele de Laurentiis is an anthropologist, independent filmmaker, and participatory-video practitioner. He has carried out long term ethnographic research in Italy (prisons, migration, health care) and in Bolivia (rituals, indigenous politics, mining conflicts). Michele has led independent participatory-video projects in the UK and Italy. He has been at Spectacle Productions, where he coordinates participatory video programmes and video training for social research, for over five years.
María Fernanda Carrillo Sánchez
María Fernanda Carrillo Sánchez is a filmmaker and researcher. She is a professor of Communication and Culture at the Audiovisual Media Laboratory, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México. She holds a master's in documentary filmmaking from the University Centre of Cinematographic Studies (UNAM, Mexico), a master's in social sciences from FLACSO, and a degree in sociology from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her research interests lie principally in audio-visual anthropology, documentary cinema, collective action, gender, and historic memory, whereas her practice has focused on direction, sound, and editing of documentaries. She is an enabler of communitarian and collaborative process of audio-visual production.
Lina María Zuluaga
Lina María Zuluaga is an anthropologist with a master's in education and human rights. She has substantial experience in the use of participatory research methodologies. Lina is a member of the Conflicts, Violence, and Human Security research group at the University of Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia. Lina previously worked on intervention and research projects as a consultant for international organisations, often in close collaboration with indigenous, peasant, and urban Afro populations in Latin America. In this way, Lina has accumulated a great deal of experience in the implementation of participatory methodologies within scholar-activism research projects on issues like gender, human rights, human security, and social policy.