Authors in Conversation: Minority Languages and Documentary Media

[00:00:05] Andreea Cârstocea: Hello and welcome to a new video discussion hosted by the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, or how we prefer to call it JEMIE. My name is Andreea and I am the editor of this journal. JEMIE is a peer reviewed, open access, fully online journal published by the European Center for Minority Issues in Germany. We publish original research exploring minority majority relations in an interdisciplinary manner, drawing on political science, sociology, anthropology, international relations, history, social psychology, and cultural studies.

[00:00:40] Our video discussion today will focus on the most recent special issue we published, exploring topics related to minority languages and documentary media. The special issue was published in July this year and examines the relationship between documentary media and minority and minoritized languages across diverse historical, political and cultural contexts. The special issue which you can find, of course, on our website, includes five articles in the Book review and was guest edited by Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones and Dafydd Sills-Jones.

[00:01:13] Elin is an internationally recognized academic specializing in minority languages, sociolinguistics, language policy and planning, cultural policy, media, and literary translation. She is director of the center for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies at the University of Wales. Trinity, Saint Dafydd and Dafydd is a media maker and scholar with a background in documentary and digital media production. He is Associate Head of School and head of the animation, Visual Effects and Game Design Department at the school of Art and design of the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.

[00:01:47] Elin and Dafydd will be moderating the conversation today and of course, introducing the contributors and their contributions to the special issue. Dafydd and Elin, the floor is yours.

[00:02:01] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: Thank you very much, Andreea, and it's good to be able to have this discussion this morning. I'm just very soon after the launch of the special issue. And thank you very much for the opportunity to be able to work on that special issue with you and with all the contributors that we have with us today. So Dafydd and I, we we work together for quite a number of years in Aberystwyth in Wales, where we were both teaching and researching at Aberystwyth University.

[00:02:35] And then very well, I think about sort of eight years ago now, we both 8 or 9 years ago now, we we both left that department as it was being reorganized and restructured and various academics moved to different parts of the world and to different institutions to continue their careers. And when we were working together, we were very much involved in working in this intersection between language and documentary. So I suppose that the journey towards this special issue starts well over a decade ago, doesn't it have it? And it was when we were working and teaching and researching together at that same institution. Obviously we were talking about it just before, wouldn't we, in terms of trying to trace the, the, the, the very start of it? And I think we had slightly different beginning points and then we met in discussion about it then. And that's kind of grew from there.

[00:03:33] Dafydd Sills-Jones: So certainly for me, I'm trying to look back at the date of the, of the program that was presented by Iolo Williams back in 2011, actually a long time back where there was a very interesting documentary in Welsh television where Iolo Williams would speak in Welsh and he would speak, speaking to, some Cree members of the Cree tribe in North America, and they would speak back to him in Cree. And, I remember being quite surprised by it, and I kind of then being quite reflecting on why he was surprised by it. But of course I was surprised because usually there would be English in between those two languages. And so it was quite a revolutionary thing for 24C to have done that to, to have sort of cut the two languages next to each other.

[00:04:17] And it created a really interesting moment for me. It also made me think, wow, language and documentary. So I mean, I can, you know, read a lot of stuff about documentary, doing my PhD, but documentary and, and language per se didn't really feature. And so they could have made me wonder about it. And then we'd had many conversations around about language policy in broadcasting and language policy in film. And I was thinking, well, we're we're just documentaries sit there. And then we sort of talked about this for, for some time and then, then, then then it sort of became this collection or this, this, this call for papers, for this collection. And, and what's really interesting, I think, is that the collection has established a new area. I really do believe that, because there isn't that much discussion of the kind of dynamics of language within documentaries. It's quite an interesting, gap, I think.

[00:05:10] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: And I think it reflects the sort of societal sensitivity that we have as scholars and as speakers working in what we're calling minoritized languages, but what other people feel more comfortable by calling regional or minority languages or indigenous languages or endangered languages. So I think that our sensitivity, our awareness of that sociolinguistic dynamic within the product that's produced in that media process, the process itself of creating and producing a documentary in whatever kind of subgenre of documentary and the context in which that, that process takes place and that product is produced and is disseminated.

[00:06:10] I think we're just more aware of those power relations when it comes to linguistic representation. And because of our experience of working with people in similar contexts in the Basque Country, in Galicia, in many parts of, of Europe and further afield, we thought that it would be a really good and interesting opportunity to bring people together, people who are working in the context of what we might call languages with kin states, as well as languages that don't have powerful kin states, at least.

[00:06:55] Dafydd Sills-Jones: Yeah. So certainly, I mean, for me, I remember working in a TV company in Cardiff in the late 90s called Taliesin, and that was a very bilingual situation, making documentaries in more than one language at the same time and, and, and code switching and making different versions and things. But that was interesting in all part of the kind of mainstream discourse around the analysis of documentary. And so, so that it was much more, around form, around the visuality of documentaries, which is kind of interesting because documentaries are, you know, you can't get away from it are about words. And very often there are about people talking about their experience. And so that the, the subtlety of the kind of language used, what happens when one language meets another language, what happens when there's a transfer across maybe dialects within what is considered to be the same language?

[00:07:48] All those dynamics in the discussion around documentaries, to some extent hidden. And I think I think that's maybe because at some point, documentaries that had too much talking in them were kind of were kind of sort of jettisoned as being perhaps too official or being perhaps to too much service of ideology or at national broadcaster ideologies, etc., and that the, the true documentary was the visual one, the one that used cinematic language in a new way, and that there was definitely a trend for, you know, throughout the 2000 and into the into the second decade of the 2000, for that to be where the value of documentary sat.

[00:08:29] But I think that does really ignore an awful lot of what's made under the umbrella of documentary. And and increasingly, perhaps, as we get used to, the ease with which documentary can be cinematic and visual. Because it wasn't so easy, maybe with technology, but 20 years ago that that maybe the word word has come back into the picture a bit more. But but certainly is very interesting that it wasn't being looked at with the same kind of intensity. So very glad to have this chance to do that. And I think, you know, your, your work, everybody's contributed here is really illuminated some very interesting aspects of that question.

