As a journalist she worked on social issues ranging from the armed conflict in Colombia and sexual violence as a weapon of war to the global spread of cumbia music, and she was twice a winner of the Colombian National Journalism Award. Clare has directed several documentaries and doc series for TV channels. Clare is a founding member of Casatarantula and DOCCO Distribution and Promotion agency. Clare has been a tutor in CreaDoc-MiradasDoc (Spain) and teaches film in several universities. She is frequently invited as an advisor and as a jury in film funds.

Supported by Proimágenes Colombia, Ibermedia, Catapult Film Fund, Sundance Institute, Open Society Foundations, Just Films-Ford Foundation, IDFA Bertha Fund, Avanpost, The Romanian Film Center, Romanian National Television, Chicken & Egg Pictures

We worked with psychologists, experts in trauma, who prepared us for shooting. To know when to stop, and to give tools to the girls so they can also say ‘I want to stop’ with signs with their hands. So the whole team was very prepared,” Weiskopf says. Other considerations included filming extensive research material, which was then checked by the head of the Colombian youth institute and the school’s in-house therapists to ensure the project remained beneficial to the young women, not harmful. When shooting rolled around, a series of workshops took place as well, where the girls were prepared before going on camera and guided into the interviews. Afterward, they came together to debrief as a group. “The interviews were one by one, so it was very intense and beautiful when all the girls came together as a community, and they realized they come from the same place. Normally these girls put on a tough face. Because they’re always defending themselves, they’re always very strong with each other. Here, it was very beautiful what happened because they realized that they’re all the same,” Weiskopf explains.

Working with a vast number of characters, all of whom defied expectations, demanded a different kind of film language. It became clear that an observational film wouldn’t work, and not only because of the number of subjects involved; it just wouldn’t do justice to the girls. “We didn’t want to just follow them,” Van Hemelryck says. “We felt there was much more that could be done with them.”

“We were there about two weeks, but we were very impressed by the girls,” Weiskopf remembers of their first visit to La Arcadia. That was back in 2016, when the filmmakers were initially invited to give a documentary workshop at the school with the local cinematheque. The workshop was short, but it left a lasting impression on the directors.

The result is a different kind of documentary storytelling that is utterly participatory and unexpected, stretching beyond tropes and conventions; forgoing observation in favor of play and experimentation. And, as the filmmakers point out, it means we really get to see these characters for who they are. “There are many documentaries that use the characters to say something about the world,” Van Hemelryck says, painting a hypothetical picture: “a documentary about a war in this or that country; they follow a character, and somehow we don't feel like we really met the character. We don’t know much about them, but following them, we understand a reflection about the war or a specific theme. “Here we wanted to make the contrary, we wanted to really get to know them,” he explains. “In the beginning, it’s just a game—it’s imagination. But more and more, you get into the feeling that you’re connected to the girls, and you don’t care what’s true, what’s not true, what happened to Alis, what’s made up. You connect with the girls very emotionally.

Speaking to Weiskopf and Van Hemelryck reveals a painstaking development period that spanned several years, full of workshops, research, consultations, and burgeoning friendships, ultimately giving way to a cinematic tour de force that paves a subtly subversive course of documentary filmmaking. Significantly, the ethics of director-character relations cannot be separated from the artwork itself here.

Tajiri often focuses her inquiry on the representation of Asians and Asian-Americans in popular media. In Off Limits (1988), she critiques Hollywood's portrayal of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people, juxtaposing fragments from Easy Rider with her own text to give voice to a Vietnamese character. In History and Memory (1990), Tajiri examines the construction of history and the manipulation of collective memory through a powerful pastiche of personal reminiscences and mass media images of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

I was starting to do more photography, mostly of her. My mother’s dementia was very creative, and in between her loss of memory, she’d share these profound insights or tales I’d never heard before. Friends would say, "Are you filming this? You need to make a film from this."At first I couldn’t. But very late into the process, around 2012, I saw that I needed to turn our story into a film. I did this because I came to see how much of a performer she was and how she came alive in front of the camera. It was a surprise because, before dementia, she was very private and would shut down in front of the camera. Now she became an incredible model – really conveyed the mood of a given moment.

Wisdom Gone Wild tells the remarkable story of my mother, a Nisei woman who survived incarceration in an American concentration camp during World War II, and developed dementia late in life. Through interactions with me, her daughter and care partner, she bestows a new name and identity on herself, transforming her past along with her present. In its form and content, the film centers on her perspective rather than a disease, telling the story of a life to be valued, not a problem to be willed away

inal sixteen years of Rose’s life as a person living with dementia. Delicately weaving between past and present, parenting and being parented, the film reflects on the unreliability of memory and the desire to reinvent one's own life when memories fail us.

