Ecologies of indigenous filmmaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Environmental films by indigenous filmmakers are circulating increasingly widely on small screens and at major film festivals.

They have proved empowering thanks to their potential to rethink the environmental crisis from experience-based perspectives. Despite this, they remain largely unexamined among scholars.

This goes especially for indigenous filmmaking in the DR Congo, where communities living in mineral-rich areas crucial for the transition to green economies are being instrumentalised for greenwashing purposes and subjected to environmental racism. Their filmmaking exposes these abuses and reflects upon the environmental crisis’s uneven effects.

They contribute to the environmental imagination and their worldviews are crucial for the animist turn in contemporary film studies.

This action explores these neglected mediations of the environmental crisis and aims to enrich film studies and the environmental humanities by studying ecological imaginaries.

Through critical content analysis, fieldwork involving participative action research and practice-based analyses of audio-visual practices, I probe how these films articulate indigenous perspectives and build agency. The action will be embedded in the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.

Prof.

Patricia Pisters, the project’s supervisor, is a leading voice in film studies and the ASCA’s research groups stand to enhance the research significantly.

It will benefit from a secondment for additional training at Munich’s Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, ensuring that the project is informed and debated.

A non-academic placement at Cobra Films will allow me to build on my participative action research method to deliver a documentary that bridges theory and practice.

The project will enable the transfer of scientific knowledge and skills among these three institutions, leverage my future academic career, and facilitate further research, publication, and outreach.