[00:08:52] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: Absolutely. And as we sort of look forward now we're looking at more sort of short form documentary, all kinds of general that are primarily being, distributed through social media platforms and so on. We can we can see that sort of the written word, if you like, or the visibility of language, gaining a new prominence as short form is subtitled within the same language across languages as well. That's also part of the discussion that we'll have later. And also when we think of that relationship between media and so-called minoritized languages, we know that the the mediating of those languages contribute to social functions, that are not really represented so greatly in the real world, if you like.

[00:10:09] And so the media size of those languages gives those languages a public presence where they are invisible ized in, in, in many, in many walks of life and in many real, real life situations. So we know that that is an important linguistic function as well of media content and the media production processes. So perhaps we could start, turning towards the contributors now to have a brief introduction to, to your, your, your, your article in the journal, and that after we do that, we have some more discussion around the matters that have arisen across the the edited collection as a whole. So.

[00:11:02] We're going to go first to, to María. Yeah. And will you introduce yourself to please.

[00:11:02] María Seijo-Richart: Good morning. María Seijo-Richart, I am a Spanish at the moment. I am in Spain, but I am based in Leeds in the United Kingdom, where I work at the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds. And my article is both related to film and to transport, and to my own Galician culture. And can I share my slides with you? One second, one second please. Is it visible to everybody? Okay. My article is about the Galician correspondencia film, which is both a documentary subgenera and an early form of communicative travel. In this article, I have focus my linguistic analysis on two specific films which you see on the right. One is Idilio. This film was shot in Argentina by the Galician migrant community and sent to the motherland, while Galicia y Buenos Aires was shot in a place called the Riviera in Galicia and then sent to the migrant community, also in Buenos Aires.

[00:12:50] So the Galician language is from northwest Spain. It has around 2,400,000 speakers and is now a days in Spain. But this was not always the case. It used to be forbidden. It was restricted and subjugated. It was even considered a negative social marker. You will be considered low class if you spoke the language and it was totally forbidden at different periods. The most recent was between 1936 and 1975 during the Spanish dictatorship. So it was this was the time when many film industries around the world, and at that time, it was totally impossible for us to make cinema in Galician language. When democracy comes, we find that we have no films nor the visual material, and at that time no budget to produce it.

[00:13:56] So we started having a TV, Galician and TV and film work as one single entity, producing films when they could, and also any material in Galician film material in Galicia and from the early 20th century was lost. Only in the last 30 years we have started to compile and recorded and recovering it, and it has been appearing in film archives all around the world, especially in countries with a high number of Galician diaspora. But it was a big labor of restoration. The scene of the correspondencia belongs to this period to the early 20th century. The cinematography had arrived to Galicia in the early 20th century, and this was a time of massive economic migration to the Americas. It started in 1850s, lasted till the 1950s, and it was also a time of nationalist awakening, aiming to recover Galician language.

[00:15:08] At the time the language was restricted to the domestic, the oral not taught in schools, and we didn't even have grammar rules. So in this climate, the filmmaker José Gil creates the correspondencia in the 19 tens, which we could translate as epistolary cinemas. These films take the form which nowadays we associate to a documentary, but the term didn't even exist at the time, so they show, sorry, the Galician landscape extensively, and our celebrations and these films travel back and forth between the motherland and the Americas.

[00:15:55] They have the specific purpose of communicating with the relatives in the diaspora. So you see the participants facing the camera, looking at it, waving at the relatives as if they could actually see them. And they also present a very positive view of migration. They will focus on showing all the innovations and improvement in the villages that were made with the money sent by the migrants, while the migrants, the films they made in Argentina, in Mexico, places of Galicia, migration, they will focus on showing how, how nicely they live, their common meetings, their common celebrations.

[00:16:46] When analyzing these two films, I was not expecting to find Galician language on them because, as I said, people will mainly use a Spanish in a school, in administration, in their public life. But there was actually intertitles in which Galician language is used. It will happen in very significant occasions. First, there will be popular songs mention well-known to the audience. So as soon as you mentioned the title or the first line, everybody in the audience will be able to keep singing the song on eBay or even singing while it was being projected. Also, there were words that we cannot translate into Spanish, for example, which is a cry of happiness when you are done, sing. And also the Galician language will be used to evoke emotions and nostalgia for the motherland at moments of happiness, at moments of celebration and playfulness.

[00:17:54] In the documentary, the intertitles will always use the Galician language after sorry after 1936, as I said, these type of productions stop. For example, in the film I mentioned before, Galicia y Buenos Aires, there is a lot of political discourse discourses about the Republic, which were totally forbidden during the dictatorship. These films were mainly destroyed, lost. There will be bits left in archives nowadays. They are appearing in archives all over the world, and sometimes you don't even know who shot them or when. But the use of documentary to communicate between the motherland and the Galician diaspora continue through the century. And in relation to what we will discuss later, the fact that now we have internet and social media allow us to produce our own content using a language.

[00:19:04] Nowadays we all study Galician in school, so you can find you numbers of the main documentaries and lots of contents available in Galician language and is activists and preservation go together because in order to advocate for a cinema in Galician language, you first need to know what was done before the history. So that's why it's so important to preserve this type of films, and also because of the correspondencia, seems to be kind of exclusive to the Galician film industry.

[00:19:44] I have found similar experiences in other, but not film being used like a visual letter. And thank you.

[00:20:05] Dafydd Sills-Jones: Thank you very much. That's that's fascinating. We definitely return to those questions later in our discussion. I'd also I'd like to ask Chen Chen now to, to tell us a little bit about your article, which is very interesting. It draws on work that you yourself have done in making documentaries in, in China. Would you like to tell us a bit about that?

