ABSTRACT
While film production is inherently a collaborative process, the notion of participatory filmmaking is still a nascent concept in ecocriticism and film studies, often analyzed for its methodological approaches rather than its aesthetic and expressive abilities. This chapter examines the nature of collaborative expression through participatory filmmaking and probes into the ways participatory video (PV) can communicate shared ways of seeing and being that can reflect a community’s ethics and socioecological relations. In this chapter, I consider the role of aesthetics in participatory film production, specifically discussing how a Persianate understanding of proper form known as adab helps inform the stylistic decisions carried out by the Takab PV group in the Iranian documentary film Women of the Sun: A Chronology of Seeing (2020). As a co-producer of the project, I engage with participants’ expressive intentions in answering environmental concerns through collaborative filmmaking and examine how hybridity affects the ways filmmakers produce and protest accelerating global environmental and social changes through cultural understandings of aesthetic expression.
