Invitations IV: Therese Henningsen with Juliette Joffé

Technecast

Technecast is hosting the Invitations Series: four conversations by Judah Attille, Therese Henningsen, Mark Aerial Waller and Astrid Korporaal. Each episode is based on a research encounter with a creative practitioner connected to the field of sound & moving image. Together, the episodes question the relationships between audience, screen, maker & subject.This final episode features Therese Henningsen and Juliette Joffé, reflecting on the ongoing curatorial project Strangers Within and the notion of 'documentary as encounter' in their own films Next Year We Will Leave (2021) and Slow Delay (2018).The two films will be publicly shown for the Strangers Within anthology launch and film programme at Whitechapel Gallery in June 2022 in collaboration with Prototype.Contributors to the Strangers Within anthology and film programme are: Khalik Allah, Ruth Beckermann, Jon Bang Carlsen, Adam Christensen, Annie Ernaux, Gareth Evans, Xiaolu Guo, Therese Henningsen, Marc Isaacs, Juliette Joffé, David MacDougall, Laura Rascaroli, Bruno de Wachter, Yuya Yokota, Andrea Luka ZimmermanStrangers Within addresses convergences between encounter, hospitality and autobiography in documentary filmmaking. It engages with the risks of encounter, unsettling assumed distinctions between host and guest; stranger and friend; self and other; documentarian and protagonist. By challenging commonly held assumptions around the division between director and subject in the documentary encounter, it unsettles the filmmaker’s presumed control over those she films. By staying with the difficulty of such encounters the camera can keep us open to risks that may otherwise be avoided or ignored: seeing oneself in strangers or becoming a stranger to oneself.Links for reading: Towards A Transpersonal I by Annie Ernaux [https://www.annie-ernaux.org/texts/vers-un-je-transpersonnel-2/]Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger [http://dorothyproject.com/book/suite-for-barbara-loden/] , excerpt here [https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/6820/barbara-wanda-nathalie-leger]Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran by Gohar Homayounpour [https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/doing-psychoanalysis-tehran]*Therese Henningsen is a filmmaker and programmer based in London. Her filmmaking often takes shape through the encounter with the person(s) filmed and the direction this may take. Her films have been shown at Whitechapel Gallery, Chisenhale Gallery, Whitstable Biennale, Close-Up Cinema, SMK Statens Museum for Kunst, among others. She is a member of the two film collectives Sharna Pax and Terrassen, both engaging with the social life of film. She collaborates on ongoing film and research projects with artists and filmmakers Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Juliette Joffé. Therese came to filmmaking through anthropology and holds an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College. She is currently working on a practice-led PhD in Media Arts at Royal Holloway University, and teaches on the MA Documentary and Ethnographic Film at UCL.*Juliette Joffé is a filmmaker based in Brussels. Her films have been shown in festivals such as Visions Du Réel Nyon , FIDMarseille, Open City Documentary Film Festival, Astra Film Festival among others. Her first film Maybe Darkness was awarded a Wildcard For Best Documentary by The Flemish Film Board allowing her to direct The Hero With A Thousand Faces which won Best Short Film Film at Mostra Internazionale Di Cinema Di Genova. She has recently finished the mid-length essay film Next year, we will leave. She runs the documentary course in Brussels- based art school Preparts. As part of her programming practice, she was invited to introduce the work of Belgian filmmaker Olivier Smolders at Open City Documentary Film Festival 2017.*Image Credit: Still from Slow Delay, Therese Henningsen (2018)