[00:20:30] Chen Chen: Oh. Thank you. Dafydd. Maybe first of all, I just briefly introduce myself. My name is Chen. I'm a filmmaker, practice researcher, and educator based at at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. My work explores poetic documentary, semantic space and Chinese approaches to creative practice in general. My article Crafting Poetic Imagery asks what happens when we understand dialect not simply as the content of documentary, but as something that actually generates cinematic form. So the case study is the documentary I made last year, Little Potato, a film about my own grandmother who has lived with dementia since ten years ago. The film moves between her fading memories of everyday life and the hallucination produced by her condition. She speaks through the dialect, a local form of Wu Chinese dialect associated with a particular region called Jiangnan.

[00:21:48] So during the filmmaking and editing process, I realized that the dialect was doing much more than just establishing identity. So it's tonal qualities, repetitions, inverted words, rhythms, and everyday poetic expressions influenced how I actually constructed images. For example, my grandmother often repeats words and sentences in ways that are not very common in today's normal Chinese. The repetition actually carries both rhythm and emotional duration. So during the editing process, actually responded to this internal rhythm by shaping the scene around the movement of her voice. The inverted word order actually are quite common in Juji dialect and other dialect in China region. So I actually use that as a way to inspire my editing approach to reconstruct on expected shorts in an interesting way, following the structure of the dialect.

[00:23:09] So in this way, linguistic structure was translated into visual and temporal structure. So the general theoretical concept is a Chinese concept called the Xiang system. So there are three key concepts within that system. So Wuxiang refers to physicality which is the first layer Yixiang which is the second layer. It's about the fusion of the external world and the subjective feeling. Then the third layer is Yijing, which describes a broader emotional comprehension. So in this particular documentary actually utilize this Xiang system. Originally from Chinese poetry, which was actually written in the form of dialect, so Wuxiang in this film operates actually on the surface level. So dialect is part of the shell. And together with water spaces, gestures, light, memory, it actually constructs Jiangnan, which is the regional features as the central e sound and produces emotional connection and meaning.

[00:24:37] Especially about loss. So importantly, I don't claim that the decline of dialect and my grandmother's dementia are equivalent because one is about social cultural process and the other is actually a particular condition, but their relationship in the film is a poetic resonance. Both actually allow fragmentation and changing relationships to time to be sensed. So probably I can just quickly showcase one one short clip from the film. Let me see if I can just share the screen.

[00:25:46] Probably. It's hard to share on my end. I'm just quickly to, can you share my see my screen? Okay. It's my grandmother.

[00:26:14] Dafydd Sills-Jones: I don't think we can hear the sound. However.

[00:26:27] Chen Chen: Can you hear me talking?

[00:26:27] Dafydd Sills-Jones: Yes, I can hear you talking. There might be a setting when you're sharing the video that you need to, select computer audio.

[00:26:49] Chen Chen: That's fine. Maybe we just have a look at the image. Yeah, I can talk to about the editing. So if we just quickly move back here, my grandmother actually is inside her mental space. So she starts to get confused about the space. The editing wise. I cut to two kind of quite similar teapots once from the imagined space, when in reality, but they are in not in the story order, which is quite similar to the particular dialect. Yeah, so it's pretty much about me. Thank you.

[00:27:49] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: Thank you very much. And I think we could hear actually the part of the audio there. Sorry. It was just to start with, but thanks very much that I did come through. Great. Okay. If we then we can now turn to Özgür. I hope I'm saying that correctly. Your name? Please do. Tell us about yourself and and about your about your publication.

[00:28:17] Özgür Çiçek: Let me share my screen first. And. You can see it, right? Yeah. So let me briefly introduce myself first. I'm a film scholar, researcher and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam. I started working on Kurdish cinema for my PhD. Mainly like a decade ago. And since then I have been working on it. And, so my paper focuses mainly on Kurdish documentaries produced in Turkey as a very brief background. Turkey has always been home to diverse ethnic and linguistic communities. While the history of the Republic has been shaped by its by strong policies of Turkish, particularly since the 1990s with the advent of digital technologies and cameras, Kurdish audio visual culture has become an important space for documenting Kurdish histories that had very little presence in Turkey's official archives or in mainstream media.

[00:29:25] And, when I started working on Kurdish cinema around 2007, at a moment when it was increasingly being discussed as a cinema in its own right, one of the first functions I identified in Kurdish cinema was its capacity to create what I call a archive for Kurdish people, basically an audiovisual audiovisual space in which unmediated Kurdish histories and memories that had been excluded from official historiography could be recorded, and in this way preserved and circulated. In this article I returned to this archival function, but I narrow narrow the question to language, and I ask, what happens when documentary turns attention to Kurdish languages that have been suppressed in public and institutional spheres? So basically, I ask, how can film preserve languages and how can it reconnect language to everyday experiences and ultimately to the world it names?

[00:30:28] That question becomes the starting point for the two concepts I develop in the article documentary as dictionary and documentary as Classroom. For my theoretical framework, I start with Stanley Cavell, particularly his idea that we learn language and learn the world together. For for language and world are formed together and one is distorted, the other is distorted as well and covered for the rights that what seems like finding the world in a dictionary is actually a matter of bringing the world to the dictionary.

[00:31:08] I take this quite essentially, and the question becomes if a language has been suppressed, marginalized, or made invisible, how can documentary reconnect that language to the people, to their lives, and to their memories and to their worlds that give it meaning? I also make a lot of use of Kurdish studies and for that, for instance, Geoffrey Haig's work on The Invisible of Kurdish, which helps me think about the political and institutional processes through which Kurdish has been rendered absent or illegible in public life.

[00:31:47] I also use Coşkun and Uçarlar's concept of the ‘scar of tongue’ to think about the effects of mother tongue exclusion in education. And, this the scar. Their work is especially important for the second part of the article, where I look at the classroom and how the classroom documentaries becomes a space in which linguistic oppression is reproduced and, foreign language is enforced. So the objects of analysis I first look at where is my mother tongue, what I call as documentary as dictionary. Through Bêrîvan Hikmen's documentary, the film follows Mustafa, an elderly speaking man who becomes concerned with reserving his mother tongue that is disappearing from his everyday environment, and he begins recordings as a key words, and eventually uses a small camera to record this as a key names of objects, places around him, whatever he sees.

