Looking at Themselves

The film is an attempt to question the ways in which the visual narrative is constructed when using the feedback method. The feedback provided by the people involved (the young performers but also the elders) in the Babaluda Feast, turned out to be very important in offering an insight to the ways in which the Feast was depicted by the visual ethnographer. By recoding the shared visual ethnography, which was arranged in big groups in a large screening rooms, but also in small groups in private houses, the film will try to experiment the ways in which the visual narrative is constructed by looking at, the looked at. The montage method of the film will use a chronotopic montage technique (Bakhtin), in which the time and space unity will be enacted in a visual ethnographic present.

Mihai Andrei Leaha

Mihai Andrei Leaha is an audio-visual researcher and filmmaker working in South America. His films have been shown at various film festivals and won prizes. As a board member of Commission on Visual Anthropology, IUAES, and other organizations, he is involved in curating, promoting, and programming ethnographic films at various conferences and festivals. He has taught visual anthropology in Cluj and São Paulo. He has also organized conferences and workshops on visual and multimodal anthropology in Romania, Brazil and Peru. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of São Paulo, conducting research on the DIY electronic music scene in São Paulo.