Yearning
The 70th Flaherty Film Seminar
In an effort to lift the veil between the leadership of The Flaherty, our history, and our programs, The Flaherty is honoured to work over the next two years with curator, researcher and writer Jemma Desai. We are inspired by Desai’s long standing commitments to the underlying practices that drive curatorial and programming work and their position within the ecologies that cultural workers in film work in. Her engagement with our board, staff team, and the archives will culminate in her curation of the 70th seminar, tying our long history together with possible visions for the future. A question that she will hold during this time is What might happen if we used the phenomenology of yearning to appraise our cultural production infrastructure? Not yearning to belong to what we have, but yearning to be longing: to embody a desire for something else? How might both understanding more clearly our own desires as well as attending closely to the ways that reformism, managerial moderation and ‘professional practices’ contain the work that is possible lead us to more congruent and committed ways of working?
Yearning
What does it mean to think with and against the project of yearning that lies at the heart of us coming together across difference to watch work that we care about and that we hope cares about the world? Yearning is an approach to curating a seminar that does not just extend a relational ethic towards the work and the artists on screen, but to the participants, and the spaces between and around the participants and beyond them outwards towards the world outside the seminar. How might we care for, but also carefully examine and be present to the yearning that is at the heart of the desire to indulge a week immersing ourselves in film, in discussing art and politics, in carrying a desire that this conversation might mean something in the world outside the seminar, or in the hope that the injustices of the outside might not enter the space which we think we are shaping with our best intentions? What demands might we have if we found ways to map and witness the desires, the longings, the heartbreaks and ruptures that coming together so often results in? How can visibilising the work of yearning lead us somewhere different to where we have been before?
Unfolding the role of the seminar curator to be three fold: as seminar programmer, a programmer in residence on the Flaherty board and a facilitator for preparing the ground and holding space for seminar participants, the programme will extend out from my own yearnings: for belonging, for family, for kinship and for political solidarity towards the artists who make work holding these desires, and use these not just as content for a programme of work or food for thought, but as guides and anchors for us to do the work of reorienting the practices that hold, actualise and circulate this work.
—Jemma Desai, August 2023
Jemma Desai
Jemma Desai is a writer, educator and somatic facilitator based in London. Her practice engages film and other art forms through research, writing, performance, as well as informally organised settings for deep study. She has previously worked with the BFI and British Council, and is the creator of "This work isn't for Us” a multidisciplinary and autoethnographic research project on institutional racism in the UK arts sector. She was co-chair of LUX, a UK based international arts agency that supports and promotes artists’ moving image between 2017-22, the Head of Programming at Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival in 2021 is and is on the programming committee at Blackstar Film Festival in Philadelphia. She is a practice based PhD candidate at Central School of Speech and Drama thinking through the liberatory possibilities of abolitionist praxis to cultural production with a thesis entitled "what do we want from each other after we have told our stories?" She regularly writes, teaches and speaks on her research interests in a variety of academic and non-academic contexts.