My mother’s dementia was very creative, and in between her loss of memory, she’d share these profound insights or tales I’d never heard before. Friends would say, "Are you filming this? You need to make a film from this

In this moving and unique film, Professor Tajiri partners with her mother, Rose Tajiri Noda, to create a film about the final sixteen years of Rose’s life as a person living with dementia

where she was involved with The Kitchen art center

Currently, Tajiri is working on a documentary feature entitled Wisdom Gone Wild,[8] a film which details her sixteen-year journey as a caregiver for her mother who had dementia.

She partnered with Japanese Canadian author, Kerri Sakamoto, to write a coming-of-age story about a Japanese American girl in 1970s Chicago, resulting in Strawberry Fields.

She moved to New York in 1979

The film is about aging and who we are at different stages and moments across the span of a lifetime. Dealing with a parent who has dementia, many aspects of their past, their life story, surface.

It concerns a young Peruvian woman (the captivating Magaly Solier) who, having contracted a mysterious disease that is passed on via breast milk to the daughters of rape victims taken by soliders serving Peru’s deposed terrorist regime, sets out to bury her newly deceased mother.

Llosa moved from Peru to Madrid in the late 1990s. From 1998 to 2001 she studied there at the film academy Escuela TAI.

Bani-Etemad’s fourth narrative feature, Nargess brought her renown with its enthralling story of a young working-class woman who captivates a lonely thief. Estranged from his family, the criminal turns to his accomplice and sometime lover for her assistance in securing Nargess’ hand in marriage. The older woman agrees, on the condition that he remain her partner in crime and that they rekindle their relationship. Bani-Etemad uses the fractured love triangle as a poetic compass to chart the map of a nation torn between traditional social and gender roles and driven by a raw cupidity for wealth at any cost.

My father was a professional photographer, so I grew up surrounded by outtakes and miscellaneous random photos from whatever he was processing in his basement darkroom– I was constantly playing with these images that had this sense of the uncanny–without context as to who was in them or where they were taken. I think this heavily influenced my work because I draw from photography and work from the archive a lot

The story of the film centers on Irene Kawai, a Japanese American teenager in Chicago in the 1970s who is haunted by a photo of her grandfather she never knew standing by a barracks in a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans.

Tajiri is a Sansei who grew up in Rogers Park, Chicago

In this moving and original reflection on mortality and transformation, Rea Tajiri partners with her mother, Rose Tajiri Noda, to create a film about the final sixteen years of her life as a person living with dementia. Tajiri shows us how to enter the world of a person living with dementia in order to connect through listening, art, and music

Clare has worked on subjects ranging from sexual violence as a weapon of war to the spread of cumbia music.

Clare has spent more than fifteen years working on various social issues, ranging from the armed conflict in Colombia and sexual violence as a weapon of war to the spread of cumbia music in Latin America and Europe

Colombia’s Armero tragedy of 1985, a volcanic eruption followed by landslides, killed 23,000 people, among them Val’s daughter from her first relationship, Clare’s stepsister. Following that loss, Val and her partner canoed thousands of river miles to where she now lives, deep in the jungle, where Clare visits her.

The first half of the film, co-directed with Nicolas van Hemelryck, is effectively a lengthy flashback about the history of Val, who left England at 23 for Colombia to be with her Colombian partner. Her life since then has involved two more relationships, four children by two different fathers, unhappy periods in England, experiments in communal living and lots and lots of traveling. Val values freedom above all things: “Your life is your life,” she passionately tells us, and the idea that a woman might have to sacrifice herself for her kids is hateful to her. She wants a full life, free from routine. On paper it sounds great, but perhaps not so much if you happen to be, say, her daughter.

As a journalist she worked on social issues ranging from the armed conflict in Colombia and sexual violence as a weapon of war to the global spread of cumbia music, and she was twice a winner of the Colombian National Journalism Award. Clare has directed several documentaries and doc series for TV channels.

The most important thing about your life is your own life’ answers Val unapologetically,

Perhaps many people for two and three decades now have been lookingbackward or inward, or for escapes into nostalgia and heritage they canpossess, when looking ahead is no longer a source of confidence.

journeys into realms of nostalgia and exoticism areavailable for anyone who can afford to travel

Unfortunately, the urge to kill for memoryis both ancient and new every day and every generation in the world

Historyasserts the authority of academic training and rules of evidence

No, teaching at a non-R1 and doing Digital Humanitiesrequires a certain do-it-yourself (DIY)ethos. But, DIY also implies uncompensated and oftentimes un-credited work