Tuesday, March 24 th , 2020 , 5:30-7:00pm in the GEM Lab (FB 630.15)
HOMING— The Homes of the Women of My Rural Home—is a research-
creation project that explores the process of documentary co-creation as a tool for dialogue with women from different cultures living in the same rural area. Working with the concept of home, this project invites local women to a process of intercultural documentary co research- creation. It uses a range of methods and strategies such as “small places” and microhistorical methodologies, poetic inquiry, “storybridging” and indigenous methodologies as a method of inquiry. Out of this process emerges a collage of diverse microhistories of women and rurality. This process is used to foster a sense of home and belonging as a means of countering the increasingly hostile world in which we live.
Oral history is at the heart of HOMING, as it is used in stories of home, thought intim
ate conversations and listening, in order to connect us—women from Lanaudière
together. These conversations—recorded in the small place where I invited the wome
n, the place where I feel the most at home on Earth—become the narrative of the documentary,
together with images and sounds of home that are created with each woman. HOMING listens to each mother tongue, takes care of each experience, of each form of knowledge. In that way, HOMING proposes other ways of knowing and of being. Beyond stories, the process of co-
creation is open, mobile and flexible, and invites each woman to participate on her own terms. “Informed consent” shifts to “sensitive engagement,” which is a“continuous process of negotiation” (Thomas 2017, 50) as a result of authority sharing.
Iphigénie Marcoux-Fortier co-creates films anchored in the territory that raise
questions of identity, highlight intercultural encounters, philosophies of life and, like
a silent mantra, that listen to details. As a filmmaker-mentor, she has accompanied
the creation of more than forty short films in indigenous contexts. In light of this
background, Iphigénie conceives documentary filmmaking as a political and poetic
process, as a flagship tool, and as a tool for bridge building.