[00:32:51] And what is interesting is that the documentary itself gradually begins to take the shape of a dictionary, preserving Mustafa's mother tongue, and also a means to attach a key to the world around him. And, the two other documentaries that are classroom documentaries I bring together. One of them is on the way to school. It could it be, and it is. It follows, a Kurdish speaking children in a primary education setting. And how they in a way, encounter Turkish as the compulsory education. And the teacher finds himself in a position of foreign language teacher, which he was not expecting. And observational documentary introduces the audience towards that process. First, a shock to reflect how the students have no understanding of Turkish and later how the teacher deals with that, and takes this question into another context.

[00:33:57] Kurdish women who have already experienced Turkish as an impulse or dominant language encounter German through language classes connected to their migration process and their first experience in language learning, which was forced, influenced negatively their foreign language learning as well. And I conclude the paper through arguing that these documentaries function both as acts of language preservation in the form of creating a documentary that functions as a dictionary, and for exposing erasure and its aftermath through documenting forced language processes and classroom oppression.

[00:34:40] In both ways, they offer means to preserve linguistic diversity within the form of documentary and to confront and dismantle linguistic erasure, and in doing so, the documentary film becomes a means of uncovering or altering the hegemonic invisibility of Kurdish ness, transforming visibility itself into a form of decolonial reclamation. Many thanks.

[00:35:08] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: Many thanks indeed, and so many, themes there that you raisin in that that particular context of Kurdish language that we know that resonates with so many others too. And we can go into some of that discussion later. So now can we turn to Sergiusz to present your article?

[00:35:08] Sergiusz Bober: Thank you. Can you hear me?

[00:35:08] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: Yeah, yeah.

[00:35:08] Sergiusz Bober: So my name is Sergiusz Bober. I'm a senior researcher at the European Centre for Minority Issues, working primarily with Minority Language Media. And perhaps I should also mention, that I'm involved in the PLURILINGMEDIA COST Action together with Elin, actually, which is a network bringing together academics, scholars and the practitioners working in the field of minority language media through which we try to consolidate this, this research field in the broader European context. Let's put it this way. Yeah. And that's for my my contribution to the special issue. Perhaps I should first mention that the, my focus was, would be good call called short or mini documentary. So it was not like this one hour long films, you know, distributed in cinemas. So it's something much way shorter but actually delivered and broadcast in a, in a very structured way because it was a part of the weekly news bulletin of the German minority in Poland.

[00:36:40] So that that that weekly news bulletin was basically divided into two parts, and one was featuring news items reporting the the life of the community, cultural, educational, political to some degree and so on. But the first part was usually devoted into, into, into a single topic. And that feature was running across a pretty significant number of minutes. If you take into account that the whole new splitting was like usually 12, 13 minutes. So this mini documentaries were having 5 or 6 minutes in terms of length, and they were focusing on on a single topic, discussing this at length from different perspectives, using some, some, some artistic means of expressions, which I will also return to later.

[00:37:24] So this is important in many, many and short documentaries. In terms of the community, as I said, it's the German minority in Poland. It's a it's a recognized minority. It is a state minority. In terms of very basic demographics, its it numbers something around 150,000 members. But I cannot say that these are actually speakers because a significant part of the community speaks German, but also comparably significant part of the community speaks actually Polish and Silesia, the regional language.

[00:37:58] And the reason behind that, I don't want to dwell to, to to long on this, but this is linked to different historical processes, political processes, mainly resulting in what has happened in the aftermath of 1945, in those territories. So basically, you know, they were they were given to Poland, you know, due to the, the, the, the, the big powers agreements. And then what followed was basically a policy of anti-German ism, resulting in the, in the, in the civil ring of the transmission mechanics mechanisms of the language, you know, and only in recent 2 or 3 decades, this is, you know, the community with the help of the keen state, you know, and the whole state to some degree, although I will also make it new and present some, some, some nuance on that later.

[00:38:45] The community is trying to to reclaim this lost, you know, transmission mechanism and time loss and so on. And the younger generation speaks, you know, increasingly very good German, you know, but with the elderly members of the community, it's still, you know, polishing and selecting, which is important here, you know, because we discuss language. And this of course translates into into certain practices related to language. In the context of the short documentaries that I will I analyzed in my text. And following this, I have to say that I had two main folks in my in my analysis. So first was language actually, and the other was geographical space. So in a way we can in terms of research questions, we could, we could, we could say that the first one concerned the ways German was used in the documentary, both in the technical sense, in terms of, you know, certain policies governing that they should, because as you can imagine, this is a bit problematic since such a significant number of the community members are not fluent in the language.

[00:39:45] And then the second concerns geographical space. So in a way, how this documentary format tries to perhaps create a certain map, certain picture of the of the of the region where this community lives, where this community lives, you know, because of course, yes, we know it's Upper Silesia, but perhaps in the actual content, it's something else. And yeah. And in terms of the language, it's interesting because on the one hand you have, as I said, the very technical aspects, you know, so there are different techniques which which are aimed towards increasing the number of German in the, in this in this short documentaries, of course, it's a German minority. So perhaps it's not surprising, but again, due to the social context in which this is happening, there must be certain ways of increasing the visibility of German, which is definitely a guiding language here.

[00:40:34] So of course, what's happening here is that a lot of subtitling is used. You know, a lot of voice over is used so that there is Polish. Sometimes there is Silesia, but German, you know, is being put to the fore through those additional tools, which in a way compensate kind of for the, for the lack of the language spoken at the level of the, of the actual community. And as I mentioned, there are certain guidelines within the team that that was producing that that content concerning concerning that, you know, but what is also interesting language is also used as a topic in those short documentaries, you know, so you can you can find short documentaries discussing different educational initiatives, you know, which as opposed to a normal news items, you know, they go deeper into what has been going on.

