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This article consists of a conversation between dr. Domitilla (domi) Olivieri, scholar and activist, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, renowned filmmaker, writer, theorist, and professor. Through questions and answers, the piece starts with Trinh's take on the notion of the intellectual; the dialogue then continues by traversing some of the themes and issues that characterise Trinh's work as a filmmaker and a scholar: films as forms of political and intellectual intervention; the matter of (diasporic) communities, subjectivities, and locations; how the issue of labels and genres plays out in the film industry; the question of audiences; the film as encounter; politics of knowledge productions; matters of time and temporalities. Sustaining the conversation is also an understanding that Trinh's films do not only address issues of (trans)national movements, encounters, technologies, poetry, and rhythms of lives, but they also enact and perform those very movements. Finally, the article discusses Trinh's legacies as feminist and postcolonial practices, and the role of criticism and (non)knowing in her work across genres and registers of filmmaking that are complex and poetic, as well as strongly political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses some of the challenges and possibilities of taking slowness as a tool to theorize and practice a way of being an activist anthropologist in the contemporary (neoliberal) university. The activism discussed here intervenes in the university itself. To articulate slowing down as mode of resistance to the unbearably fast and exclusionary rhythms of academic life, the article puts into dialogue documentary cinema and critiques of contemporary academia. Turning to the film Inland Sea as an instance of a mode of attention/attending to the world otherwise, the article concludes on the political potential of slowness to become a collective strategy of resistance to the increased culture of quantification, competition, and financialization in the university, and a tactic for an engaged anthropology to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trinh T. Minh-Ha, director, writer, and editor; Produced by Jean-Paul Bourdier; Distributed by Women Make Movies, USA/South Korea/Germany; 2015; color, 90 mins More prominently than in any of her works - with the exception of I Surname Viet, Given Name Nam i (1989), which is the only other film Trinh made that is concerned with Vietnam - the modes and sites of memory and forgetting are central to the film. I suggest that instead of trying to fit Trinh's film into an imagined and fixed ethnographic cinema framework we, as anthropologists, could look at I Forgetting Vietnam i as another compelling invitation to work with our ethnographic observational strategies. [Extracted from the article]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses interventions in race and gender inequalities through critical engagement, feminist social media activism and media representations and feminist media scholarship.

This essay explores the relation between the genre of experimental observational documentary and transnational European spaces. It engages with documentaries that focus on the everyday and the uneventful, and that present alternative representations of liminal places and subjects. The three films analysed are:El Cielo Gira(The Sky Turns) by Mercedes Álvarez (2004, Spain),Liftby Marc Isaacs (2001, UK) andSacro GRAby Gianfranco Rosi (2013, Italy). These documentaries are situated in the debate on observational cinema. The article argues that these films enable the recognition of a collective European temporality and spatiality, where migrants and diasporic subjects are not alien or ‘strangers’, but are part of the fabric of Europe; they are always already here. Through a study of the films, in their specific framing and editing strategies, the article argues that they open alternative spaces of encounter with other subjectivities. The original notion of affective proximities is presented to account for the political dimension of the films. The focus is on what these films cando: their political potential to affecting alternative imaginaries of the everyday lived space of European diasporic subjects, and performing and making sense of the affective reality of transnational movements and encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]