Revolutionary Patience: Migrant Perspectives On Doing Politics With Documentary

Revolutionary Patience examines documentaries and moving image works by women and non-binary filmmakers from the Middle East/Southwest Asia and North Africa (MENA/SWANA) who are implicated in contemporary and historical waves of migration. The project critiques the social relevance and politics of documentary by locating the critical potential of migrant and diasporic cinemas in strategies of objectification. Migrant perspectives on the strategies of objectification are positioned as critical aesthetic methods and forms of activism that prevent empathic identification as a redemptive act for the viewer. This provokes significant new approaches to thinking about the ethics of documentary.

Ethical debates normally focus on the responsibility of filmmakers. This project shifts these classic debates calling our attention to the obligation of viewers instead. Revolutionary Patience, thus, critiques empathic engagement and offers strategies of objectification, including silences and narrative opacities, as patiently revolutionary methods of doing politics with documentary cinema.

Study of films made by women-identifying filmmakers from Southwest Asia and North Africa with a personal history of displacement.