Dr Andrea Zimmerman

Biography

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is an artist, filmmaker and cultural activist. Andrea’s work is concerned with marginalisation, social justice and structural violence and has been nominated for the Grierson and Jarman awards. Films include Here for Life (2019, forthcoming), Erase and Forget (2017), which had its World Premiere at the Berlin Film Festival (nominated for the Original Documentary Award), Estate, a Reverie (2015) and Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013), written and voiced by the late John Berger. Selected exhibitions include Civil Rites, the London Open, Whitechapel Gallery and Common Ground, Spike Island, Bristol. She co-founded the cultural collectives Fugitive Images and Vision Machine (collaborators on Academy Award® nominated feature documentary The Look of Silence).

Andrea has made several commissioned short films for Film & Video Umbrella, Channel 4’s Random Acts and Tintype Gallery.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

My interest lies in filmmaking as experimental social practice. My practice consists of diverse engagements with radically different communities both in the making and dissemination of work.

At times of significant social change, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, committed moving image documentary practice comes more than ever into its own as perhaps the most literally and metaphorically ‘telling’ of forms by which to engage both the subjects and themes of its inquiry. Its ability to prioritize those marginalized by mainstream commodity film-making and the means it can employ to enable an open narrative space for individuals, communities, and ways of being, becoming, and belonging through enduring dialogue with its participants is exemplary.

The subtly polemical way it can build its argument through enduring encounter – outside of the template requirements of television production, whether in process or product – means that it offers time, the duration of shared experience, as well as space (the arena of its theme as well as the actual material environments of its content) as active components in its palette of tools. This combination, when allied to its specific role of advocacy, makes engaged social documentary one of the most energized in contemporary moving image practice.