[NEWS] Jamia co-hosts the 21st edition of Visible Evidence, the Most Prestigious and Influential International Documentary Studies Conference: [This is an official Jamia press release dated Dec. 29, 2014] The 21st edition of Visible Evidence, the most prestigious and influential international documentary studies conference came to a successful close in New Delhi on December 14, 2014. The Conference was held for the first time in Asia which was co-hosted by the AJK-Mass Communication Research Centre (MCRC), Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) and the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Visible Evidence 21 (December 11-14, 2014), was attended by about 300 delegates from all over the world. Each day comprised of a plenary session followed by three rounds of six simultaneous panels spread over the capacious and centrally located India International Centre in New Delhi. As an international organization of scholars, critics, filmmakers, film programmers, curators and other professionals involved in the study and practice of documentary film and media, Visible Evidence today has a membership of nearly nine hundred spread over a large part for the globe. The first Visible Evidence Conference was held at Duke University in 1993 under the inspiring organizational vision of documentary experts, Jane Gaines and Michael Renov. After that it was held biannually for the first few years and then soon became annual and international in scope with conferences held in Los Angeles, New York, Istanbul, Stockholm and Canberra among others. During Visible Evidence 2011 in New York, Thomas Waught (Concordia University, Canada and Shohini Ghosh (Jamia Millia Islamia) bid for Delhi to be a venue for the 2014 conference. It took three years of rigorous planning, preparation and fund-raising by the organizing team of JNU and JMI before conference was inaugurated on the evening of December 10th. Visible Evidence 21 successfully presented the most recent scholarship in global documentary studies engaging with genocide and testimony; archive, affect, space and gender; colonial ethnography, television documentary and the mockumentary. The selection of speaker represented a wide range from US, Europe, South Asia, China, Palestine, Egypt and Latin America, while the curated package of documentaries had a special focus on South East, and West Asia. The VE 21 was made possible through the generous support of the Ford Foundation, Jamia Millia Islamia, Jawaharlal Nehru University, University of Concordia, University of Westminster’s Department of Media Arts and Design and the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California. As is traditional, the conference was restricted to registered participants but given its location in the Global South, the organizers introduced a sliding scale for registration fees and a bursary for those attending from South Asian countries. For the benefit of non-registered scholars and students, four major public events were planned, two of which were held on the campuses of the two most institutions. The curtain-raiser was a public lecture by Professor Michel Renov at the Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre titled Documentary and Psychoanalysis: Putting the Love Back in Epistephilia. Co-founder of the Visible Evidence conference series, prolific writer and author of Subject of the Documentary (2004), Michael Renov has edited Theorizing Documentary (1993) and Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, Collecting Visible Evidence (1995). On the evening of the December 12, 2014, Jamia Millia Islamia hosted its own special VE event titled Freedom: In Memory of Tareque Masud. The evening was a tribute to the cinematic legacy of well-known Bangladeshi filmmaker Tareque Masud (1956-2011) who died in a tragic car crash in 2011. Tareque’s life and work is inseparable from that of his co-filmmaker and wife, Catherine Masud. Together they made a dozen films of which the most widely acclaimed is the feature length documentary Muktir Gaan (Song of Freedom, 1995) and the autobiographical feature Matir Moina (The Clay Bird, 2002) which won the FIPRESCI prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Held at the auditorium of the FTK-Centre for Information Technology, a packed audience listened to a panel comprising John Greyson (filmmaker, artist and Associate Professor, Department of Film, York University, Toronto), Dina Hossain (independent documentary filmmaker and co-editor of Muktir Gaan, Dhaka, Bangladesh) and Sanjay Kak (independent documentary filmmaker, New Delhi). The event was followed by dinner hosted by Jamia Millia Islamia for VE delegates and special invitees from the University. Visible Evidence 21’s biggest success was its last and fourth plenary. Joshua Oppenheimer’s The look of Silence, the much awaited sequel to The Act of Killing, was screened for the first time in India. The screening was followed by a one-and-a-half hour conversation with Joshua Oppenheimer who spoke to the packed hall of audience visa Skype from Copenhagen. As the Conference came to a close, the hosts of the forthcoming editions of VE declared that VE 21 was going to be “a hard act to follow”.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 15:15:39 +0000