A lens into the everyday: visual ethnographies and making a multi-storied film in North-eastern Sri Lanka

Abstract

Film and visual methods have increasingly become significant focus areas of International Relations (IR) and feminist research. Feminist filmmakers have put particular emphasis on co-production and participatory filmmaking as more symmetrical approaches to research, which can provide visibility for marginalized voices and can challenge dominant perceptions. In this article, I reflect on my experience of making Hidden Voices, an eighty-minute documentary film about everyday experiences of living with disappearances in North-eastern Sri Lanka and the complex ways in which individuals and communities navigate legacies of violence and recovery. I emphasize the ethnographic value of film in bringing out the less visible relational and embodied everyday. As part of this, I discuss film as a type of ‘tour’, which can open opportunities for self-direction from participants and can offer a unique affective medium and way of seeing. While some present film narratives as a ‘microcosm’ of specific local experiences, I used Hidden Voices to explore diverse experiences and at times diverging standpoints. I also highlight the ongoing dialogical and didactic social value of film. While visual methods can be powerful tools for ethnographic research, I also discuss ethical and epistemological tensions inherent in making a research-based film.

Introduction

In the summer of 2018, I began filming an eighty-minute documentary, Hidden Voices, in North-eastern Sri Lanka. The film examines personal and communal experiences of loss and recovery in a context of state-enforced disappearances, militarization, victor’s peace, and suppressed and competing memories. Contributing to a wider thematic interest in visibility, methodology, and voice, the film draws attention to less visible voices and everyday informal healing, memory, and recovery. It focuses particularly on the role of war-affected women in restoring normalcy and caring for family members and dependents and unresolved and lingering legacies of violence. The film was part documentary, relying on a mix of observation and formal interviews, and part memory film, using photography and footage of landscapes and past artefacts to visually link testimonies about the past to the present. As I will discuss, the film served as both a visual output and a method of observation.

Film and visual methods have become significant focus areas of International Relations (IR) and feminist research. Linking into the broader aesthetic turn in IR theory (Bleiker, 2001), film is often framed as a different way of seeing, which can surface silenced and invisible voices and challenge dominant perceptions (der Derian, 2010; Weber, 2010). Critical IR and feminist scholars have discussed film as an output that ‘opens up spaces for new political thinking’ (Callahan, 2015: 897) and that can generate activism and transnational solidarity (Harman, 2018, 2019). Within and outside of IR, interest in film plugs into broader scholarship on participatory and arts-based methods (Coppens, 2012), and film and visual methods have created greater symmetry between researchers and researched within academic contexts, especially among feminist scholars (Coppens, 2012; Harman, 2018, 2019; Jauhola, 2020).

In this article, I reflect upon the value of filmmaking as a visual method for feminist and ethnographic IR and peace research and on the question of what film can reveal and contribute as a visual research method particularly in relation to the everyday realities of living with legacies of violence. Despite a marked interest in film, as others have noted (Callahan, 2015: 895; Sikand, 2015), relatively few scholars make films and fewer write about their filmmaking experiences and methodologies. Furthermore, although a significant recent literature has discussed participatory and co-produced film (Coppens, 2012; Harman, 2018, 2019; Wong, 2021), in IR and peace research, scholars have put less emphasis on the use of film as a form of knowledge production (an exception is Jauhola, 2020). This reflects both financial and practical constraints, ¹ but also, as I will discuss, a damaging historical colonial legacy and continuing stigmas around ethnographic or ‘observational’ film (Sikand, 2015), and concern about exploitation, hierarchies, and othering in the contemporary commercial documentary film industry (e.g. Bandi, 2016; Sikand, 2015; Tascon, 2012).

In reflecting on my experience of making Hidden Voices, I address two broader questions. First, what can film tell us about the everyday, particularly for critical and feminist peacebuilding and IR research? Specifically, how can film as a visual method generate insights about the relational and embodied ways in which people deal with ongoing legacies of violence? I discuss film as particularly suited to examine less visible lived experiences and the embodied and socially experienced everyday. I begin with the premise that visual methods can produce knowledge that emerges less easily in traditional research media (see Pink, 2007a, 2007b; Seppälä, 2021). ² Although I had encountered many of the film’s participants through previous research, as a visual and participatory method, the filmmaking experience produced significant and powerful knowledge insights. This was primarily as participants took ownership of the film encounter and offered an emplaced and embodied presentation of the past and present (what I will discuss as film as tour), as the film offered a unique social and affective medium, and as the film footage and later screenings provided a repertoire of material to review and discuss. Some of the film’s knowledge contributions appeared over time and further emerged through the filmmaking experience and through presenting and discussing the film with others.

Second, what is the relationship between film as a visual method and broader qualitative research? How can film and academic research reinforce each other and where are they in tension? Here, I contribute to reflective and auto-ethnographic literature, particularly in IR and feminist work, on the methods and ethics of filmmaking and visual methodologies. While film is widely acknowledged to be a powerful affective medium, I argue that previous knowledge and research encounters influence the affective experience of film, particularly in an ethnographic setting. In making Hidden Voices, significant research value came out of contextualizing (and discussing) film encounters, ³ and in a setting of longer term co-relationships, through providing space for the agency of film participants to emerge. ⁴ Finally, I argue that film production generates distinct ethical challenges, some of which are in tension with each other. These are in the realms of representation and visibility, as well as in relation to the question of whether as a collective endeavour, those using visual methodologies have a duty to strive for a broader impact, beyond universities and film participants. As an output, I also discuss opportunities and challenges facing academic filmmakers in broader research contexts.

I begin the article by anchoring my contributions to literature on visual methods, ethnography, IR, and film. I then turn to how I made the film and its broader orientations. Next, I examine the film as a lens into the everyday in North-eastern Sri Lanka and discuss selected vignettes from the film that demonstrate the relational and interdependent nature of everyday loss, care work, and recovery. Finally, I discuss the relationship between the film and my surrounding research.

