An innovative, multifaceted creator with a major influence on feminism, with rich film and academic work. OUR Trinh T. Minha he visited a few hours ago – and for the first time – a city where, in his context 13th Athens International Ethnographic Film Festival with the support of Onassis Culture, she spoke about her first film, among other things”Assembly» (1982).

This film became one of two film screenings within the framework of the festival dedicated to the 40th anniversary of its creation. It is an exploration of Senegalese women and rural life, while at the same time raising questions about the ethnographic conventions of cinema. A montage of fleeting images from Senegal with no narration, although the film does have sayings from Trin T. Minh-ha. There is music, silence, and the creator’s goal is to emphasize the audience’s expectations and the need for them to be given meaning.

Trinh T. Minha was born in 1952 in Vietnam. He is a writer, professor of gender studies and rhetoric at Berkeley, and an artist. She is one of the first non-Western artists who left their country in the 1970s and settled in America. Then the post-colonial question is combined with cultural studies, and the director becomes a symbolic figure in the spaces associated with the deconstruction of the dominant Western view of third countries.

She began making films in the early 1980s and quickly developed into a figure inextricably linked to both ethnographic and experimental cinema. Her work is directly related to feminism. One of the revolutionary steps in her career was that she disenfranchised women who wanted to make films, giving them greater freedom. Undoubtedly, her work is authentic, as she speaks “not about something, but from nearby” (“not about talking; just talk near”). And that’s what marked a big shift in who has the ability to speak for others.

In terms of structure, the pioneering filmmaker presents a different way of filming, challenging the traditional documentary format and disrupting established ways of exploring different cultures. He “breaks” the forms of linear narrative, “breaks” the need for observation. The image is out of sync with the sound, and this is one of the elements that makes her film difficult to work with. These are “deep cinephile” films that don’t have the expected flow. She is very concerned about the limits of memory, of contact, of her association with the world. But the main thing is that her work is not limited to closed spaces, and she herself does not “fit” into the label.

Another iconic film of the author is “Surname Vietnam first name Namfrom 1989, which was not filmed in Vietnam. In it, the artist has been exploring the status of women in this country since 1975. The film consists of news and archival footage or printed information, interviews with five contemporary Vietnamese women. “This allows the practice of the interview to enter into a game of truth and fake, real and staged.” Trinh T. Minha, showing both directed and “spontaneous” interviews, outlines the differences between the two. The film invites the viewer to explore issues such as identity, the fictions inherent in documentary technology, and film as a metaphor for language.

Her latest filmWhat about China?» from 2022 is a cultural critique and a one-dimensional dominant narrative that gives place to the polyphony of China’s indigenous people. Set in rural China in 1990s footage, the film mixes poetry, songs, and oral history to reveal the country’s complex history as well as the complexity of itself.

Film screenings of the festival continue until December 4 online at ethnofest.gr