[00:41:17] So for example, they interview pedagogues explaining certain concepts behind behind certain types of workshops. You know, for example, the children attend, you know, or the literary sources they, they use. So something you wouldn't normally see in the short like a half a minute news news item in the, in the, in the for for for such a, you know, weekly bulletin format. Language is also discussed, for example, as a, as a tool through which, you know, community members can, can improve their, their, their personal careers, basically, you know, because it's linked to job opportunities with a lot of investors coming to the region from the from Germany, for example, from from other German speaking countries. This is also discussed in such a way which perhaps you could interpret as a sort of, you know, incentivizing mechanism.

[00:42:05] You know, it's good to learn German for identity, of course, for access to culture, but also for, for individual, individual careers. So there is there is, there is there's all those different layers of discussing the addressing the language, you know, how do we want to achieve a certain amount of German in the documentary, but also how do we discuss the language, what language means for us, for the community, individual members of the community, and so on.

[00:42:29] And in terms of the geographical space, it's interesting because when I was interviewing the people producing the format, at some point, they said, well, for us, the German, the Silesia is where our people are. Which is interesting because the minority in the core sense of the word it leaves in Upper Silesia, which is divided into two administrative regions, regions of Poland. But that statement from the producing team indicates certain level of flexibility in terms of, you know, where the boundaries this imagined boundaries of the of the region reach and through the process of, you know, the content production and the distribution of content, you certainly see that certain vision of the geographic, let's say you reach of of of the region and of the communities being produced, you know, and and on the one hand, it goes like in terms of the depth.

[00:43:19] So certain locations are being like symbolic locations important for the community, you know, true. Which members can sort of get a deeper understanding of the of their meaning. But you have also you have also the territorial aspect, you know, so so for example, which is linked to what María was saying, diaspora is mentioned very frequently. You know, that actually the members of the community are living elsewhere in the in the world, which is also resulted to different, politics related aspects, which I mentioned before because a significant part of the community just left, or whether or rather, was made to leave the region in the aftermath of two.

[00:43:59] So, so, so that's very interesting because that really shows that that Silesia is where our people are. You know, they are they might live in Germany, but they also might live elsewhere, like quite far away, even from Europe. Also in the historical sense that is mentioned because, for example, when particular towns where the minority lives, sometimes their histories are approached to to stories of important people living in, in, in the, in these areas. And for example, you can learn about different, you know, businessmen, you know, operating in 1819 century with, with with vast commercial empires reaching to North America, South America, Asia, you know, and so on. So in that sense, you can also see that the community is just something is also something more than just this local embeddedness aspect, but it also goes beyond it is open minded, you know, it reaches, you know, towards the work.

[00:44:52] Sometimes it migrates, but sometimes it stays in the area but actually cooperates with with different people from different corners of the, of the world, which I think is, is, is, is, is very, very interesting because it opens this whole interpretation towards this localism, globalism sort of dynamics, you know, so it's, it's, it's something broader than just the local regional. And so this is roughly like this, this, this two let's say main points that I was trying to, to address, but I would what I would also like to add sort of as a, as a way of concluding this little part, is that I also think that documentary is a, is a is a is an artistic expression tool, you know, and even in this context of the, of the, of the, of the new, and you can see that, you know, with the way music is used, with the way shots are used, you know, this is, I think, very important because we are also discussing the spaces where actually minority communities, speakers of minority languages, you know, we will discuss their terminology later, how they can be creative. And of course you can be creative in a perhaps a simple way, you know, from the perspective of art critiques. But you can also, you know, encounter things that are very sophisticated in the case of, you know, the use of different techniques, you know, you can see like quite comprehensive thought process behind the way such a short, even short documentary is actually delivered.

[00:46:20] You know, on the visual level, you know, on the, on the audio level and so and so on. So this is very important. And then just to conclude, you know, media world is of course very, very dynamic. So for example, the format I was discussing, you know, it has changed in the meantime, you know, this documentary aspects are still visible there. But this news bulletin is now a bit different. You know, it is produced by a different set of people in a slightly different organizational context. So I think what is also important here, and especially if we have all those bottom up, you know, initiatives concerning to documentary production, our work is also to just document that, you know, because they tend to disappear so, so quickly.

[00:47:00] You know, if there's something larger which is distributed through cinemas or big streaming platform, then perhaps it can be accessible over a prolonged period of time. But this kind of stuff, like short documentaries, you know, linked to news items which don't have a very long lifespan, a week, maybe two weeks, maybe a month, you know, if you have some kind of a digital archive, they tend to disappear from you, not to mention the bottom up short documentaries which are produced.

[00:47:26] You know, on the, on the platforms like YouTube, you know, and so on. So I think our role here is also to document all those practices and try to try to interpret them, kind of preserve them for posterity, but also offering some sort of a conceptual reflection which perhaps can be useful for for people producing documentaries in minority, minoritized languages. Later in the, in the, in the, in the future. Thank you so much.

[00:47:47] Dafydd Sills-Jones: Thank you very much, Sergiusz. It's very interesting. I think we'll we'll definitely come back, in a few minutes to talk about formats and the future. I think that's definitely a very strong theme coming through for for everybody. Before that, I would like to introduce, or invite Alastair to to talk a little bit. It's slightly different format. Alastair to talk about his, his career. I was very happy to be able to ask us some questions about that, but I think I was to, you know, you please let us tell us about, about experience of the interview, but also the content of it. It would be great to hear from you.

[00:48:33] Alastair Cole: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Dafydd. And thanks, everyone. It's, you know, it's it's. My name is Alastair Cole. I'm a senior lecturer in film practice at Newcastle University. Originally from in New Zealand, but I live in Scotland these days. But I, you know, my I'm a little bit particular as a documentary filmmaker and that a lot of my filmmaking has been engaged with language. And I come from a background academically and linguistic anthropology. But make documentary films for festivals or broadcast for cinema and, and an impact and engagement context as well. But really for the last decade or so, I've worked a lot with in shorts and mid-length and feature documentaries that addressed a lot of these subjects that we're talking about.