Documentary film as a visual method and making a critical multi-storied film

The relationship between academic research and filmmaking has a complex and contested history. Within the academic fields which work most closely with film – visual anthropology and cultural studies – ‘ethnographic film’ has negative associations, where the production of film was linked to colonial cultural and social observation. This applies particularly to ethnography used for non-academic ends in the early-20th century (Pink, 2007a: 7) and to what visual anthropologist, Paul Henley (2020), refers to as filmmaking that seeks to remain detached from the subjects, ‘observing them from afar, as if from a watch-tower’ (p. 5). Documentary film today is an ethically loaded industry, where documentaries are often legitimized under the mantle of human rights and feminism, while still producing heavily othered representations of victimization and suffering (Bandi, 2016; Sikand, 2015). ⁵ In a review of human rights advocacy websites, which discuss the ‘intersection between film and human rights’, Sophia Tascon (2012) finds that human rights films were largely described as a ‘transparent window to other people’s lives’ (p. 870). The notion of film as interventionism to help marginalized others by those who have the capability to do so (trained filmmakers) plugs into well-established critiques of global human rights in which the ‘fittest must shoulder the burden of righting the wrongs of the unfit’ (Spivak, 2004: 524).

Although IR turned relatively late to the study and production of film, recent auto-ethnographic work by academic filmmakers in IR and anthropology puts significant emphasis on positionality and reflexivity (see Callahan, 2015, 2020; Coppens, 2012; Harman, 2018, 2019; Jauhola, 2018, 2020; Sikand, 2015; Wong, 2021). IR scholars often present their use of film as a critical and boundary-pushing method and as an ‘innovative methodology’ for research and teaching (Callahan, 2015; Harman, 2019; Munster and Sylvest, 2020). Scholars have framed visual methods and art as alternative knowledge sources and present visual documentation and film as methods to discuss IR theory and to bring visibility to silenced and marginalized voices and experiences (Campbell, 1998; der Derian, 2010; Harman, 2019; Weber, 2010). Bridging IR and anthropology, auto-ethnographic filmmaking discussions focus on methodology and positionality (e.g. Callahan, 2015; Harman, 2019; Hong, 2021; Sikand, 2015) and on centering agency in their films (Harman, 2019; Hong, 2021; Sikand, 2015). ⁶

In both fields, co-production and more ‘symmetrical’ approaches to filmmaking and visual methods have played a prominent role among academic filmmakers (Coppens, 2012; Harman, 2018, 2019; Hong, 2021). ⁷ Feminist scholars, in particular, have presented co-production and participatory methodologies as a feminist method (Harman, 2019; Hong, 2021) and as a way of showing solidarity and decolonizing research practice and knowledge production (Harman, 2019: 30; Hong, 2021; Seppälä, 2021; Vacchelli and Peyrefitte, 2018). In her discussion of Get By, Emily Hong examines the lives and activism of two working class Black men, Stanley and Milton, in the United States, in their campaign on working-class wages. Hong (2021) details the ‘ethos of care and collaborations that manifested in terms of relations’ (p. 664; in which she and the film protagonists became increasingly involved in each other’s personal lives). Scholars have also discussed the ‘transformative’ potential of collaborative filmmaking as a tool for activism (Coppens, 2012; Harman, 2019). They stress the importance and value of long-term collaboration with film subjects, while noting unresolved challenges, particularly in relation to managing expectations in vulnerable settings (Harman, 2016) and in continuing collaboration in the post-production phase when pulling together the film becomes more specialized and technically focused and often occurs remotely (Hong, 2021: 669).

While this collective literature offers important insights into the contribution of film as an output (beyond academia) and the boundary pushing and symmetrical benefits of film as a visual method, there is a risk that the focus on co-production and participatory filmmaking has produced a narrower research focus in critical and feminist discussions on film. Co-production may not be a suitable method; ⁸ as others discuss, it can also become a means of legitimization, without addressing deeper concerns about the film industry. ⁹ The emphasis on more formal, scripted films can further overshadow flexible and negotiated ways in which film can be used in a context of longer term co-relationships and its broader knowledge-producing contributions. This includes the ability of film to complicate understandings of local experience to go beyond singular representations. ¹⁰ In my view, this is particularly important when focusing on women’s experiences in conflict-affected contexts, which are already prone to homogeneous characterizations (see Friedman, 2018; Gentry and Sjoberg, 2007) and in polarized contexts of competing narratives and memory, as in post-war Sri Lanka.

In this article, I engage with concerns about unidimensional representations and hierarchies in film production by focusing on film’s broader knowledge-generating potential, particularly as a medium to feature multiple voices and experiences in a violence-affected setting. I concentrate on film as a lens into lived experiences and on how film can provide insights into the relational and embodied everyday. In making Hidden Voices, I took a more unstructured format and approached conversations with participants as a ‘tour’ to maximize opportunities for self-direction and to foreground participants in narrating and showing their oral histories and lives. The conception of film as tour allowed participants to orally (and sometimes physically) walk through their histories, lives, and places of meaning, while narrating their significance. ¹¹ The self-guided and personally situated nature of film as tour forged a closeness and a shared affective bodily experience to collect emplaced and embodied insights, while walking took on an additional demonstrative and communicative aspect in front of a camera. The article’s conception of tour includes both walking across physical distances and memory ‘tours’, for example, tours of home, artefacts, places of meaning, and the practices through which people navigated war-related loss and recovery. As put by Sarah Pink (2007b: 249), memory tours move through time and space and became multisensorial experiences to tie past meaning to the present.

The concept of film as tour is also based on principles of ownership and symmetry as participants decided on topics and narration sites (Coppens, 2012). I took a more open-ended thematic focus, where I described the topic of the film and then let participants choose what to share. Inviting film participants whom I often knew generated intimacy and familiarity. Although Hidden Voices was based on collaboration, this was less formally and predictably. The filmmaking espoused a fluid approach – what Marjaana Jauhola (2020: 40) discusses as ‘negotiated co-compositions’, in which participants may at times be characters, and at other times, active planners, and ‘an interviewee in front of the camera’. This also respects principles of ‘visual sovereignty’, whereby

members attempt to reach consensus on the details of the film; the director or producer is a facilitator, or a contact person, rather than solely in charge of making final decisions; and versions are screened before an audience and edited according to feedback. (Raheja, 2007, in Jauhola, 2020: 42)

Although the film had a loose plan and was based on pre-existing research and relationships, I adopted the stance that filmmaking should be dynamic and that it should be given independence from academic research (Henley, 2020; Hongisto, 2015). ¹² I thus approached the film as an emotive and socially connected medium which generated its own momentum over time.

