ABSTRACT
Around three years ago I began to include transnational documentaries in a film course I regularly teach to undergraduates (mostly US citizens) at a mid-size Jesuit university in California. Without any previous experience of teaching non-fiction cinema, I brought these texts to my students’ attention as an experiment while seeking ways to enable them to reexamine their own responses to the feature films that were initially the focus of the curriculum. The introduction of non-fiction films had, in fact, a galvanizing effect, eliciting emotional reactions that ranged from pity to perplexity, and opening up avenues of inquiry that prompted often heated discussions. Although I have continued to include documentaries in subsequent classes, making them more central to the curriculum with each iteration, facilitating students’ productive engagement with these transnational film texts remains a challenge. In what follows, I offer a reflection on the methodological, ethical, and political issues that have arisen in the process of this ongoing experiment.
