EMBEDDED FILMMAKING

Outsider-Insider

CONTEXTUAL NARRATIVES

History Culture Power

My training as a journalist compels me to set these humanistic portraits against a backdrop of historical, cultural and political context. Reductionist narratives are avoided as the story navigates accuracy and meaning, advocacy and aesthetics. As an optimist, I focus on solution-oriented stories driven by passionate individuals who strive for a better future in ways both big and small. 

I am a woman filmmaker. I approach my art from a position of being an insider in the developing world and a peripheral voice in the developed world. As an artist, I work intuitively with the individuals whom I portray, and strive to create an intimate space that allows for mutual self-expression: me through my lens and the subject through their quirks, humor and dreams. Complex issues can be humanized this way, allowing the audience to connect with the individual's endeavor, grasp the stakes, and care for the issue.

It is in moments of social transformation that the potential of storytelling is manifest. Here, storytelling becomes an act of empowering peripheral voices. An act of reclamation from the truth-constructing enterprise of history. An engagement with popular imagination, and a counter to the polemics of self and other. Through my work, I examine the role of storytelling as a  “social art”: if such a concept has value, and whether, like the painter Arshile Gorky’s portraits of victims of the Armenian genocide, art can interpose between history and its marginalized players.