<\/p>\n
Rithy Panh<\/a>, the award-winning Cambodian-French filmmaker, has been a long-term mentor at the Short Documentary Lab<\/a> at the Doha Film Institute<\/a> (DFI) in Qatar. In collaboration with Panh\u2019s Bophana Centre<\/a> in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and organized by DFI\u2019s Hanaa Issa, Ali Khechen, and Ania Hendryx W\u00f3jtowicz, the Doc Lab has been dedicated to instilling in Qatar\u2019s fledgling filmmakers an artistic approach that revolves around looking inside oneself to make sense of the world, and examining the world to make sense of oneself. During the 2020\u20132021 edition<\/a> of the Doc Lab in which I participated, that world was in lockdown, that world was in turmoil, that world was almost entirely virtual.<\/p>\n The confounding coronavirus pandemic period was the setting in which we, as lab participants, documented our contemporary condition any which way we could, with whatever tools we had at hand, within the confines of our living spaces. Unsurprisingly, the theme of the workshop that year was to explore our definitions and experiences of \u201cconfinement and isolation<\/a>,\u201d with Panh encouraging us to audio-visually represent the fact that \u201ca small invisible virus\u201d had exposed \u201cthe fragility of our existence.\u201d<\/p>\n Ensuring that the lab continued during the pandemic was Panh\u2019s way of pushing participants to keep creating, despite the setbacks. The overarching question that guided the workshop asked participants to imagine what happens when filmmakers become unable to work with the casts, crews, and locations to which they are accustomed?<\/p>\n The drive of the workshop was for filmmakers to become more independent, more self-reliant, more versatile, more creative, and perhaps even more passionate about the urge to make films. Our small task was to keep cinema alive in the full knowledge that theatres would be shuttered for the foreseeable future, and that screenings would be confined to the home, to patchy streaming services, television sets, laptops, and mobile phone screens.<\/p>\n Panh\u2019s lab was a savior for many filmmakers, such as myself, who wanted to divert our attentions to something other than the death and depression that defined the time. Despite our attempts to escape the world around us through daily online sessions, Panh returned our gaze to the waning world, encouraging participants to look out their windows at their versions of it, examine, discuss, film, screen, and, hopefully, make sense of and perhaps even change that world.<\/p>\n