In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Ethnographic films have been widely understood as transcultural . . . They remind us that cultural difference is at best a fragile concept, often undone by perceptions that create sudden affinities between ourselves and others apparently so different from us.1 There is no institutionalised world of ‘documentary studies’, although . . . I argue for the emergence of just such an interdisciplinary field of inquiry in which a range of theoretical and methodological approaches converge and in which the object can be photography, film, video and the digital arts as vehicles of historical representation. Although it is essential to retain a sense of the specificity of each of these media forms, it is equally important to develop a sufficiently inclusive rubric and critical community capable of embracing them all.2 Renov’s rallying call in the epigraph above for expanding the compass of documentary inquiry,‘responsive to the best of cultural studies’ attention to both the micro level of social phenomena and to the broader contextual map’,3 has been most instructive in conceptualising the cross-disciplinary terrain of my ethnographic film practice and its textual reflection during the past decade, conducted initially in Scotland with the production of a short performative documentary titled Silent Song (2000)4 about an exiled Kurdish musician, and latterly in Ireland and the Philippines, Here To Stay (2006) and Promise and Unrest (2010).5 Drawing on my theoretical background in the academic field of cultural studies, in which instantiations of identity formation are always inflected by the interplay of race, class, gender, religion, age and ethnicity, among other performative dimensions, the corpus of films made to date has been directed thematically in relation to migration, gender and globalisation, routes, rootedness and displacement, cultural and embodied memory, and the political expression of migrant subjectivity. Taken together these intersecting and observable spheres of lived experience, topographical and corporeal in their reach and having a close affinity with the moving image, have the potential to harness the documentary form, as visual anthropologist Lucien Taylor Transnational Scenographies of Care The performance of migrant identities in documentary film ALAN GROSSMAN 19 20 Alan Grossman notes,‘to one of its initial imperatives: to open our eyes to the world, and in so doing, to restore us to it’.6 This chapter sketches in outline form fundamental questions underpinning the production and post-production concerns of two co-directed creative documentary films with Áine O’Brien, Here To Stay (2006, 72 mins) and Promise and Unrest (2010, 95 mins), both funded by the Irish Film Board, with the latter produced under the aegis of the Forum of Migration and Communications (FOMACS) – a collaborative and public audio-visual media project launched in 2007, and designed to reach and engage diverse audiences by way of amplifying voices and personal stories previously sensationalised or marginalised in broadcast and print media depictions of the migrant subject.7 The two observationally led films framed in this discussion represent an ongoing critical convergence in my production between slow-paced, on-theground ethnographic inquiry, allied to a socially engaged documentary interrogation of transnationalised immigrant identity and labour practices in Ireland and beyond. This critical convergence between independent nonfiction film production and ethnographic inquiry has been methodologically envisaged from the outset as a timely medium of analysis offering an alternative , competing set of representations to those dominant strategies readily supplied through Irish broadcast media. For the sake of dramatic emphasis, these strategies can be characterised by on the one hand, portrayals of the migrant as victim whose civil and employment rights have been violated, and who is subjected to exploitation by rogue employers, as evidenced in factual televisual journalism such as Prime Time. While at the other extreme, the nation’s dedicated multiculturalist broadcast policies predominate, directed at mainstream Irish audiences and operating through an admixture of stereotyped and binary representations of ‘difference’, packaged under the rubric of cultural diversity programming, through, for example, fixing, freezing and homogenising the image of the immigrant other, by eliding emphatic class, gender, linguistic and religious differences, among others. These are elided between members of a given ethnic minority group, assuming that all members share an equally symbolic identification with, and commitment to, the given ‘culture’, whether ‘Indian’,‘African’ or ‘Filipino’; and further through perpetuating a dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This discursively positions immigrant subjects as outsiders or, in some cases, tokenistic insiders, the ‘new Irish’ adorned in shades of green, through superficial intercultural celebrations of ‘difference’ materially locatable, for example, through food, music, dress or practices...

Share