Drawing on my PhD research, this paper will explore the similitude existing between the anthropological approach to representation and documentary film practices in India. I shall argue that both practices share common features and call for further collaboration in both the academic and practice-based fields. In line with Fred Myers (1991), I suggest that anthropologists are not alone in their interpretative activity. Documentary filmmakers (as well as other practitioners dealing with representation) are, in fact, involved in a similar act of 'intellectual catharsis' (Sontag 1986) to the extent that, as Robert Edmond (1974) analyses, the significance of any documentary film can be interpreted through an anthropological lens. The Indian subcontinent provides a valid example of this similitude and provokes anthropologists to start thinking beyond anthropology. A combination of documentary film practices (from art, ethnography, activism, performance to non-linear images and video-installations) making use of different technologies (from celluloid and video to HD devices and digital platforms) is proliferating in the subcontinent. These practices of 'image-making' (see Favero 2009, Basu 2008, Ramey 2011) are in line with the field of anthropology, dealing with media and visual images. For decades, this area of anthropology has worked towards the integration of technology and images in the process of knowing ethnographically, and today is increasingly emphasising this feature calling for further theorisation (see Banks and Ruby 2011) but also for regional specifications. The Indian example that I will bring to this panel will help us thinking in an interdisciplinary way but also through possibilities existing between the academic-practitioner relationships.

Seeking a vivid 'synthesis of Vertov's cine-eye and Flaherty's participating camera', Rouch compares camerawork with 'the improvisation of the bullfighter in front of the bull' (The Camera and Man, 1973). Capturing and framing the image whilst habituating the subject assume the ubiquitous apparatus of the camera, yet we can rethink point-of-view and the optics of focus and light, aligning them with a deliberate porosity and diversity in feminist reflexive filmmaking. Luce Irigaray, arguing with Nietzsche on the nature of water (1991), suggests it is feminine because it encompasses equal multiple points-of-view; 'she undoes all perspective'. The sensory turn in anthropology (eg: Pink, 2009) allows a reclaimed historiography of womens' approaches to the ethnographic subject. In particular, we can review uses of an aesthetics of affect and visual hapticity (Marks, 2000), in womens' film work and indigenous media collaboration (Deger, 2006); perhaps taking a lead from claims in new studies of female experimental artist filmmakers (Best, 2011; Levitin et al, 2003; Minh-Ha, 1989, 2011; Petrolle and Wexman, 2005). Does a sensory approach recast notions of documentary reflexivity, visual and aural engagement and female subjectivity (Lebow, 2011; Ellis, 2012)? This paper is influenced by ethnographic work with cinematographers and my interviews with female professionals, and by my own practice as a filmmaker using cinematography as ethnography in approaches to material culture, time, place, memory and female point-of-view. I will show clips, where women are the subject, which seem to amplify a "female eye" (Minh-Ha, Longinotto, Greenhalgh).

From 1997-2001 I filmed Australian Aboriginal Elder, knowledge holder, filmmaker and Human Rights advocate, Lorraine Mafi-Williams as she 'squatted' on traditional land to teach and defend a women's birthing lake from imminent destruction. She returned home from the UK and USA in the 90s, globally known but under threat of being locally ignored. After a women's weekend retreat teaching about the land, lake and history, 5 male council rangers moved in to dismantle her camp and evict her.

"We can, under law, arrest you" he said. "But that's your law" she replied. "No, that's the Common law" … "But I'm an Aboriginal, I belong to this land".

The rangers acted illegally, finally handing her a '30 day compliance period' letter. I filmed the event - under threat of being arrested - and she was able to use the footage to negotiate with local council and re-establish her camp where she remained for the next 4 years, transmitting environmental and cultural knowledge to 100s of people from Australia and overseas. She revealed a parallel word. "I want to bring out the unknown… so we can all move together as one". Being Aboriginal, the personal was often, if not always political. In my presentation I discuss how we collaboratively tried to portray her world and cultural teachings and the challenges we faced in conveying cross-cultural 'perspective shifts'.

Lorraine's activism inspired me and I went on to make an award winning film Australian Atomic Confessions (2005) which screened in 25 festivals in over 14 countries.

Mexico 1980: I wanted to write a dissertation on pottery in the context of developmental anthropology. I arrived at a village, at a potter family house, and stayed. They kindly accepted me, we shared our time, and I managed to stay in contact with them till today. 1989: We (my cameraman and I) started an ethnographic film project portraying the potter family. I wanted to show the manifold activities of the women, the daily life, and the economic implications. Later I asked the main protagonist to comment the film. She did it, but she was not feeling very comfortable with it. She was a modest person and she was not sure of the usefulness of the film - till her grandchildren from the US visited her. Suddenly the film became a piece of family history. 2000: She moved to Florida to look after her grandchildren. 2001: We visited her, and she started to use our video camera to record her life there and her reflections on living in the US. I visited her once in a while and the people in the sending village, recording changes here and there. We used the little time we had together to discuss the difficulties she was encountering - very often off camera. Through her I got deep insights in a migrant family life, the worries and hopes. I gathered a lot of visual material, but I still search for a way to make sense out of it without compromising the protagonist's family.