This understanding of film as a visual method is anchored within and contributes to feminist peace research and feminist visual and ethnographic approaches that emphasize affect and fluidity (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2021: 43). Feminist scholars have stressed the importance of taking risks, including allowing changes in plans, and being vulnerable and uncomfortable (Baaz and Stern, 2016; Hedström, 2019), and consistently reviewing positionality and the dynamics and hierarchies of research encounters (Jauhola, 2020). In using film as a visual method, I put emphasis on being open and affected by the filmmaking experience. The filmmaking drew on active listening (Porter, 2016) to think through what people were trying to express through their participation as part of what I will discuss as a duty of ‘ethical representation’. As I will discuss, the filmmaking helped explore vulnerability, interdependence, and relationality, and showed continuums and intersections of violence, loss, recovery, and care, including between people and between people and their pasts and their surroundings. ¹³

Finally, Hidden Voices features multiple diverse narratives with the objective to produce a more complex and open-ended filmic narrative. In making the film, I examined varying understandings of local agency and experiences and intentionally included conflicting and critical standpoints and perspectives (some of which came out through the filming). This open-ended approach resonates with visual anthropology (Henley, 2020), and scholarship on survivor memory that put emphasis on emotional rather than factual elements of testimony (Fujii, 2010; Langer, 1991). As I will discuss, the intimate participant-led encounter of film as tour helped allow ‘deeper’ experiential testimonies to emerge (Langer, 1991: Chapter 1). Furthermore, as an output, I organized the film around themes that participants raised, making space for voices that did not fit a story arc and reflecting on the agency of participants and encounters.

Hidden Voices: method and process

My making of Hidden Voices in the summer of 2018 built on my longer term research on loss and recovery in North-eastern Sri Lanka. For many years, Sri Lanka had the second highest number of disappearances in the world. ¹⁴ Similar to demographics of disappearances elsewhere (Kapur and Alshaibi, 2023: 63), where disappearances in Sri Lanka heavily targeted boys and men, in war-affected areas in the Northeast, disappearances resulted in a high proportion of female-headed households, with at least one quarter of households in Sri Lanka headed by women. In my broader research, I examined the complex and gendered economic, political, social, and psychological legacies for families and communities of the loss of a close relative (see Friedman and Ketola, 2023). This is magnified in Sri Lanka, where the military remains stationed in war-affected areas, creating further insecurities, particularly for women (see de Mel, 2017), and where the reinstatement of conservative Tamil cultural norms affects social views and opportunities for widows and women to work and travel.

The filming took just under two weeks, and I spent four months intensively editing the footage and producing the film, with BBC editor, Carole Bertinet. The film is based on 25 testimonies and participant observation, particularly of an overnight Hindu collective healing pilgrimage, Aadi Amavasai, in Mullivaikal. It contains the following five standalone chapters, which examine aspects of everyday loss and recovery. These include (1) formal activism by families of the disappeared and formal investigative bodies; (2) ambiguous loss and psychosocial interventions (particularly the work of the psychiatrists in the Northeast and the ICRC); (3) ritual collective healing; (4) personal stories of war and recovery (‘healingscapes’); and (5) Muslim and Tamil women’s inter-communal care networks and reconciliation. As I will discuss, some chapters in the film came from film participants and I intentionally included standalone stories that did not fit neatly into pre-existing themes.

When I began working on Hidden Voices, a principal reason for using visual methods and making the film was to raise awareness about disappearances in Sri Lanka and to reach audiences that academic work could not. The decision to use film also responded to the frustration and isolation felt by families of the disappeared, my concern about carrying out research that had little tangible benefit for communities under study, and a desire to speak to non-academic and non-specialized audiences. The film – and the project’s use of visual methods (e.g. photography) – was also intended to enhance opportunities for participants to shape the research project and have a more direct platform. Throughout the project and film, I navigated my positionality as an American, UK-based academic and the ethics of making a film in a sensitive post-war context. I worked closely with partner organizations in Jaffna and Colombo, and women’s groups and activists. I held workshops before and after the filmmaking to discuss the film’s objectives and content and its potential usages. I also screened the film in Sri Lanka and abroad and used film material for one of the project’s partners’ commemorative work and held a workshop with NGOs and activists and media students at the University of Jaffna. In producing the film, I worked with a range of people, including a (US-based) documentary filmmaker, to take the footage, and a musician, translators, and transcribers from Sri Lanka. The project’s final event brought over three film participants for a screening at my university and featured an art exhibition by artist and film participant, Vasuki Jeyasankar. ¹⁵ The film also incorporated photography taken by a Sri Lankan photographer from one of the project’s partner organizations (ICES), and by participants in the film.

Although I originally considered making a narrower film on families of the disappeared, my focus in the film expanded. This was on account of my evolving research on families of the disappeared, who had become divided. At the time of the filming, Sri Lanka’s disappearance protest movement (consisting largely of parents who had disappeared children) had become partly co-opted by other spokespeople, including Tamil political parties and activist groups internally and externally, and some of the protest movements had begun to shut down. These dynamics were taking place within a wider politics of competing victimhood in Sri Lanka for recognition by the international community and state (see Hannifa, 2015) and protests against politicized accountability mechanisms and investigative processes in the country. Sri Lanka is also a site of competing and suppressed memory politics and war-related silences, particularly over wrong-doing (see also Thiranagama, 2011). In addition, the film’s direction expanded as my research focused on less visible interconnections between families of the disappeared and other war-affected communities. This included Muslim communities, who had been driven out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during the war, and Tamils who did not experience disappearances directly, but were affected by them (see Friedman and Ketola, 2023).

