Who Tells the Story? Power, Consent, and Representation in Film: The Double-Edged Sword of Empathy in Cinema
by Zhena Faith Omojola Zhena Omojola is a senior at UC Berkeley majoring in Film & Media with a minor in Human Rights. She is passionate about the intersections of storytelling and law, particularly human rights and intellectual property. Currently, she interns with the Criminal Law and Justice Center at Berkeley Law and serves as […]
Sounding the Archive: Sonic Strategies in Panorama Ephemera (2004) and The Natural History of Destruction (2022)
Students taking the course Global Media (Film 145) in Spring 2025, taught by Deniz Göktürk and Kayla Rose van Kooten, learned about everyday practices of documentary film production in works from around the world. A key question arising in discussions of documentary cinema is the relationship of the audiovisual medium to real events. In the following blog post, Yansu Tan […]
A Satirical Promotion: Sergei Loznitsa Goes to the Opera
In January/February 2025, the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive welcomed renowned Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa for a ten-day residency. Loznitsa’s Mosse Lecture on February 5, 2025, was the opening event of this spring’s Documentary Voices series, co-curated by Kate MacKay and Professor Deniz Göktürk. Raiden Shields, a student in Professor Göktürk’s UC Berkeley course […]
Authenticity Sucks! A Biased Manifesto from Future Documentarists
Image generated by Open AI DALL-E2 Students taking the course on Documentary Forms (Film 125 / German 184) in Fall 2022, taught by Deniz Göktürk and Qingyang Freya Zhou, discovered possibilities of engagement with the world through documentary cinema, old and new. The class conversations culminated in a manifesto in which future documentarists contest all obsessions […]
Work in Single Takes, Vol. 2
Students taking the course on Documentary Forms (Film 125 / German 184) in Fall 2022, taught by Deniz Göktürk and Qingyang Freya Zhou, learned about everyday practices of documentary production: filmmakers observing, participating, and reflecting, as they record how human and non-human actors work, live, and play. To gain hands-on experience, the young documentarists made two-minute single […]
“Auf den Trümmern das Paradies”? Ilija Trojanow’s Utopian Prerogative
wie eine meuterei bricht das glück, wie ein löwe aus. ——Hans Magnus Enzensberger: utopia In this blog post, Berkeley Ph.D. student Anna Lynn Dolman reflects on Ilija Trojanow’s Mosse Lecture on “The Utopian Prerogative,” specifically how literature can sketch a topography of the future and indeed affect the world we live in – not by […]
“Nation of Assimilation”
What does it mean to make an investigative documentary on one’s family history? How could the filmmaker and her interviewees represent the joyful and eventful, as well as the painful and awkward episodes of their most intimate past? In this blog post, Berkeley Senior and L.A. native Veronica Jacques reflects on the process of making […]
Behind the Apron: An Investigatory Dive into the Lives of Overlooked “Essential Workers”
Scan products. Put items in bags. Collect payments. The repetitive and monotonous movements of supermarket cashiers often went unnoticed by the average customer — until the pandemic introduced the practice of self-checkout, which reminds us of the indispensable labor of these once “invisible” essential workers, who, it turns out, also live colorful lives outside of […]
Work in Single Takes
Picture source: Harun Farocki GbR Students taking the course on Documentary Forms (Film 125 / German 184) in spring 2022, taught by Deniz Göktürk and Alina Predescu, discovered possibilities of engagement with the world through documentary cinema old and new. Weekly screenings in the film series Documentary Voices, co-curated in collaboration with Kathy Geritz at […]
Polyphone Auseinandersetzungen mit kulturellen Bildern, Vorurteilen und Rassismus im Hörspiel “Bitmemiş – not finished yet” (2019) von Ralf Haarmann und Tuğsal Moğul
Picture Source: Westdeutscher Rundfunk Guest contributor Monika Preuß (Technische Universität Dortmund), author of the MGP blog post series on German radio plays, analyzes the portrayal of lived experiences of Turkish German immigrants across generations in Ralf Haarmann’s recent radio play, Bitmemiş – not finished yet (2019). Das Hörspiel Bitmemiş – not finished yet des Komponisten […]