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Thursday 5 April 2012

NEWS – launch of new website DocWest

Centre for Production and Research of Documentary Film at The University of Westminster

DocWest is the website of the Documentary Film Centre at the University of Westminster. Established in 2009, it brings together an interdisciplinary network of researchers, practitioners and students to foster creative conversations around documentary practice. In their premises in Central London they host an exciting range of screenings, master-classes and conferences involving some of the most prominent practitioners in today’s documentary world.

Their activities involve teaching, film production, and academic research. They aim to redefine documentary discourse, its history and its connection to art and politics through investigating relationships between ideology, history, culture, and the apparatus of artistic production. They pay particular attention to the study areas of Visual Anthropology and Human Rights, Arts Documentary and the Documentary Archive, whilst extending the range of production and research into other fields of documentary study, such as the interactive documentary and the web-based documentary.

They focus on international collaboration and they welcome proposals from, and partnerships with, other documentary centres throughout the world. They actively search to promote documentary work that goes beyond Western European and North American traditions. They collaborate closely with Westminster University’s India Media Centre, China Media Centre and Africa Media Centre, and they are currently developing partnerships in Central and Eastern Europe.

They have developed a thriving Ph.D. culture, with both theoretical and practice-based doctoral degrees focusing on a variety of contexts and referencing many different documentary traditions. Current and completed Ph.D.s range from a shared ethnography of a queer club in London to an examination of the new forms of documentary film-making associated with representations of Modern China, and from an investigation into the new visual language associated with ‘mobile-mentaries’, to an ethnography of a documentary film studio in communist Romania.

They aim to provide a platform for initiating, funding and distributing creative documentary projects conceived at the intersection between academia and the industry.

If you feel inspired by the above, they want to hear from you.

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