These orientations shaped my production and post-production work. Reflecting demographics of war-related violence, where most wartime disappearances were committed by the military and targeted the Tamil population, most of the film focuses on war and post-war experiences of members of the Tamil community, especially in relation to disappearances. Yet, the film also examines violence committed by the LTTE (particularly its expulsion of the Muslim population) and present-day violence within Tamil communities, especially gender-based violence. This acknowledges gendered continuums of violence, particularly where military ‘ethnic’ violence against Tamil women often gets politicized (Kodikara, 2019), and narratives that are seen as distracting from Tamil victimhood (e.g. violence within the Tamil community) are silenced. It also reflected concerns that women today are most at risk from domestic and intra-communal violence.

Although I sought to minimize narration and to foreground the agency of the people most directly affected by the issues in the film (providing only occasional light written narration for context), I also intentionally included critical and conflicting voices to help reflect on material in the film. ¹⁶ I took a more experimental and open approach to enable film participants to shape the final film (which was organized thematically around areas that participants brought up). As I had already interviewed many film participants in the past, I invited people to participate who were engaged in areas that I wanted to explore in the film and who represented diverse experiences and perspectives. Yet, in the final cuts, I intentionally included stories that stood out for me (and nuances which had come out less in my previous research). Rather than serve as a manifestation for a broader position or category of people, these stories were intended to generate reflection and to raise questions.

In the following section, I will discuss filmmaking as a visual research method. Although Hidden Voices was based on longer standing research on similar subjects – and was a chance to visually explore subjects that I had previously discussed with participants, I will argue that the film helped bring out less visible places of meaning and processes and interconnections with which participants addressed and found ways to live with legacies of violence. I will particularly highlight the film as a method that provided participants ownership, its social and affective nature, and that the film generated a repertoire of material, which continued opportunities for dialogue and learning. What came out through the filming in which participants narrated their lives and places of meaning was the everyday as a site of embodied pain and violent topographies and relational webs of care and recovery.

Film as a lens into the everyday: violence and healingscapes in North-eastern Sri Lanka

The narrative frame and title of the film’s fourth chapter – Healingscapes – came from Tamil psychiatrist and film participant, Sivathas Sivasubramaniam, while travelling together through the Northeast. ¹⁷ Pointing to a combination of bombed and deserted buildings and religious establishments, military victory and celebratory war hero monuments, and militarization, Sivathas described the Northeast as filled with ‘landscapes that hurt rather than heal’, which were shaped by cumulative experiences of violence and trauma. Citing the lack of ‘healingscapes’ in the Northeast, Sivathas contrasted the injury and difficulty of healing from ‘manmade’ harm (the war) to the damage from the 2004 tsunami. Not only was there more humanitarian relief and open opportunities to grieve after the tsunami, but in his view, manmade harm leaves an additional layer of trauma, particularly where those responsible have not been held accountable and the military is still stationed in the Northeast. Sivathas stressed his wish to create smaller, more sporadic healingscapes, which allowed people to grieve and brought them together (e.g. his idea to create a symbolic holy zone for those who had lost relatives during the last stage of the war).

This excerpt from a conversation with one of the film’s protagonists and supporters is important for several reasons. First, it highlights the value of film as part of longer term co-relationships in generating ownership and a visual and affective form of knowledge generation. As discussed, a key contribution of the film was that it allowed participants to offer a tour of their surroundings and places of meaning and that it let people share their lives and memories on their own terms. The filmmaking was conducive to encouraging a visual embodied and emplaced presentation of violence and loss, for example, through artefacts – for instance, photographs and scrapbooks – or, as I will discuss in relation to former LTTE combatant, Kavitha, injury and shrapnel in the body. More so than in written publications, people linked personal losses to landscapes and memories as they walked me through places of meaning and past experiences in the film.

These encounters took on a particular dynamic as the film was in part a ‘memory film’ in which portions of testimony and footage (e.g. footage and photos of wartime artefacts and historical moments) dealt with the past (see MacDougall, 1998 [1995]: chapter 12). Literature on memory and testimony distinguishes ‘common’ from ‘deep memory’, while common memory has a chronological and coherent structure (and looks at a compartmentalized and mediated past), deep memory tries to recall the self ‘as it was then’ and the sense experienced at the time (Langer, 1991: 6, expanding on Charlotte Delbo, 1985). This distinction is important for ethnographic film, which, in its reliance on longer term relationships, provides an opportunity for deep experiential memory to emerge. Deep memory applies especially to unprocessed sensory evocation of the past and emerges in instances that were spontaneous or less planned.

Second, the article’s brief discussion of healingscapes reinforces that filmmaking is a social and affective experience, which can generate its own meanings and dynamics. Moments early in the filmmaking shaped how I – and those working on the film – experienced and approached subsequent testimonies and film encounters. Where Sivathas focuses on organized social or community healingscapes, the imagery of healingscapes stayed with me and provided an affective lens to see often less visible connections and moments later. In Chapter 4, Tamil counsellor, Vinista, discusses multiple losses in her family – of her brothers and parents during the war and due to the 2004 tsunami. She brings up her ‘bare’ garden at the time of the losses, before turning to the coconut tree she planted 14 years ago from a seed as a young woman. The interview was conducted in her garden over which the tree arched, providing shelter from the sun as Vinista expressed her joy about the tree (and her garden) and its significance in her life. Although I had interviewed Vinista before, including in her garden, we had not discussed her plants. The tree preceded her having children; it now provides food and income (selling coconuts), and shelter and shade to spend time with her family. Vinista felt that planting the tree shows her power to affect her life for the better. ‘Gardening’ became the second healingscape in the film.

Vinista’s garden (in Chapter 4: healingscapes).

Third, as a lens into the everyday, returning to the film footage offered a ‘reservoir’ of testimony and micro moments and a sensory and embodied record to examine over time. While watching reels from Aadi Amavasai, the footage (which was taken at different locations at the event) captured changes in moods as it went from joyous (as participants watched the Koothu theatre the night before) to solemn in the morning during ritual bathing in the ocean. Although I attended the pilgrimage in the past before making the film, the ability to re-watch the footage (some of which I had not seen at the time), alone and with others, offered additional opportunities to discuss and reflect. It also generated evocative moments, which sometimes became clearer with time, for example, the intergenerational element of ritual healing – of children learning about rituals from adults around them.

Mourners (and community workers) participating in Aadi Amavasai (in Chapter 3: ritual healing).

