Agenda

23 November 2023 - 17:30
Cinema Giorgione, Venezia 

Film screening of  “We are Zama Zama”
with anthropologist Rosalind Morris (Columbia University) 

Followed by a panel discussion with:

Francesca Tarocco
NICHE Director

Valentina Bonifacio
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Lorenzo D’Angelo
La Sapienza, University of Rome

Jasmine Pisapia 
McGill University, Canada

Lisa Stevenson
McGill University, Canada

Organized by Jasmine Pisapia, 
with  Lisa Stevenson and Valentina Bonifacio. 

Free admission | Places are limited, please register here

About: 
We are Zama Zama is a portrait of the informal miners making a living in the depths of South Africa’s abandoned gold mines. With this documentary film, Rosalind Morris weaves a transfixing narrative about the lives of migrants whose flight from Zimbabwe has led them to seek gold in the ruins. The product of years of collaboration with a community of migrants from across southern Africa, it combines immersive techniques, patient interviews and story-telling to create a textured portrait of the undocumented men and women who make their precarious living in the toxic wastelands of the gold industry. With cinematographer Ebrahim Hajee, Morris taught the miners to use cameras underground, and the unprecedented depiction of the days spent in the depths anchors a narrative that moves between the darkness below-ground and the dusted sun-bleached landscape above ground. We follow the migrants as they make their dangerous journeys across the border at the Limpopo River, we attend their funerals and we join them in joyous meals to celebrate their survival, learn of their rich finds and terrible losses. Above all, the film lets audience members hear from the inhabitants of this world as they want to be heard.

TRAILER link

BIO: 
Rosalind Morris is a cultural critic, social theorist and media artist who is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.  Her documentary film work grows out of her long-term investigations of life on the margins of survival, in the worlds made by natural resource extraction. Among these are the feature documentary, ‘We are Zama Zama’ and the short films that comprise ‘The Zama Zama Project,’ (official selection, Berlinale Forum Expanded, 2021). She is currently finishing a book manuscript on the topic of this documentary, entitled Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths and Afterlives of Gold in South. Morris is also the author of seven books and numerous essays, poetry and libretti. Her most recent publication is Accounts and Drawings from Underground (revised edition, 2021). This is her second collaboration with William Kentridge, which also includes That Which is Not Drawn). Morris is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, the most recent of which is a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2023-24, she is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and Society at Leuphana University. 
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