[00:49:14] So when I mentioned about this, this special edition, you know, it was something I really wanted to be involved with. And we discussed different formats. And actually what we sort of settled on was an interview that we did together. So that's what that's what the chapter and the articles about. And it reflects a little bit on my experience starting sort of where it came from. But really it sort of crosses a lot of these themes, and it was actually a real joy to read. You know, I read everyone's articles and read where these intersections were. And and obviously, like any academic reader, there's a lot of things I learned from them. But just to sort of see the context of some of many years work with the Galician diaspora and understanding that for my films as well, that's a that context of audiences and how things communicate and the diaspora that's out there that often surprises you as a filmmaker.

[00:50:00] There's something we touched on a little bit. I got on the way to School was one of the most important documentaries I ever saw as a young filmmaker, and I think that that communicating around language and the importance of these films for as sort of just just said about for future filmmakers and for, other producers is really important as well for us to remember that we have a specific audience within language communities, but also with the media practitioners. Chen, beautiful, beautiful to see a sample of your work and and definitely a lot of shared experiences within my own filmmaking, around the poetics and the challenges and and looking at different ways to embrace story that really reflect, that the, the languages that we're working in. And also just talked about the broadcasting community across languages, which is something I can I can definitely talk about within my films that have sort of worked across across different communities in a big way around the world. One of the things that we started with, I, when we were having the conversation, was sort of the basic idea around the language, the challenges and the issues of of representing language within the documentary film.

[00:51:02] And I work within a creative documentary film context. But there's so much about language and communication and code switching that is invisible. It's beyond words as well. And it's one of the gifts the documentary film has in the sense that we have the ability through editing, through observation, through filmmaking, through the visual side of things, to to capture that. But often, as we know, when we're sitting in these contexts where there's, you know, what linguistic anthropologists talk about as language events. There's so much ideology, there's so much context. And, you know, writing, we can we can give a lot of context to that. An article that but films, you know, that they have the gift of being able to communicate in a big way, but also have restriction on what you can necessarily show and communicating these visible things.

[00:51:46] So one of the things I talk about within, I'll give an example of a feature documentary film I made called Colours of the Alphabet. It was a film I shot in a, in a, in a classroom in Zambia that focuses on the lack of mother tongue education globally, but uses the story of some young primary school children in Zambia and their first year of school. We filmed for a year, but within this classroom the children were speaking to the the community language of Soli. The regional language was Nyanja that the teacher was trying to communicate to the children, and officially that I meant to learn in English. The teacher also spoke to a number of the children. There was some Lozi speaking children. She was shifting between them and, you know, in a tremendously impressive way.

[00:52:25] The children were moving between languages. If you weren't a Bantu language speaker, you had no idea really what was going on. So one of the things that was important for that film was to find a mechanism to communicate to French, Italian, English speaking audiences, whoever it was going to be that was watching it in their language with subtitles. And we and I talk a lot about the strategies of never getting that with multi-colored subtitling that became part of the film, and it becomes part of an argument that you're making with these films that, you know, this is important. This isn't something that just as filmmakers, it's a it's a side issue. This is a theme of the film.

[00:53:00] It was it was about the the talent and the incredible nature of multilingualism. But then multilingualism is itself in somewhere like Zambia, a lingua franca. The idea of being able to speak across, these, these, these community. And then one of the I sort of went on to talk about how an, a production level that has to happen and a role that I often have with my films, is someone I refer to as a producer of language and translation, and one of the first people I, I tend to get on board with any film, is a key translator and a key language expert.

[00:53:33] That will go with me through the whole project. And often it's in the case. I talked about Iorram, the Scottish Gaelic language film that I made, I, I wasn't going to make it until I had. There's a couple of key people that I needed before I even talked to producers, before we even talked to funders, we weren't. There was no way we were going to make that film. But what it did mean that if someone was there at the start and they had a much bigger role than the credits and everywhere is really, you know, being the font of knowledge, but also being the key person that is a referral that you talk to and you work with through the whole filmmaking process.

[00:54:09] And I noticed it in your introduction. You mentioned, you know, some other research around that, you know, talking about that was work done in London as well, that that, you know, the importance for translation. And some people might be watching this that are translators and other filmmakers as well, this point of communication with them, film practice, that's really important with the multilingual and language based films that, you know, translators to really understand film practice, but also, film filmmakers to understand translation and the practice and the ethics around that.

[00:54:38] Some of the other things we discussed now, when when we were doing our interview, we talked about the impact of technology. I think it's going to come up in a further conversation, which would be really interesting to to get everyone else's feedback on. We've you know, I've been fortunate with the releases of my film that we've been able to over the last decade, work with VOD, digital technology. We released Colours of the Alphabet in 30 African languages, indigenous African languages, across the continent. And then we released in the UK, we had a very specific release. It was meant to be going to cinemas and we because of Covid, we had to first go on the board system, which is a ticketed cinema system. And I've talked about this in the article that actually what we were able to do, which was a frustrating thing to not have bums in cinemas initially, but we were able to get people in later on, but because the film was entirely in Scottish Gaelic and it was the first film that was the first creative feature length documentary of a ever in Scottish Gaelic. And that wasn't an intention. That was sort of something we discovered afterwards, but we were able to release the film in Scottish Gaelic, which is, you know, a national language of Scotland. It's a it's a regional language here in the UK. But of course, it often is confined to A or B or specific areas.

