Impossible Form

This is a three-way conversation between the filmmakers Penny Siopis, John Akomfrah, and Zenab Sedira that began in Beirut in 2015 and is taken up here as an extended exchange about conceptual overlaps in their work as well as processes of making film. Akomfrah describes Siopis’s filmmaking as exercises in impossible form, so intricate and opaque are the demarcations between the autobiographical, the fictional, fable, allegory, story, and document in her works. In the course of the conversation, Akomfrah, Sedira, and Siopis elaborate on and explore their own tentacular and labyrinthine processes of producing film, as they persuade radically different and dispersed images to “talk” to each other. How they work with and think about archives, collecting, and collage; what their views are on the essay film form and its legacies in the present; their uses of voice and sound; and their negotiation of digital and analog forms are all discussed here. Finally, water, spilling, and unfixity are explored, not least in the context of the emerging crises, including climate change, in the twenty-first century.