“We had to care, we knew no one else would.”

Abstract

Domestic violence and gender-based violence are being reported in increasing numbers throughout the world. The statistics, as well as the headlines, are brutal and heart-breaking but little is being done to address the issues in a rigorous and decisive way. This shows not only that our societies are still a long way from accomplishing gender equality, but that the increasing polarization in attitudes and information exchange, possibly contribute to the decrease in humanism and care. In Portugal for instance, most homeless women have previously been the victims of domestic violence. Which makes this vulnerable group even more excluded and marginalized. As part of a practice-based research for the PhD, I started a collaboration with a Lisbon based organization that advocates housing first strategies in dealing with the problem of homelessness in general, but the project is focused on women particularly. Throughout 2022 we have been building foundations for a women’s association run and organized by the women who are or have been homeless, and whose main goal is to approach and care for Lisbon’s homeless women based on peer support. A collaborative interactive documentary is an important part of this process. Its production is being used as both a tool for empowerment, and at the same time, as a part of an outreach strategy aimed at the wider Lisbon public and their cognizance about women’s homelessness, drawing attention to a series of specific problems that homeless women face. The baseline question is if and how the interactive documentary can contribute and serve for the voices of these women to enter the debate, to show various points of view and sensibilize the community for their issues, as well as to display the lack of policies and propose the bottom-up approaches and joint strategies, offer feasible solutions and build collective action to seriously address women’s homelessness. Theoretically and methodologically, the constructs of polyphony and co-creation are very important factors here. This approach helps in building trust among different actors, where the authorial role vanishes, and the narrative is controlled and shaped by several participants. Our hypothesis is that it could also help in producing affect and care, firstly among peers, which is already being observed, and then among the documentary’s audience. The promise for social change often gets intertwined with documentary filmmaking, and the discussions around impact and change did grow in the last couple of decades, in industry, in marketing, at festivals and around funding opportunities, and coming from different filmmakers, activists, NGOs and other stakeholders. It is often talked and written about, but rarely proved. This paper does not aim at establishing the proof of the direct link between impact and documentary, but it will, through one case study, explore the affordances of collaborative interactive documentary in raising awareness, building hope, fortifying personal relationships, and fostering affect and care.