Returning to the footage was also important to explore intimacy and affective relationships. This applied especially to the film’s chapter on reconciliation, which shadowed the friendship and experiences of two women, Janooriya, from a Muslim village in Mannar, whom I will discuss shortly, and Krishnamma from a neighbouring Tamil village. The footage highlighted non-verbal moments in between and during interviews – taking a break and relaxing; having lunch. These included micro moments of laughter, helping each other, naturalness, which evoked their story of years of working together and solidarity.

Together, these aspects of film as a method were interdependent and fed into each other. Built on longer term co-relations, the combination of people presenting their lives and surroundings, the affective, cumulative experience of film, and being able to return to the footage brought into focus and gave additional meaning to everyday micro topographies and less visible interdependent relations.

Where, as I will discuss, embodied violence and violent topographies emerged as prominent parts of lived experience, the main focus and contribution of the research and film was on exploring the relational webs of care and agency through which people found ways to navigate living with legacies of violence and loss. In the following section, I will turn to three selected vignettes from the film, which, in my view, show the less visible interdependent losses and care that emerged when participants narrated their lives in relation to place and others. While former LTTE cadre, Kavitha, was able to reclaim her injury through revisiting her last battle site; Artist Vasuki discusses how care for others and personal sacrifice intertwine. Janooriya demonstrates her determination to return to her village after the Muslim evacuation and to create new relationships with Tamil neighbours, and her evocation of nostalgia provides both a lens into present longing and loss and into the past. As all three narratives were unusual in their depiction of harm and agency, rather than submerge them within a broader theme, I included the first two (by Kavitha and Vasuki) as individual stories of ‘recovery’ in the chapter ‘Healingscapes’ and created a full chapter on Janooriya and inter-communal reconciliation.

Janooriya: situated nostalgia

In this article’s first example, community peacebuilder, Janooriya, highlights the emotional connection she felt towards her former village and the region where she grew up. I invited Janooriya to take part in the film as I felt it was important to include members of the Muslim community, where I was filming, and as Janooriya’s story provided an important narrative of care and agency in a context of sustained communal loss and tensions. However, Janooriya’s oral history became additionally significant as an illustration of the evocative strength of film in its capturing of nostalgia. The importance of nostalgia as an affective experience and motivator became more apparent as Janooriya physically walked me through her community’s former life before their expulsion and retraced her experiences since her return.

Nostalgia came up at multiple points in Janooriya’s narrative, first in her sharing of joyful memories in her village before her expulsion. These were often expressed in sensorial and physical ways – how she was feeling and what she was doing at specific moments in her life as she walked me through the area and how the area looked and felt at the time of her recollection, particularly the seasons and the feel and appearance of the land and vegetation. Janooriya was pivotal in helping facilitate inter-communal care networks with Tamil women in neighbouring villages, which provided opportunities for Tamil and Muslim women to support each other after the war. In detailing her reasons for collaborating with marginalized Tamil women upon her return, memories of affective relationships with Tamil neighbours before the war (when they lived as ‘brothers and sisters’) were part of the nostalgic evocation of place. These were expressed as particular moments together and tied to physical spaces and memories, for example, friendships with Tamil women and spending time at each other’s homes and regret for this loss. This included positive quotidian memories and memories of solidarity – for example, playing netball against local Tamil teams, while the LTTE kept the area safe – which were juxtaposed against the pain of the LTTE’s later betrayal of the Muslim community.

In her testimony and tour of her former and present life, Janooriya moves between layered memories of her past life and her recent rebuilding and hopes for the present. Although there were times when this temporal shifting blurred, letting the interview proceed uninterrupted allowed its invocation of nostalgia and provided glimpses into how deep memory of the past intertwines with present longings, agency, and struggles. The affective past – including positive inter-communal relations – was also frequently invoked as a moral and emotional basis for renewed community relations and peace. These came out especially where participants physically led us through their emotional memories and former lives and contrasted these with current efforts and struggles and visions for the present.

Image of Janooriya (in Chapter 5: inter-communal reconciliation).

Kavitha: reclaiming her injury

Navigating everyday life with disability and injury (both visible and invisible) was another theme that emerged through the filmmaking. In a context of embodied violence, film participants discussed post-war recovery in terms of finding new ways of living in a wounded body. While these were individual and corporeal experiences, what came out strongly in testimonies is that social interactions and relationships of care also enabled personal healing. In the film, Kavitha spoke about her former life as a higher ranking LTTE cadre before she was permanently injured in the war. She joined the LTTE after multiple people in her family were killed – her father in Sinhalese ethnic riots in the 1970s, and her elder brother by the military during the war (her second brother was shot, and her third brother was severely tortured and released). After what she presents as a positive period of her life in the LTTE, a battle injury paralysed her from the waist down and confined her to a wheelchair. Kavitha’s story is also important as one in which two characters in the film crossed paths. Describing a trip with other wheelchair-bound cadres and Sivathas through his work for the Vanni Spinal Cord Association, she recounts passing the battle site on the 21st anniversary of her injury. This culminated in Sivathas stopping to access the site to let her narrate her story (while he and others contextualized the battle in the history of the war). In recounting the battle and showing others her place of injury, she was able to offer a different narrative of her injury and reclaim its meaning:

Our [the injured cadres’] previous experiences of that place where we fought was pain and suffering and where I lost my legs and blacked out. It felt like a place to avoid and made me immensely sad. . . . But now when the doctor took us there, we felt as though it was a new place. . . . But only after going with the doctor, I saw the exact place where I got injured. So, it gave me joy. We didn’t see the place as the place of injury, but as the last place I walked.

Where the war had violently imprinted itself on her body, and ‘bound her to the wheelchair for life’, through physically visiting the place of injury with others (including other injured former cadres and support staff of the Spinal Cord Association), Kavitha was able to reclaim meaning and to remember positive aspects of her life before the injury. Also significant to the memory is that she felt heard and supported in the company of other former cadres, who had overlapping experiences and could relate to her past.

