Paper long abstract:

Doing ethnographic fieldwork with film in Mexico, Burkina Faso, India, and Indonesia about ritual, craft, architecture, and developmental processes has confronted me with a variety of situations of uncertainty, mistrust, but also of committed cooperation and friendship.

I began my carrier as anthropologist doing fieldwork in Mexico. I faced various situations of mistrust and misinformation. That changed when I started to film. People got an insight in my work. They knew film is, they saw us working, they got a feeling of presence, and they saw later the results. Later I used film as a tool of communication, investigation, and co-operation. Film has some advantages: the process is open, the people follow closely on what one is doing, and they feel, they have a possibility to intervene. But the people manipulate the film situation also, they participate in the film construction even the filmmaker is not aware of it.