Skilled Vision: The Homeless City—Behind the Making of an Ethnographic Documentary

Abstract

Here we look at the process behind the making of the film Very Very Different. It was created in the city of Bari (southern Italy) by five homeless people who joined in its production and took part in the storytelling workshops organized by INUIT. These aimed at letting participants bring their own stories and share them gradually, fostering familiarity with audiovisual language in order to merge their specific inclinations with the production of a participatory film. Each session was presented as a moment of mutual learning. From the writing of the screenplay to the shooting and editing of the video itself, participation was the conditio sine qua non for the mutual exchange of knowledge: the technical knowledge of field experts and the local knowledge brought along by the homeless group.The five authors chose a common subject and started the discussion from a news report. Then they inflected it according to the priorities of their personal narrations. Each video shows the city from the street’s point of view and it carries values, imageries and significance to the spatial boundaries. The film exhibits altogether several perspectives and tries to negotiate them: the use of visual means and the concept of authorial commitment, the ethnographic encounter and the weight of relations between researchers and informants, the spatial sense and the construction of personal visualscapes.