Join us for a screening of "Nobel Nok Dah" and a conversation with Ethnocine, a collective of visual anthropologists and filmmakers who push the boundaries of documentary storytelling through decolonial and intersectional feminist practice. What are the stakes of feminist documentary storytelling during times of authoritarian resurgence across Southeast Asia? What is the range of methods, pedagogies, and teaching that are necessary to sustain decolonial afterlives?

Nobel Nok Dah offers an intimate view into the lives of three refugee women from Burma whose migratory paths cross in Thailand and eventually meet when they resettle in central New York. Drawing upon methods of feminist oral history and ethno-fiction, the film traces glimmers of subjectivity that complicate any singular narrative of the refugee experience. As camera movements follow the textures of everyday life and work, a weave of sensorial fragments immerses audiences in women's narratives of self, place, and belonging." -- Ethnocine

Emily Hong is a Korean-American visual anthropologist and filmmaker who has worked in Thailand and Myanmar for fifteen years. Emily’s non-fiction film and video work combines feminist, decolonial and ethnographic approaches with impact-oriented storytelling. Emily’s short films GET BY (2014), NOBEL NOK DAH (2015), and FOR MY ART (2016), have explored solidarity and labor, womanhood and identity in the refugee experience, and the gendered spectatorship of performance art, respectively. Her current feature-length project ABOVE AND BELOW THE GROUND features indigenous women and punk rock pastors leading an environmental movement in Myanmar’s North. Emily is the co-founder of Ethnocine Film Collective and Rhiza Collective and a Leadership Team member of the Asian American Documentary Network (A-Doc). She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies and Anthropology at Haverford College.

Mariangela Mihai is Romanian multimodal ethnographer and filmmaker. Her work builds on decolonial, queer, and feminist sensory ethnography methods to understand Indigenous resistance, borderland disputes, and refugee issues on the India-Bangladesh-Myanmar-China borderlands and in "the Balkans.” Mariangela’s films have screened at international film festivals, universities, museums, and public and art institutions in Athens, Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Paris, New York, Yangon, New Orleans, Los Angeles, DC, and San Jose. Her latest media projects include I Am A Whisper, My Dear, a collaborative ethnofiction film exploring LGBTQIA+ activism on the Southeast Asian borderlands; and, Anatomically, the heart is always incorrect, a multimedia play that uses autoethnography, poetry, animation, and digital storytelling to explore Eastern-European embodiment, politics, and heritage. Mariangela is co-founder of Ethnocine Film Collective and a board member of The Society for Visual Anthropology. Currently, she serves as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Media and Film, in the Culture and Politics Program at Georgetown University. 

ZOOM LINK: https://tinyurl.com/ethnocineatucr

Moderated by Dr. Emily Hue, Ethnic Studies and SEATRiP Program