Article:

Activist Citizenship, Film and Peacebuilding: Acts and Transformative Practices

In this article I explore film as a socio-political and artistic-transformative cultural prac-tice through which acts and activism are performed. I am interested in how film em-beds acts of peacebuilding and how this scene of imagery/imaginary is transformed by those acts, with the filmmakers transformed into activist citizens whose activism questions ideologies that surround them. I argue that acts of citizenship and activ-ism, as a creative practice, do not solely involve the analysis of how activism has been represented in films, but also the understanding of what is beyond these representa-tions and narratives. I look at a) how film auteurs emerge as activists through the narratives and the created scenes 1 in film; b) how these acts consequently represent the “answerability to Others” 2 and c) the link between (cinematic) performativity and activism.