Film-making as creative praxis: capturing the intimate side of interculturality

This article uses the use of creative film-making to explore the doing of the intimate and personal aspects of the intercultural encounter. By focusing the investigation of the intercultural encounter through and with the film-making as artistic practice rather than as an objective document, it seeks to offer an alternative paradigm for the use of visual methods for ethnographic and auto-ethnographic research. It draws on a phenomenological and auto-ethnographic film perspective to move beyond an ocularcentric focus and towards an embodied methodology by seeing the film as body (Sobchack, 1992) and using the concept of ‘haptic visuality’ (Marks, 2002) to explore the lived, subjective experience through film-making praxis via the example of three short films, namely A Letter Of Love To You (Rifeser, UK, 2016) Care|ss (Rifeser, UK, 2017) and Totsch (Rifeser, UK, 2018) which all form part of the wider work A caressing dialogical encounter (Rifeser, UK, 2019). By using creative film-making praxis as methodological tool, or what could be called “pensive-creative praxis” (Rifeser, 2020a), a parallel can be established with an understanding of the intercultural encounter in its all its multi-dimensional complexity: a vibrant, multi-layered and textured way of making sense of our cultures (Ros i Solé, 2022).