[00:55:52] And what we're able to do is make English, the English subtitles, just one of eight other options. And to be able to do a full cinema release in the UK with English, Italian, Chinese, French, Polish, we had to do subtitles as the collective options, whereas the main language is the language of the film and it's a British film. This was quite an important, you know, subtle but important point that we were able to embrace with, with digital releases. And so there's there's a discussion around AI as well, which I think is a very present issue and an interesting one around, you know, lowering the cost of labor and translation within production. What that really means, obviously, the importance of human engagement is really key.

[00:56:35] But, and then one of the final areas that I think is going to come back around in a conversation as well is around documentaries, roll and language preservation. This was a theme that, for me, impacted the capacity of documentary film to engage and impact the policy or be at public awareness or public understanding is really important. It's one of the reasons I, you know, really want to make a lot of the films I do, the power of documentary through emotion, through storytelling can engage audiences in different ways.

[00:57:05] We know that as we watch films, but policymakers are just the same. If you can get a really great piece that that will speak to them, you can get them in the room, and then you can scaffold that with the key research that's often surrounding it. You really do have an opportunity to to to start making arguments and fostering empathy with not just audience, but with people that can actually put out change makers. And I've seen that a few different times. I've talked about a film in my that are produced within a Bolivian context with that was entirely in Ayoreo, which was a very, you know, a language that spoken by 5000 people in eastern Bolivia. And what was important, there was not so much the policy makers, but the screening is that the film was talking about, the wildfires in the region.

[00:57:50] It wasn't not talking about language, but it was talking about a very prescient issue, but it was doing so from a perspective of indigenous knowledge and indigenous languages. That in itself was important. That and like Sergiusz mentioned before, that sometimes films are engaging in these with with language themes, but often when they're not. That's also really important for the non speakers of that community to understand and to and to, you know, to to start thinking and looking at these language communities, but perhaps in a more effective way and understanding the issues that they face.

[00:58:24] So I'll tie up there a little bit that the interviews there, but, I'll look forward to chatting with everyone about their work and obviously it's been a real pleasure to read. Thanks a lot.

[00:58:34] Dafydd Sills-Jones: Thank you very much. Alastair, I just want to add at the end, I thought Colours of the Alphabet for me was a, a revolutionary film in that it was such an intentional choice technologically, but that, that it was, again, interesting. It was a bit like the Williams film. It's kind of like you, you did it. And then ever seen that before? And and I kind of thought, well, you dos to you for doing. But also why haven't I seen that before? It's interesting that that was a technological device that people hadn't used. And it made me think of, a film like Forest of Bliss, for example, which sort of did a pretty did in some type of things so that it can have exotic language.

[00:59:14] So you weren't allowed to know what was going on. And, and, and, and the because of that, there was a kind of, sort of Orientalism about it which, which is, which was highly problematic. And I think that it was very interesting to see your your take on it. I'm kind of wondering whether that is maybe the big question that's behind a lot of the, of the, of the, of the articles in the, in this, in this issue and, and you know, the, the, the great brief some ups you've given us.

[00:59:44] Thank you everybody to today, tonight, this morning regarding technology and intention. Really it's kind of it's almost like the, the technology quite often is there. But how do you use it and and what, what what what does how does intention work with technology. And perhaps I don't know if that's a good question to start off with. We haven't got a huge amount of time for questions, but, maybe that's the central question, but especially looking forward from now on words, maybe learning lessons from the past.

[01:00:15] How does technology and intention work with language and documentary? I don't know if that's too big a question. Or if if anybody wants to comment on that.

[01:00:15] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: It kind of takes us to Raymond Williams as well, doesn't it? Because of Raymond Williams's observation around technology and societal uses of technology and that, you know, whether we live in a, in technological determinism or whether we can adapt the technologies that we want and that we have symptomatic technologies instead, and it also links us to the to the issues around, that who has the right to be to be producers and are we producing for societies where we live, or are we producing for societies outside the, the, the, the object of, of of the documentaries? But I think that it's all it's all kind of interconnected, isn't it. And whether we whether we embrace that technology, whether we own that technology, and it also raises the issues around technological sovereignty too, doesn't it? And the sovereignty of of of the data that's used to, to build that technology.

[01:01:41] And I think that as, as people who are concerned with, the futures of, of linguistic diversity, we we're very much aware of the contribution that it can make that, you know, very often people joke around, well, I want my, my language to survive, even even if it's only spoken by a machine, you know, in the future. You know, if that's the future for languages, I won't mind to be in that future too. So I think that there are so many issues, aren't there to to unravel here. And I think that that that the where you started, Dafydd, with, with looking at how that technology is used, I think it's really, really fundamental to where we go next.

[01:02:29] Alastair Cole: I mean, I would what links a lot of that. And then I think they really, you know, points there is that documentary films specifically are made within, you know, especially the public facing boards are made within a, within an industry, within a, with a network within a production context. And, and I think that it's interesting talking to distributors and producers and accessibility specialists and language specialists and where the pressures are coming from. And unfortunately, with all the technology, often it's there and you can sort of say, well, hang on, why aren't we doing this in ten languages? How come these. This is not just going out and major languages, but the question comes back and it's money and it's audiences. And that's the commercial end of, of of a film release. But then I think there's a really interesting process, academics and, and highlighting the priorities around that.

[01:03:16] And often it's an argument because there are incredible audiences out there for people, if they would bother to put their films into English as if films would would work in different ways, or they would embrace technologies. And I think around the question of, you know, who is producing which films and which languages? I think it's a really important one. I've faced it personally a lot. And, you know, I have taken a position that for me, films are never made by an individual. It's made by an entire team. And it's and I think, you know, anyone that puts a film made by and the name I think is, is killing themselves. But I especially for documentaries because I think there's such a community and it's such a collaborative process, and that goes well beyond the crew.

[01:03:56] But it also highlights that, you know, you for me, it's it's been possible and it's whether it's with the Scottish Gaelic community, it was we were never going to make Iorram without BBC Alba on board. Whether we didn't have, the key translators, the key language community, which became a team of a dozen people that were supporting myself with key editors, with key people on board, and then then that scaffolding can can give myself as a filmmaker the confidence to do it.

