Illustrated lecture

My approach to non-fiction cinema does not stem from a desire to explain the world, but from a desire to inhabit it. I am interested in experiential cinema, a cinema that is shaped as the filming body moves through a situation, a territory, or a conflict and learns from that process. In my work, the experience of making the film is not a preliminary step or a means to an end, but a central part of the thought that the film articulates: filming as a form of knowledge.

Throughout different projects I have worked from this logic, engaging the senses, perception, duration, and exposure of my body to what is being filmed. The camera then becomes a tool to measure a distance —from the environment, from others, from what hurts or resists— and also to assume a position.

The talk will be structured as a journey through this way of understanding cinema, linking fragments of previous works with the starting point of the project I am currently developing at “X Films”. This is a project born from a childhood memory that of hearing on the news the tally of people injured during the bull runs and wondering, decades later, what bodies those had been and what had become of them. Returning to that question now also implies taking on a new experience –– that of searching for those traces in the present and thinking, from the perspective of cinema, about what remains when the event ends.

Nayra Sanz