Jón Bjarki Magnússon, the director of Half Elf, will be presenting his paper, “The elf within: Negotiating dementia whilst filming with my family in Reykjavik, Iceland”, at the RAI Film Festival tomorrow. The presentation is part of a panel organized by Andy Lawrence at the University of Manchester, Martha-Cecilia Dietrich at the University of Amsterdam and Angélica Cabezas Pino at the University of Sussex, called “Empirical art: Filmmaking for fieldwork in practice | Politics and poetics of affect”.
In his presentation, Jón Bjarki looks at how the task of positioning himself whilst doing research with his aging grandparents shaped the form and findings of his research. Furthermore, he explores how ethical considerations, necessary for filming someone with dementia, helped him make sense of the complicated spheres that separates sanity and insanity, truth and lie, reality and fiction.
His case study is his feature-length documentary film Half Elf (2020), which is about his grandparents, Hulda and Trausti, both now recently deceased. The process of filming this story and editing a narrative demanded constant negotiation between what one knows as rational and emotional, closeness and distance, familiar and mysterious. The way he made peace was by merging the more pragmatic enterprise of producing a film with a poetic approach to using the camera. Filmmaking here allowed for a way of bridging seemingly incommensurable spheres revealing what it means to be human at the end of a fulfilled life.
Those interested can watch the panel here: https://festival.raifilm.org.uk/film/p26a-empirical-art/, which will be followed by discussions with William Callahan, researcher at the London School of Economics and Stephen Linstead, at the University of York.