[01:04:22] But I absolutely understand the argument, and I think it's a really interesting one about who and who can and should make these films.

[01:04:22] Dafydd Sills-Jones: Talking of production cultures, I just had a word from the producer to say that we actually need to come to some closing comments. So I don't know if anybody else has a terrible segue, but I had to do it. I don't if anybody else has some closing comments they want to make, from their positions as, as authors for these great articles in this collection, which again, thank you very much. So much for contributing. It could be around technology or anything that really that you want to say that that has come up in this conversation.

[01:05:00] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: I say, María, has your hands up and then we can go to Sergiusz after that.

[01:05:00] María Seijo-Richart: Okay. In relation to what you were discussing about Alastair, it was a huge, huge advancement for Galician language that we were finally able to use it in platforms like Google or YouTube. I am all the time watching parties, soap operas in original language, and I can put the subtitles in. No problem. But for many years this was not the case. You will go to a library and you will be able to have the menu in Catalan or in bars. Never in Galicia. We were always the poor relative and the advance of technology also has to include Galician language. You cannot depend on who which community has wealth or the budget to include those things. Our main problem was the lack of prestige and the lack of money.

[01:06:14] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: Thank you, Sergiusz. You also had your hand.

[01:06:14] Sergiusz Bober: Thank you know, just very briefly, I think it would be good to sort of think about next steps, you know, as this community of researchers and clearly, you know, technology comes up as the main thing to, to, to monitor. And then as mentioned before, you know, with changes so quickly that that perhaps you should we should also of course, the academic publishing cycle is a bit against us. You know, it's much slower than the technological changes, but nevertheless we should try to observe it, you know, comment upon it, interpret it and so on. But what what also comes to the fore from what Alastair was saying, is this whole issue of the because the technology is there, I think, you know, it's it's relatively I don't want to make it sound too easy, but it seems that it's relatively easy to produce a documentary, whether it's a good documentary, it's another thing, you know, but it's relatively easy.

[01:07:08] But of course, there's all those bottom up initiatives. But then there are also initiatives which I was trying to cover, which happen in a more institutionalized way. My understanding is that if you want to go to the cinemas, you know, that's also highly institutionalized. You need to talk to distributors, you need a specific format. You need money for a documentary that is relatively long and the whole commissioning process. You know how this shapes, you know the the expectations. Because of course, we have a community and then the artist or media content creators and their kind of aspirations. But then we also have the people, for example, who control the distribution channels, you know, and they also have some kind of expectations, you know, how would you present a given community, how much of a language you need to to.

[01:07:55] You're expected to have in the documentary. So I think that would be something also interesting to explore comparatively, maybe how the commissioning process goes when you produce this bigger and more ambitious, you know, documentaries. And then when you also produce them in the, you know, broadcasting context. But I think it also can be can be transferred to the bottom up initiatives, because at the end of the day, it's also about views about the audience, you know, and how those people kind of reflect upon them.

[01:08:21] You know, because I imagine that most of the people who produce documentaries, they want them to be seen by someone, you know. So so there must be also some kind of a process, you know, structuring that, you know, whether I'm tackling this topic or that topic, you know, whether I do it only in Scottish Gaelic or, you know, in Scottish Gaelic, in English, whether I subtitle or not, all that stuff. So I think that would be really great to, to to look at that background kind of aspects, you know, resulting then in the, in the documentary content that of course, we also need to continuously analyze. Yeah.

[01:09:00] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: Great. Well I think anybody has any more I think as good as coming in.

[01:09:00] Özgür Çiçek: Yeah. Just just wanted to pop in in terms of this technology background and or the technology layer, which has been very important for my research as well, and ties a lot to all the discussions taking place here. What was important in Kurdish context was that actually Kurdish representation already existed before digital technologies emerged, especially for sound archives or oral archives that have been kept in in the personal spheres. But what the digital technology enabled was that these sound or personal or domestic archives could find the means to become intermediate layers in documentary practices. So from that perspective, the documentaries we are talking about, I think all of us are talking about have all these different digital layers. And especially in, in the in the Turkish context, Kurdish film festivals then become a very significant means for all the audiences to come together and watch their histories on big screen.

[01:10:09] This is important for them to to, I don't know, to connect with each other in these first festival venues, and then the festival itself becomes a certain kind of technology for bringing people together and becoming a means for sharing the Kurdish language and culture. Thank you.

[01:10:09] Elin Haf Gruffydd Jones: And those sort of moments of people coming together as a collective are so important, aren't they? If it's based around a film, documentary, music, poetry, literature, whatever kind of art forms these moments of of encounter together, together. Are so important, especially when we're looking at diaspora communities but also atomized in society. And that sense, that sense of being part of a larger group of people, a larger collective, a so important. Dafydd, are we going to go to closing the session?

[01:11:18] Dafydd Sills-Jones: Thanks. So, so sorry for that. I did it a little bit precipitously there. Earlier on. Sorry about that. Yes. I mean, I think, I think we could go on and perhaps as, as Sergiusz was suggesting that there is another there's a part two to the, the this publication journey. So we should keep that in mind. But, ness anybody has any posing comments that like to make, I would like to maybe tie it up there and thank everybody very much, but I'll leave a pause in case there is something anybody wants to say.

[01:11:59] Great. Okay. Well, thank you very much, everybody, again, for for having been on this journey with us. And and it's, it's great to see this collection out there. And I hope this chat also helps people who will be, you know, accessing this work to also be able to, understand the context around it and also hopefully, as we feel. But there's more to be said in this area and hopefully we can get together and do some of that research in the future.

[01:12:21] Andreea Cârstocea: Also, I wanted to thank you on behalf of JEMIE. Thank you for thinking of us and for submitting your manuscripts to us. We're very happy, to be able to publish this special issue. And, I'm sure you will attract a lot of interested readers, in your in your work. Thank you very much. Also, on behalf of JEMIE. Thank you. Thank you so much.