Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, Professor of Screen Studies and Co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, and Louis Massiah, Director of Scribe Video Center, delivered the keynote roundtable for the Co-creation: Delights, Discontents, and Dislocations Sympsosium at Skidmore College on April 16, 2021.

Zimmermann and Massiah are the co-programmers of national touring exhibition We Tell: 50 Years of Participatory Community Media. Their discussion focused on the “States of Violence” program in the exhibition. 

The roundtable featured Zimmermann, Massiah, and two makers whose work is featured in We Tell, Anula Shetty and DeeDee Halleck. 

We Tell is a traveling multi-screening exhibition that restores to co-creative documentary practice its rich, multi-vocal 50-year legacy.  

Based in collaborations between media-making organizations and frontline response to varied forms of repression, the films in the “States of Violence” program give the narrative authority, and sometimes the camera, to those who experience and resist violence in forms as diverse as intimate partner violence, mass incarceration, police brutality, and the first Gulf War.  

The roundtable discussed the importance of a community media infrastructure for producing this work, the off-screen collaborations propelling these projects, and the stakes of articulating a history of this short-form, collaboratively-created “cinema of utility,” a too-little studied form of documentary, which festivals and the academy have ignored.