Students from the MA Documentary Film course leave as multi-skilled filmmakers, able to direct, shoot, and edit impressively professional work.
Graduates from this course join the next generation of celebrated faces behind the camera, showing their films in festivals, winning awards and working in broadcasting and the creative industries. This year’s films, exhibiting at LCC Postgraduate Shows 2017: Show 2, include a record of the longest train journey in the world, personal work exploring family histories, life in remote communities in Finland and Africa, and much more.
We highlight some of the projects on show…
Rubban Shakeel
Bubbli
Bubbli Malik is a transgender rights activist who runs a canteen at the National College of Arts Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Living in a country hostile to transsexuality, she’s had to face discrimination and death threats. The film provides a unique insight into her journey and how she has managed to fight for the rights of the transgender community amidst aggression against sexually diverse individuals. Narrated by Bubbli Malik herself, this is her story of struggle.
Rubban Shakeel is a documentary filmmaker who aspires to make films that raise social awareness. He believes in using the creative medium to amplify the voices of those who need to be heard. His filmmaking style is bold and emphasizes on the importance of visual narrative. This is his first film and he hopes that it can positively contribute in uplifting the image of the transgender community in Pakistan and across the world.
Inês Alves
No Ângulo das Ruas (At the Crossroad)
Lourenço Marques and Maputo, two cities separated by time, that occupied the same space. But the dimensions of one get mixed up with the past events of the other. It’s been 41 years since João, a Portuguese man, the father of the director, left Mozambique. This was one year after the country became independent from Portugal.
In this film the director travels to Maputo, the capital, former Lourenço Marques, for the first time, bringing her father’s memories and the desire to meet the people that live in this post-colonial city today.”
Inês was born in Portugal and has a Master’s in Cultural Studies. Inês is a filmmaker and has been involved in several artistic, cultural and pedagogic projects. She is a member of Gato Aleatório Colective based in Lisbon, with whom she organizes laboratories and exhibitions of collaborative cinema.
Ana Carolina Baquero
Mi Tía Piky (My Aunt Piky)
Every family has a secret of its own, what we commonly know as ‘a skeleton in the closet’. Eventually, when unattended, this skeleton comes out to haunt us and look us in the eyes. Mi tía Piky (My aunt Piky) is a personal documentary about a family tragedy that happened 25 years ago but has not been talked about since. After an unexpected event, a traditional family in Ecuador has to put up with a terrible loss. Their way of dealing with it was through silence.
This is an intimate journey into the filmmakers own family and her attempt to recall and understand. While life went on for everyone else, family secrets remained in cardboard boxes, videos, forgotten places and photographs. This film is an exploration into the past. How to talk about unspoken things? How do you resurface them and remember?”
Ana Carolina Baquero, 29, is an Ecuadorian documentary filmmaker currently living and studying in London. Her journalistic background led her into the broadcasting world before she decided to explore the documentary filmmaking field. Her signature or style are still yet to be defined, but human and personal stories are her main concern at this particular moment of artistic development. In “My aunt Piky”, her first non-fiction film, she ventures into her own personal history. She unveils unspoken family memories as she discovers a new cinematic language.
Sonja Madani
Love Child
In this documentary, the filmmaker undertakes a personal journey to explore how her birth as an illegitimate child shaped her experiences and the lives of her family.
After finishing her BA in Media Studies at the University of Brighton, Sonja spent several months working for commercial film companies in London before furthering her filmmaking study with an intensive programme at the Met Film School London. Following that, she spent a year in New York undertaking an intensive programme in theatre studies and acting. Sonja has worked on several film sets, at a film commission in Vienna as well as in the field of music PR. Sonja sees herself working in the field of short-form documentaries, music videos and online video content.
Linnea de la Chappelle
Tunhamn 59°55′35″N 22°10′55″E
Sea as far as the eye can see, self-built electricity, outdoor toilets and no neighbours – this is the home of a family on a remote island in the Finnish archipelago. Tunhamn 59°55′35″N 22°10′55″E portrays the life of three family members, 17-year old Ronja who studies to become a ship captain, dad Kaj who lives on his boat, and grandmother Thelma who dreamt of working on the sea, but was born in a time when women were not allowed to.
Although representing different generations, they have much in common: they all know they belong to the islands. This beautifully shot film shows how a place shapes and changes you, whilst it also gives insight to a lifestyle that is slowly dying out.
Linnea de la Chapelle is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. She was born and raised in Finland, but during her relatively short life she had the possibility to live in many different places abroad. As a filmmaker she is interested in people. Especially underdogs and unheard voices drive her storytelling. With her first documentary ‘Naturally Nude’ she attracted a viral audience of half a million. Her second film ‘Barcelona Here We Stand’ was screened at film festivals and won awards. Tunhamn 59°55′35″N 22°10′55″is her third film and the first one she shot entirely independently.
Marie Eissing
Philipp und ich
Philipp is both mentally and physically severely disabled since birth while his twin sister Marie is fully able-bodied. They have always been close but since Marie moved away almost 10 years ago, their relationship entirely relies on her visiting him as often as possible. Philipp und ich is a personal portrait showing the intimate relationship between filmmaker Marie Eissing and her twin brother. It reveals their way of understanding each other even though Philipp cannot speak. The film gives the audience an insight into their family dynamics, both past and present.
Marie Eissing is a documentary filmmaker and video technician based in Munich, Germany. She worked on some short documentary films both during her studies and alongside her job in a major German theatre where she made the video designs for several successful plays and collaborated with some well-known directors. As a filmmaker, Marie is a careful and patient observer of her environment to create intimate portraits of the small extra-ordinary things in life. She has a particular interest in the media representation of disabled people and their families which is why she decided to tell her own story as her graduation film for her MA in Documentary Film.