Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter

SoundImageCulture (SIC) and Goethe-Institut invite you for an afternoon & evening of screenings, discussions, and warm soup on the occasion of the Brussels launch of the anthology Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter.
Strangers Within is edited by Therese Henningsen and SIC-participant  Juliette Joffé and published by the independent publishing house Prototype. It explores the idea of documentary as encounter through essays, stories, and other responses by filmmakers, artists, and writers.
The texts engage with the risks of encounter, unsettling assumptions about the distinctions between host and guest, stranger and friend, self and other, documentarian and protagonist.
SoundImageCulture is happy to welcome you to an evening with participating artists and filmmakers Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Mary Jiménez Freeman-Morris, Therese Henningsen and Juliette Joffé.
They will present films and engage in a conversation on their work in relation to questions of representation and encounter.

Reserve your spot via email to: soundimageculture@gmail.com
About the films and filmmakers:

Next Year We Will Leave
Juliette Joffé, 2021, 46 mins

Guided by a sentence from my childhood, I encounter three people in Paris: a collector of lost objects, a princess in Disneyland and a coffee seller. Next year we will leave is a reconciliation with my hometown through a dialogue with strangers. Through a mirroring effect, the first-person narrative echoes the stories of those filmed, questioning the possibilities of the documentary encounter.

Juliette Joffé is a filmmaker and lecturer based in Brussels. Her films have been shown at festivals such as Visions Du Réel; FIDMarseille; Open City Documentary Film Festival, Whitechapel Gallery; and Sheffield Fringe, among others. Her first film, Maybe Darkness (Peut-être le noir), won the Wildcard for Best Documentary awarded by the Flemish Film Board (VAF). Her second film, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Le Héros aux mille visages), won Best Short Film at Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova.

Slow Delay
Therese Henningsen, 2018, 16 mins

‘You’ve got something I want, and I’ve got something you want,’ he said. Twins Trevor and Raymond have lived together in New Cross for fifty years. They opened up their home to me after I approached them on a bus and asked to film them.

Therese Henningsen is a filmmaker and programmer based in London. Her films Slow Delay and Maintenancer (with Sidsel Meineche Hansen) have been shown at Chisenhale Gallery, Venice Biennale, Whitstable Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery, Close-Up Cinema, SMK Statens Museum for Kunst, Cryptofiction, Liberated Film Club, among others. In collaboration with Juliette Joffé, she has co-edited the recently launched interdisciplinary anthology Strangers Within: Documentary as Encounter, published by Prototype, and is working on a practice-led PhD in Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, closely linked to the ideas addressed in the anthology.

Face Deal
Mary Jiménez Freeman-Morris, 2014, 29 mins

The director’s 102-year-old father is afflicted with dementia. His memory loss raises questions about the nature of family lineage and identity. Who has she become for him? A Lynchian journey into illness where images unravel in their texture and words become visionary. ‘Truth is in the eyes of the beholder.’

Mary Jiménez was born in Peru. She studied architecture in Lima before pursuing film studies at the INSAS film school in Belgium. She has been teaching film direction in Brussels, Cuba and Switzerland. Mary is in charge of Sound Image Culture - SIC, a filmmaker’s laboratory in Brussels. Among others, Mary’s work includes films like Du Verbe Aimer (Berlinale - Forum), The Dictionary according to Marcus (Cinéma du réel), Faceless Heroes (Visions du réel), By the Name of Tania (Berlinale - Generation), Fuga, just finished. Her films have been selected at numerous other festivals worldwide.

Art Class
Andrea Luka Zimmerman, 2020, 49 mins

Art Class is a filmed performance lecture playing on, and exploring, the perennial tension between the two key words in its title. It uses the tropes of scholarly presentation and personal confession alongside extracts from the artist’s work, guest interventions, martial arts and meditation exercises and evidentiary found material. The sequence tests the limits of access that working-class artists have to cultural production and to the relevant institutions circulating these outcomes. Alternately playful and provocative, serious and satirical, Art Class favors wit over weaponizing and reflection over rhetoric but does not pull its punches when it comes to the real obstructions to working class creative progress, or to the strategies necessary to overcome such outmoded hindrances.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award winning artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose multi-layered practice calls for a profound re-imagining of the relationship between people, place and ecology. Films include the Artangel-produced 'Here for Life' (2019), which received its world premiere in the Cineasti Del Presente international competition of the Locarno Film Festival (winning a Special Mention), and 'Erase and Forget' (2017), premiering at the Berlin Film Festival (nominated for the Original Documentary Award), Selected exhibitions include 'Art Class' at METAL and LUX, 'Shelter in Place' at Estuary Festival, 'Civil Rites', the London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, 'Common Ground' at Spike Island, Bristol and 'Real Estates' at Peer Gallery.




SoundImageCulture - SIC is a workspace where artists, filmmakers, anthropologists can find support to realise their personal projects.

SIC offers a 12-month program in Brussels that involves artistic coaching through collective seminars, individual mentoring, group critiques, and inter-artist dialogue.