Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship: Simone Mestroni

Dr. Simone Mestroni was awarded a Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2017 to aid filmmaking on After Prayers. We’re thrilled to announce that After Prayers has been selected to appear at the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival in San Jose, California this November. Please enjoy the trailer and blog post below!

trailer after prayer_2017 from Rizoma on Vimeo.

After Prayers

Fejo Postdoctoral Fellowship

During the three months fellowship the post-production of After Prayers, a documentary based on Phd research on Kashmir’s conflict, has been completed. More specifically the final editing has been carried out at Rizoma Film studios in Rome with the collaboration of Donatello Conti. Subtitling, titling and color correction were also realized at Rizoma’s during February 2018. At the end of February, the trailer, meant to be used for festival submissions and promotion, was also realized with Conti’s editing support. Audio mixing and designing were then realized in Trieste at A-Lab studios, by a team composed by Francesco Morosini, Emiliano Gherlanz and their assistants. I have been personally following all these operations as beside the technical aspects of the audiovisual editing, many of the creative aspects of the documentary came as a result of the final stages of the post-production.

Beside some editing adjustments and audiovisual polishing the structure of the film hasn’t radically changed from the rough cut version which was presented for the grant application. The basic idea of conveying ethnographic findings into the visual language was accomplished, and After Prayers seems to be able to give an immediate feeling of what the conflict is in the daily life of Kashmiri people, describing the ways violence perpetuates into the valley’s routine throughout ideological, emotional and embodied layers. More than making theoretical findings explicit, the film aims at representing the sensorial and affective aspects of the conflict, so that the audience will be able to empathize with the characters, feeling the pain of a martyr’s mother, as well the rage of a rioter throwing stones at Indian soldiers, or the moral strength of a maimed mujahideen.

Since March 2018, when the film was almost finished, I have started preparing the festival submissions plan, trying to find a balance between different type of events: marked-oriented, ethnographic and human rights related. At the present time After Prayers has already been selected for Doc/player, the online industry oriented platform of Sheffield Doc Fest. This means the film has been shortlisted among the best 200 among thousands applications, and has been privately screened in front of very specialized audience. Notwithstanding this the premiere status is still intact.

At the moment After Prayers has been submitted at almost forty documentary and film festivals and I’m actually waiting from upcoming notifications. Among the ethnographic festival After Prayers will run for Filmes do Homem (Portugal), Jean Rouch (FR), SVA (USA), RAI (UK), Ethnografilm (FR). Considering the academic background of the film I have decided to give a priority to these festivals even considering the chance to hold a premiere in a very specialist environment: the ethnographic dimension can become the documentary’s strength in a broader panorama, and this specific curricula can become a good kick to achieve access to other networks.

At the same time I have already discussed screenings of After Prayers in academic contexts, as Dublin’s School of Law and Government, University La Bicocca di Milano, University Roma Torvergata,University of Messina, University of Catania, University La Sapienza. These screenings are still to be fixed according to festival’s plan and  premiere  requirements. In Italian Universities the documentary will be presented along with the discussion of my ethnographic book on Kashmir’s conflict, Linee di Controllo (Lines of Control), which is going to be published by Meltemi in September 2018. Regarding the dissemination process, the book and the documentary are meant to work in a synergy, ideally pulling the film’s audience into the book’s reading and anthropology students into the audiovisual language, so to blur the borders between the two fields, hopefully opening a fertile dialogue.