Romana Turina is Associate Professor at Arts University Bournemouth. She is a writer, filmmaker and historian. While leading research in the ‘Essay Film’ for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS), Romana engages in the creative processes. Her work includes the essay films Lunch with Family (2016) and San Sabba (2016), shortlisted at the AHRC Research in Film Awards 2018 and awarded at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards 2018. In 2024, she completed the essay film Three Sisters in a Sketchbook (2024), selected at the LA Independent Women Film Awards 2024, and the Hollywood Independent Filmmaker Awards and Festivals 2024. Romana received her Ph.D. in Theatre, Film and Television from the University of York, UK. She taught creative writing and screenwriting at the University of Indianapolis, the University of York, and the University of Greenwich. 

Kiki Tianqi Yu is a writer, filmmaker, curator, and senior lecturer in film at the Queen Mary University of London. Her research, in theory and practice, explores cinema in relation to decoloniality, personal expressions, and eastern philosophies, with a focus on creative documentary and nonfiction, women’s cinema, and Chinese cinemas. She is currently working on ‘Daoism and Cinema’ and Sinophone women’s cinema. She is the author of ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (EUP, 2019), co-editor of China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21st Century (Bloomsbury 2014). Her films include Memory of Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019). Kiki also curates film screening series including Dancing with Water: Women’s Cinema from Contemporary China across various venues in London (February–April 2024).

List of Figures

Preface

Laura Rascaroli

Introduction: Essay Filmmaking as Creative Research: ‘Behind the Scenes’ of On-screen Thinking, Narrative Techniques and Processes of Knowing

Kiki Tianqi Yu and Romana Turina

Part One: Journeys and Nature of Thinking

1. Chaos or Process? Some Remarks on the Work Process of an Essay Film

Jouko Aaltonen

2. The Collector/Sampler/Editor: A Feminist Perspective on the Screenwriting Process 

Judith Rifeser

3. The Future of Thinking: Notes on Animation and the Essay Film 

Richard Wright

Part Two: Dialogic Practices

4. Father-land: Narratives of Memory in a Place of Conflict 

Kayla Parker

5. Heliographies of Change: Marianna Christofides’ Days In Between (2015)

Brenda Hollweg with Marianna Christofides

6. Personal monument: remembering an awkward love Personal monument: remembering an awkward love

Louis Hothothot

Part Three: Work-in-Progress: From Still to Moving Images

7. Three Sisters in a Sketchbook: Photography as Prosthesis in the Essay Film Form 

Romana Turina

8. ‘Into the Frameless Distance’ and ‘The City of (No) Memory’: Itinerant Research for Photo/Filmic Practices 

Patti Gaal-Holmes

Part Four: Nature of the essay film and Cinema as Knowledge Production

9. Black Essay-filmmaking and Essay-filmmaking as ‘Black’

William Brown

10. Filmmakers as ‘magicians’ and cinema can be dangerous Filmmakers as ‘Magicians’ and Cinema Can Be Dangerous

Kiki Tianqi Yu in Conversation with Lei Lei 

Notes on Contributors

Bibliography