Filming Kavitha’s story was significant as she had a strong narrative arc of her life – pre-injury, injury, and post-visiting the place of injury – which, for her, presented a different way of thinking about living with embodied loss and violence. The open-ended film format allowed her to direct the story and present it in ways that felt meaningful in the trajectory of her past. Re-watching the footage later helped me re-visit Kavitha’s expressions, gestures, and tone as she told this narrative. What was clear in the footage is that there was a transformative moment when Kavitha came to the point of her narrative in which she revisited the place of her injury. The film brought out overlapping experiences and connections and care relationships between characters, for example, when participants commented on their relationships with others in the film. In this sense, the filmmaking was a more openly social and reflective experience in which participants had the chance to discuss their experiences with each other after giving their testimonies (see also Seppälä, 2021 on participatory photography; and Coppens, 2012).

Image of Kavitha (in Chapter 4: healingscapes).

Vasuki: embodied protest and maternal loss

Where Kavitha’s story revealed the physical violence borne by many former LTTE and less visible care networks and personal journeys to navigate legacies of violence, the life histories of civilian participants also contained themes of embodied sacrifices and interdependence. Here, too, the filmmaking experience helped surface less visible experiences of living with disappearances and loss. In the film, artist, Vasuki, described herself as affected by the injustices surrounding her from an early age (including both violence by the military and domestic intra-group violence against girls and women within the Tamil community). This concern grew during her university studies and participation in feminist workshops and her experiences of working with war-affected women. During the war, she decided that art would be her ‘protest tool’. At her home, Vasuki presented collective art that she made with Tamil women whose children had disappeared. This included a collectively made quilt, in which mothers documented images and personal details of their disappeared children, which then travelled to the UN in Geneva. Vasuki also presented and discussed her own art during the filming, particularly her painting, My Child is Not for War, in which a woman holds a child over her head amid encroaching flames, as resistance and maternal outrage to war:

So here the flames are coming as war – you will see in the painting as camouflaged flames and barbed wire and the mothers are trying to bring the child away and away from the war, towards the bright future. So that was the anguish of many women during that time, so my paintings and even my poems were on questioning that – what women wish is not heard by the ones who are waging this violent war. So that’s my first painting on that topic – My Child is Not for War.

The painting also highlights her personal decision not to have children:

When I started working with women in the East, we just moved here after our marriage [from Jaffna]. Every day we had women crying about the loss of their kids – disappearances and loss. And then there were cases of incest – a lot of pain for the women. I decided that I’m not going to have children if I am supposed to stay in Sri Lanka and work further . . . If I have a child, I have to protect the child somewhere outside of Sri Lanka as many of my relatives were doing. So, I spoke to my husband, and he agreed because both of us wanted to remain in Sri Lanka and work, so we decided not to have a child. And I started my own individual campaign, saying, My Child is Not for War. I have paintings, I have poems on that, and statements I made that we shouldn’t, mothers shouldn’t, have children if our motherhood is not recognized and children are not for war.

Vasuki’s choice not to have children for the sake of her work with war-affected women signifies an invisible relational act. This parental loss – of working with women who lost live children and giving up her own chance to have children – was a current throughout Vasuki’s artwork at her home. The self-directed and visually engaged filmmaking enabled Vasuki to show me around her home as she narrated the meaning of the art. Vasuki’s presentation of her artwork allowed the corporeal and interdependent nature of her actions to emerge in the context of her life and work and highlighted the invisible but cumulative experiences of parental loss and harm that connected her with those she sought to support.

Artwork by Vasuki. Exhibition at the project’s final symposium in the United Kingdom (2019).

In different ways, these vignettes speak to the ability of film to bring out the evocative and often less visible relational and embodied every day. They also reinforce how bodies and physical spaces become sites of violence and loss, as well as agency, care, and recovery.

While thus far, the article has focused on the ethnographic insights generated by film, in the following section, I turn to the ethnographic evaluation of film footage. Although, as discussed, I minimized narration and sought to foreground the voices of film participants, even in a ‘lighter touch’ film, like Hidden Voices, contextualization (by myself and those working with me) was significant behind the scenes to think about what stories to include in the film and how to represent them. ¹⁸ This was not a simple process, and indeed, previous relationships with individuals in the film and my own research filtered my experiences and contextualization of the film content. In discussing evaluation, I will highlight the interdependent relationship of making Hidden Voices and my surrounding research – while the film provided a sensory and affective medium, my prior research and co-relationships helped situate narratives and influenced decisions on the film’s final content. I highlight how multiple agencies and stories came together in making the film – those of film participants and my own readings and understandings, based on prior research and experiences.

Ethnographic meaning-making through film: agentic encounters and evaluation

In the autumn of 2018, I began reviewing the Hidden Voices material. When going through reels of parents of disappeared children at the Vavuniya protest site, I noticed scenes of protesters sitting silently and sometimes speaking to the camera against the sounds of the busy A9 highway. The contrast of the cars rushing by and of the parents sitting still next to the mounted photos of their children and sometimes holding up their photos to the camera recalled earlier conversations I had with relatives of the disappeared – about being consumed with the search for the disappeared and ‘stuck in the past’, while daily life continued. For me, the scene evoked an element of living with disappearances and ambiguous loss and influenced the film’s post-production. The editor and I began Chapter 1 with a long shot of the A9, before closing in on the faces of the parents at the protest camp and the mounted photos of their children.

This example highlights several aspects of film evaluation in a research context. First, while scholars put weight on the affective, sensual, and evocative value of film, previous encounters and contextualization (both of those working on the film and the audience) also influenced affective and sensory experience. In making Hidden Voices, while surfacing hidden and unusual stories was an objective of my research and the film, my prior research and co-relationships also shaped what I saw and how I experienced the footage – and indeed what I considered to be unusual. For instance, while Kavitha’s film participation brought out the embodied violence of her injury and her restorative experience of finding ways to come to terms with her loss, my research in Sri Lanka underpinned my reading of her testimony. Kavitha’s narrative showed the importance of informal care networks to facilitate what I discussed in previous research as ‘social reintegration’, in a context of marginalization and stigmatization of former LTTE (Friedman, 2018). ¹⁹

Second, it is important to recognize film encounters as sites of agency and politics. This includes agency of multiple media and sensory interventions coming together and generating their own dynamics and momentum (Hongisto, 2015: 11). It also includes agency that participants bring to and act out in relation to their wider environments and through film encounters. ²⁰ Indeed, reflecting on Hidden Voices, a potential and less recognized strength of film is its ability to explore and contextually situate agency. Where scholars have recognized the performative aspect of film participation and put emphasis on evaluating testimonies for their affective rather than their truth-telling value (Callahan, 2015: 904), ²¹ an agential reading of film further directs attention to what participants are expressing through film and why, and to what film encounters can tell us about situated meanings and entangled subjectivities of those working on and appearing in film.