My home town, Perama , is a city that evolves around the industry of traveling and transport in which the family album is often used significantly to remember and communicate the past as well as define an emotional space signifying stability.

The photographic narratives I have assembled into art photography assisted me to articulate and express visually my grief for the death of my father. I will decode visual language rituals involving stereotype family photographs used to externalize feelings of intimacy, and thus assert the connection of the expression of the personal with the political. Walkerdine clarifies of how self-disclosure in auto ethnography is intended to be a way of understanding subjectivity, and that is when "the confessional becomes reactionary". (Walkerdine 1997). Self-directed art photography mediated the reconstruction of the preferred stories sought by me, and thus affected the emotional and cultural landscape of grieving within my family, from which I have been reciprocally influenced. The language of the family photograph as an artefact seriously infested what I choose to remember or forget as well what I chose to be through what I remember. My art photography as a research tool challenged the language that inscribes my memory allowing me through the renegotiating of my relationship with the power struggles intermitted to photography to redefine myself through new enabling identities.

Through ethnographic research, the purpose of this investigation concerns the analysis of self-representations expressed in media, made by people who self-identify as "queer women of color," articulated around the "Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project" (QWOCMAP), "training project of filmmakers and videographers" aimed at women, queer subjects, people "of color" and immigrants in the region of the San Francisco Bay, CA, U.S..The research seeks to understand how well these initiatives relate to the production of local meanings and self-representations into audiovisual media about the "queer women of color", thinking, at the same time, as an opportunity to reflect on these creations and about their production context as a field of disputes. This field provides fertile ground for research, considering that this field is possibly configurated through various processes and modes of subjectivity for the constitution of subjects, intersecting differences, ie, crisscrossing intersections between categories of identication (of gender, sexuality, "race/ethnicity ", nationality.). In the Intersection of the fields of feminism and postcolonialism, these films are made thinking in the effort to built other ways to represent the "queer women of color", proposing visual ways to resist to the normative views about these women. In comparative exercise proposed here I seek to consider the context of production of these films, thinking in the ambivalences of such context: Are these movies "native documentaries" or they share the assumptions expressed in ethnographic films made by women? Or, in another way of thinking, they could be both types of films?

The Hindu caste system has many manifestations. In addition to social hierarchization, it also enables the creation of roles for women so that they may be easily exploited: the devadasi system in some parts of India is an instance. The Institutional rituals whereby the priest was authorized, if he chose to, to have intercourse with any lower caste women in the society who wished to enroll with his temple . She of course has to remain unmarried and subsist on ceremonial begging. Or she ends up in a brothel. Prostitution in India is neither legal or illegal.

The women become commercial sex workers because of poverty, broken family/marriage or social exploitation. Research reveals that women are forced into prostitution by 76% women agents and 24% by men agents like neighbors, family friends, money lenders, lovers, husband, indulge women into prostitution. . Many of them infected with HIV and AIDS end theirs lives when their family members isolate them, or force their daughters to turn to prostitution to survive.

Many awareness program-mes are conducted to educated the prostitute regarding health, safe sex, banking loan for children s education and marriages by Doctors and NGOs. Through a film on sex workers, one brings to awareness a sad reality

What are the specificities and consequences of being a woman when you decided to dedicate your life to Visual Anthropology?

We could start from the training as a cameraperson in order to avoid the "power relationship" with technicians, to the fieldwork shared with women colleagues, to the decision of dedicating your work to the women daily life in the Dogon country.

My choices permitted to better understand the ways the Dogon society could be perceived by Dogon men, the crucial importance of men rituals and that daily life was probably one of the most difficult aspect of the society to render. Also, I clearly understood it was not "the cup of tea" for festivals and in the French cultural surrounding. The last exhibit at Quai Branly Museum was exemplar by presenting 330 exceptional "pieces" from international collections without giving any explanation regarding the social surrounding of the population. Women were still in the backstage waiting for the next century to be allowed to have their own existence, rights and proper beliefs.

As I'm starting, with a woman colleague of mine, a new fieldwork on the biggest French maternity in Mayotte island, where 6.000 to 8000 babies are born every year, during this presentation I will describe precisely the reasons, consequences, specificities and the evolution of a woman' eye behind the viewfinder.

Kim Longinotto' internationally acclaimed documentaries are well recognised in anthropological circles, are regularly screened at ethnographic film festivals and used in teaching. All but one of her last 14 documentaries take a female perspective, portraying women and addressing topics such as FGM, domestic abuse, divorce or woman's rights with sensitivity and compassion. Using interviews with the filmmaker and citations of her films this contribution will analyse her approach to her female subjects and her practice. From a distributor's perspective we like to position the impact of her documentaries within visual anthropology and compare with feedbacks from women's filmmaker networks such as Woman Make Movies.