Folk filmmaking in the Wakhan Valley, Tajikistan. Islom Mirzoev and the Davlatjon family helped us re-tell an old snow leopard story. We'd been in the village a few days, struggling to get going, when the children found us. They'd hosted AA three years before, recognized him, and led him straight to their house for tea.
What is Folk Filmmaking?
Inspired by feminist and decolonizing thinking, we developed folk filmmaking to center the interests of those featured in our storytelling.
The centering can take various forms. In some instances, our partners direct us. In others, they receive the training and tools to produce their own work. We called our method ‘folk filmmaking’ because it initially focused on folklore and retelling old stories through modern performance.
Since our initial work on folk filmmaking, we’ve come to understand the method more as a guiding principle and orienting practice than as a formula or protocol.
In action, it’s always shifting. Sometimes it means helping ease the technical burdens: asking people what they’d want to make and then helping them make it. Other times it means working with cellphone footage, clips shared via WhatsApp, forgoing aesthetic and artistic concerns, focusing on content more than form. It’s often cobbling. The more projects we do, the closer we tack to the principle, the more challenging they become. The challenges assure you you’re folk filmmaking. The method guides the process: focusing on craft while removing ego and initiative, helping others express their ideas and themselves and realize their visions, while you tend to the lift of the filmmaking (whether that’s conceptual or technical).
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We learned this approach not only from my studies, and mistakes flailing across cultures, but especially from working with friends.
I don’t remember when I first picked up my mother’s VHS camcorder, or when I left it in the yard and our dog, Yukon, a snow-white German shepherd, grabbed it, dragged it and broke it, ending my videos for awhile. But I remember that, since the beginning, my friends helped me make movies.
From the childhood friends doing flips and tricks on boards and out of trees to fellow graduate students doing cool things in cool places (or just looking for birds), we worked as collaborators, co-authors, telling the story together. We worked as friends. That’s what we aim for with folk filmmaking. Through time and conversation and collaboration, coming to work together as friends. It may sound foofy, and I suppose it is, but the idea is simple. On each project, we approach our partners as if we’ll become friends, as often, we do. The method’s about attending to the relationships more than any other aspect of the project. It’s about relinquishing control, letting the subject lead, and the story find a life of its own.
The truth they convey is hopefully that inherent in self-expression.