When making Hidden Voices, reflecting on and providing space for agency was both ethnographically valuable and facilitated by prior research and partnerships. Thus, looking at Janooriya’s testimony through an affective lens offers a compelling evocation of nostalgia; yet, in my view (and based on prior research), Janooriya’s tour of her former village and discussion of her return were also political and agentic encounters. At the time of the filming, the majority of Northern Muslims had not returned to their former villages. This was a consequence of state and international refugee policies, which see ‘older’ Northern Muslim IDPs (who have been living in displacement for 25 years) as ‘low priority’, compared to more recent Tamil internally displaced persons (IDPs), who also endured physical violence (Hannifa, 2015: 2). Muslims who sought to return have also encountered suspicion from Tamil communities, some of whom moved into evacuated Muslim areas during the war and had little memory of Muslim history in the region (Friedman, 2024). Looking at Janooriya’s testimony through an agential lens, Janooriya’s story of return references language and discourses derived from international legal frameworks – her leadership of her community’s return as ‘our right’ and the Muslim community’s displacement as a painful experience (becoming a ‘refugee’ in her own country). In this context of state and international marginalization, in my reading, Janooriya’s reflection on her relationship and affinity to home took on multiple meanings; in a similar vein, her contrast of her life in displacement as a ‘life for machines’. Farzana Hannifa (2015) documents how UN High Commissioner for Refugees officials objected to Northern Muslims’ ‘aid seeking behaviour’ (p. 4; particularly after receiving assistance to resettle into new areas during the war). She draws on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ to critique the hierarchies of international humanitarian bodies in which ‘victims most worthy of assistance are those that are only capable of suffering but not politics or speech’. Janooriya’s self-presentation as someone with strong attachments to place and home also came out in her detailing of hardships that her community went through to resettle in her former village. In a similar vein, she contrasts the relatively comfortable living conditions that she felt her community had in displacement to the challenges they faced in starting over and returning to their homes. Through this lens, Janooriya’s narrative evokes a view of herself and her community as people who have history that matters and who worked hard to make their vision of returning possible (including through reconciling with and caring for war-affected Tamil neighbours), thereby upholding that a right to return should be based on factors other than ‘bare life’ (physical survival and economic need). Janooriya’s affective and sensorial evocation of the past thus must be situated in a charged atmosphere of competing political claims and suppressed memories and histories.

Transitioning to film as an output, this agential reading of film performances also influenced my decisions about the film’s content. While film can only communicate limited context, I included a longer section on Janooriya’s story as it explored how affect, peacebuilding, and interdependent losses came together, and how agency emerged through her affective and largely self-guided film participation. At the same time, as I will detail in the following section, an agential reading of film performances helped me think through the ethics of using the footage to make the film, particularly in a context of longer term co-relations, and to balance letting stories of participants emerge on their own versus weaving them into the structure of the film.

In the final section, I will briefly discuss the following: (1) the ethics of representation, particularly in a context of co-relationships and (2) a dilemma between making a longer multi-storied versus a more narrowly focused film for wider audiences. Both concern a recurring question of whose voices and narratives should appear in the film and its visibility and target audiences. While the use of visual methods, such as film, raises ethical challenges, thinking through these parameters was an important part of ethnographic reflection.

Ethical representations, voice, and visibility

The question of whose stories to feature in the film and how prominently emerged since the earliest planning of the film. Chapter 3 (on collective and ritual healing) features Shiyamala (Sham) Selvaratnam, an art therapist based in the United Kingdom and a member of the Tamil diaspora, who spent extended periods working in Sri Lanka. Sham suggests that ritual collective healing and the restoration of Tamil Hindu cultural practices after the war also reinforced gendered practices and values that were harmful to women and critiques cultural mind-sets that kept domestic and gendered violence against women less visible (as well as caste-based harms). She also questions the emphasis on restoring the family unit as a pillar of the social fabric in collective healing approaches, especially where family remains a source of oppression for many (particularly women). Her comments followed Sivathas’ earlier discussion on the importance of Hindu ritual healing in the Northeast, which he had spent many years supporting, travelling to remote areas at cost to himself while balancing his work in the capital. In his view, informal and religious collective healing is crucial, given the inadequacy and short supply of Western formal individualized mental health approaches, Tamil ‘collectivist society’, and the damage of the war to the social and cultural fabric. For Sivathas (and some others I spoke to), it was also important to address military war-related violence first, particularly the disappearances, before addressing harms within the Tamil community.

The decision to include Sham and her viewpoints generated disagreement with some industry professionals I worked with and/or discussed the project with, particularly outside of Sri Lanka. There was a bias against including someone with a ‘British accent’. I was also advised that the film should follow a simpler story line and that Sham’s comments clouded the narrative of the film and distracted from the meaningful and inspiring collective healing and pilgrimage that the film had captured in Mullaitivu. However, while Sham’s comments complicated the filmic narrative, in my view, this complexity was important to the broader project and film. As discussed, including her perspective highlighted continuums of violence and feminist concerns about the gendered nature of community healing in the Northeast. Although a film has limited space, I also thought that attention to diaspora voices was important in a conflict that caused a large-scale refugee crisis and diaspora population, some of whom continue to be targeted abroad (see Craven, 2022). Through including Sham’s testimony, I therefore also sought to look beyond geographical space and state borders when examining everyday healing and local experience. ²²

