Becoming Undesirable: Produção Audiovisual em Tempos de Repressão
This two-day seminar takes as its point of departure the film My Undesirable Friends (2024) by Julia Loktev, which will be shown entirely (323 min). The documentary follows journalists and cultural figures in Russia as the space of public speech is progressively narrowed — not only through explicit repression, but through the gradual transformation of everyday life under growing political pressure.
From this sustained observation, the seminar opens a broader inquiry into documentary cinema and its relation to the real: what it means to record, to testify, and to produce images when appearing entails risk, speech becomes incriminating, and the circulation of images is unevenly permitted or obstructed. Censorship emerges here not only as a visible prohibition but as a structuring of the sensible — a prior shaping of what may appear, what may endure, and who may speak — while self-censorship and “anticipatory obedience” mark the moment in which this structuring is internalised, fragmenting solidarity and participating in the production of silence.
In the context of the genocide in Gaza and the war between Israel/US and Iran, similar pressures have become palpable in Israel, where repression targets not only Palestinian journalists, filmmakers, and cultural workers documenting occupation and state violence, but also Israeli Jews and foreigners who publicly oppose these policies; and beyond Israel’s borders, where political, cultural, and media institutions in Europe and the United States increasingly regulate, condition, delegitimize, or punish speech and dissentwhile sustaining the self-image of democratic openness. Without collapsing distinct political formations into equivalence, the seminar seeks to think cinema as both practice and problem: as a medium that claims proximity to the real while remaining entangled in regimes of power, and as a fragile counter-memory that tests what it means to speak out under increasingly repressive conditions today.
About the film
How do you keep fighting for the truth when your country declares you an outlaw? What begins as an intimate epic about young Russian independent journalists fighting Putin’s regime takes a drastic turn when Russia invades Ukraine and they must choose whether to flee their country. A front row seat to how authoritarianism works and the lives of those who resist, which becomes more and more relevant both globally and in the U.S. every day. An intimate epic that captures momentous historic events real time and feels somewhere between a reality show and a Russian novel.
The Ongoing Seminar
The Ongoing Seminaris a series of encounters in Lisbon dedicated to critical thinking and collective reflection on the role of cinema in the present, the relationship between images and politics, and the emancipatory potential of documentary practices.
This seminar is co-organised by Doc’s Kingdom and IFILNOVA/CineLab, and free and open to everyone. Please write an email to phildoc@fcsh.unl.pt if you would like to attend. Registration is mandatory, as places are limited.