The first episode of the new season of the DOK Industry Podcast has just gone online. Filmmakers Sameer Farooq and Marley McDonald join host Aisha Jamal to reflect on the specific role that documentary films can play in the decolonisation of museums.
Sameer Farooq introduces his experimental documentary “The Museum Visits a Therapist” (co-directed by Mirjam Linschooten). This film focuses on the collection in the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam’s prominent museum of ethnography, and asks: What if the museum were to go to a therapist? What might such a trauma-centred therapy session reveal?
Marley McDonald is currently developing a documentary project entitled “The Elephant in the Room” which focuses on American natural history museums. This film, which consists entirely of archival footage, attempts to discern what collections show and hide about their past, present, and future.
In this episode of the podcast, our guests explore such questions as: What does documentary film add to the conversation around art restitution and museum collections? What are the ethical concerns when dealing with archives? How can images, objects or entire collections be further decolonised?
Sameer Farooq is a Canadian artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent. Using a versatile approach involving sculpture, photography, documentary film and anthropological methods, he explores strategies of representation to add to the ways in which museums have investigated the past through collection, interpretation and display.
Marley McDonald is a filmmaker, animator and painter. She was an associate editor on “Spaceship Earth” and “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” and an additional editor on “Listening to Kenny G”. She completed her first feature film, “Time Bomb Y2K”, for HBO in 2023.
Documentary filmmaker and curator Aisha Jamal is a member of the Programmers of Colour Collective and a curator at the Hot Docs film festival in Canada. She is currently working on her second documentary film about art repatriation and museum culture.
The podcast is available from the DOK Leipzig website as well as from Spotify, Google Podcasts and Deezer.
The DOK Industry podcasts are produced in collaboration with What’s Up with Docs and the Programmers of Colour Collective, with the support of Docs-in-Orbit and funding from Creative Europe, BKM, MDM and the City of Leipzig.
Listen to the podcast episode: DOK Industry Podcasts