At the same time, in a divided context, the question of whose voices to include and the creation of a multi-storied film raised broader ethical tensions. Callahan (2015) discusses how the presentation of information at the editing stage can serve as ‘social critique’, particularly in episodic films, as in toilet adventures, where ‘. . . the tremors of affect are produced through the montage of images and the juxtaposition of interview film clips’ (p. 907). He stresses that critique must be balanced with an ‘ethic of hospitality’ towards participants in the post-production stage, in which consent should be treated as a ‘rolling process’ (Callahan, 2015: 906). In making Hidden Voices, both imperatives (‘editing as critique’ and the ‘ethic of hospitality’) intersected in the sequencing of testimonies. For instance, the film had a subtle but significant internal tension between comments by Sham and Sivathas (as well as the Hindu clergy involved in the collective healing processes in the film). Although I showed participants the footage to get their approval before finalizing the film – and would similarly provide different perspectives when producing a publication – the contrast appeared more personal in a film where positions were individually expressed, and which audiences often spotted and commented on at showings. This raised ethical considerations about how the film was engaging with and representing the viewpoints of people who had supported the research and film, and were in some cases, partners and friends. It also re-surfaced issues of narration and ownership. While, as discussed, I avoided formal narration and made space for unplanned stories in the film, by inviting participants whose views I was familiar with and sequencing them, in some regards, these moments also narrated through participants.

Most critically, in a context of severe unresolved violence, in my view, an ethics of representation required thinking about what participants were trying to express and what they sought to get out of participation. At a minimum, this meant not misrepresenting testimony or using it out of context (e.g. using only small clips of interview material that departed from their general narrative account). This required considering the entirety of participants’ testimonies and a fluid approach that respected film encounters on their own terms rather than using them to fit a preconceived story line. ²³ This also affected the parameters of the film, and meant for Hidden Voices, making a longer film that allowed space for ‘thicker’ interviews and content. For instance, in Chapter 1, an elderly father at the Vavuniya disappearance protest provides a striking reflection on guilt and argues that the low-level soldiers, who took his son, did so involuntarily. He further positions the disappeared children as coming from poor families – as children of ‘farmers and workers’ – much like the soldiers, who ‘were poor people like us’. However, rather than linger on this as an example of relational knowledge and shared suffering relevant to everyday peace (Butler, 2004; Väyrynen, 2019), we included the statement as part of a longer testimony in which he compares the foot soldiers to the commanders, whom he felt should be held accountable (‘for every ten there is one’). Given the extreme and mounting despair of families at the protest, an ethics of representation meant getting his main message across, which was a call for international intervention and a condemnation of impunity.

Significantly, the film’s knowledge-generating capacities and its ethical dimensions transcended its planning, production, and post-production. When showing Hidden Voices, different audiences perceived it in different ways. Audiences working on gender and feminism were unsurprisingly interested in its exploration of gender dimensions of traditional healing; indeed, even though she appeared briefly, feminist audiences picked up on Sham’s critique. While in my view, critical discussion was a positive outcome of the film, there was a greater risk, compared to written outputs, for the film to slip into binary positions, for example, to frame disagreements as larger than they are and to lose complexity. ²⁴ Yet differences between participants also led to productive discussions, for example, at screenings and the project’s final symposium in the United Kingdom, where participants spoke to a public audience and to each other. ²⁵

Finally, making the film reinforced tensions between ethical imperatives. Mirroring debates by participants over what should be prioritized in the public eye, I was conscious that making a longer, multi-storied film in some ways elevated complexity over the amplification of certain voices and issue areas. As discussed, the decision to make a longer multi-storied film was partly a consequence of the ethics of co-relationships where I sought to create space for individual stories. It also grew out of my research, where I wanted to ensure that the film was critical and complex enough to sit alongside research findings and that it did not gloss over in a way that further upheld silences and made gender harms invisible. I also wanted to make a film that was appropriate to show people in the film and to screen in Sri Lanka and among the Tamil diaspora and that could be useful to country partners. ²⁶

These decisions also occurred against a backdrop of (until recently) not making the film public. I was conscious of outbreaks of violence and repression in Sri Lanka and that security situations could change with elections and shifts in government (de Mel, 2017; Satkunathan, 2016; Friedman, 2018). I erred on showing the film at events and sharing it with those who expressed interest or contacted me. While the film was an excellent resource for teaching (for my courses and to share) and a medium to generate discussion and solidarity (especially with Tamil diaspora audiences and as material for the project’s partners), there were trade-offs as to whether the film should be circulating more and generating greater awareness. ²⁷ Although academic filmmakers have more freedom as they generally do not rely on film for income and can avoid the pressure of film festivals and specialist approval (Jauhola, 2020: 42–43; Sikand, 2015: 44), there was a continuous dilemma about whether the film should be doing more to gain traction and to share the voices of participants. I also questioned whether expanding the film’s focus and length diverted attention from specific causes (the families of the disappeared) and might hinder its ability to travel. These issues remain relevant, and I am working on converting chapters of the film into shorter standalone films that can be better used by participants and partners.

Conclusion

Visual, arts-based, and participatory methods have generated significant interest in a range of fields, including recently in IR. Although IR scholars have a strong interest in film as part of a focus on visuality, aesthetics, and participatory methodology, few have explored film as a research method. This article engages with visual anthropology and feminist principles of co-creation and collaboration to surface ways in which film can shape understandings of the everyday. I argued that film can provide a powerful lens into the less visible relational and embodied everyday from the perspectives of critical and feminist peacebuilding and IR. The affective, evocative, and self-directed medium of filmmaking highlighted interdependent relationships of care and loss, topographies and embodied loss and recovery, and how legacies of violence linger in multifaceted and gendered ways in a complex post-war setting.

On a broader level, I reflected on the use of film in an academic context and examined the relationship between research and film. In many ways, my wider research and the filmmaking fed into each other in dynamic and sometimes unpredictable ways. While the film generated new research insights, my research helped contextualize stories told and evaluate complexity. Furthermore, making a research-based film helped navigate the ethics of representation and of what should go into the film, beyond ‘do no harm’ (particularly in thinking about what participants are communicating and seeking to achieve through taking part in the film). At the same time, making a research-based film generated ongoing ethical dilemmas and tensions. While academic filmmakers have certain advantages compared to professional filmmakers, I navigated less discussed pressures when making a film in a research context. This included, for instance, how to make a film that was complex and critical enough to reflect research findings and to be useful to local partners, while also, in this context, seeking to fulfil its original imperative to provide a platform and raise awareness for families of the disappeared.