Create Dangerously
Film producer, writer and curator Elhum Shakerifar created the image and text 'Create Dangerously' in response to her conversation with Megan Clinch.
This is how she got there...
Elhum Shakerifar is a producer, curator and writer. Her company, Hakawati, holds the core tenet that a good story is in the telling, and the ethos that we are the stories we tell. Elhum's credits include BAFTA nominated A Syrian Love Story (2015, Sean McAllister), BIFA Best Documentary winner Almost Heaven (2017, Carol Salter), BFI/Sundance supported Even When I Fall (2017, Sky Neal & Kate McLarnon), Tokyo and Hong Kong IFF winning Of Love & Law (2017, Hikaru Toda), ISLAND (2018, Steven Eastwood) – now used by NHS for education around death and dying, Doc/Fest 2018 Opening Film A Northern Soul (2018, Sean McAllister) and Ayouni (2020, Yasmin Fedda) – virtually launched at CPH:DOX 2020 and is available worldwide in 7 languages on www.AyouniFilm.com. Her work has screened internationally including at Berlinale, Hot Docs, IDFA and Rotterdam. Elhum is programme advisor for London Film Festival and has curated programmes for Shubbak, Barbican and Birds Eye View. She has taught ethnographic film and documentary filmmaking at Berlin Freie, UCL and Middlesex University; she has devised workshops and taught filmmaking internationally, including in Georgia, Lebanon and Egypt. A 2016 BFI Vision Award recipient, Elhum was awarded the Women in Film & TV BBC Factual Award in 2017, and named a Producer on the Rise in Screen International’s 2018 Brit50 list.
Megan is a Social Anthropologist who undertook her doctoral research at the BIOS Centre, LSE. She has conducted research at the Institute of Public Health at the University of Cambridge, the Faculty of Social Science at the Open University, and undertaken a visiting postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Global Public Health.
Megan is currently a Co-Investigator on the UK Climate Resilience Programme project Mobilising Adaptation: Governance of Infrastructure through Co-Production (MAGIC) . She is also completing the Wellcome Trust funded Test Sites project in collaboration with the curatorial organisation Arts Catalyst and artist Ruth Levene. In both of these projects she is developing anthropological and artistic methodologies aimed and supporting communities to reflect on and meet the challenges of living with climate induced flooding in the United Kingdom.
Building on her commitment to civically minded teaching and research, she is also working with a range of third sector and statutory partners to develop community led research, evaluation and education capacity across the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
Together these activities provide a means through which she can explore how different forms of investigation, experimentality, evidence, and evaluation are understood and negotiated in the development of complex multi stakeholder public health interventions.
on summoning relationships with participants in each of our practices
on multiple agencies and intimacies in the film 'Island'
I loved it when you saw the director of 'Island' help the man have a cigarette outside - that was an explicit example of how the director was really in that situation with this man. It felt very real, and authentic, and shaped how I watched the rest of the film.
on third sector and hierarchies of power
Your paper makes me think about the difference between human and humane, and broadening the frameworks that communities can develop.