Sightlines Journal, Issue 7: 2025

Welcome to the seventh issue of Sightlines: Filmmaking in the Academy Journal.

Once again, we are delighted to present an engaging and diverse range of screen production research. The research projects presented in this issue of Sightlines include examples of documentary, experimental film, virtual reality and screenwriting. 

These creative practice research outputs or artefacts showcase creative and applied practitioner-based research where the creative work sits alongside a research statement outlining research questions and situating the creative work within a body of theory, literature and other creative works. The individual works reflect and interrogate some of the artistic methodologies associated with screen production from a practitioner perspective. 

Each of the works has been reviewed by two peers from the screen production discipline. Reviewers were asked to assess intention, aims and research design in each of the works comprising a research statement and creative artefact. We continue our practice of publishing reviews along with the research statements to create conversations and connections to continue building and extending our community of practice. The editorial committee would like to express their heartfelt gratitude to each reviewer for their important contributions to this issue of Sightlines. 

This issue features 13 thought-provoking works. 

We begin with three poetic, experimental films. Commissioned by Te Herenga Waka- Victoria University of Wellington, Alfio Leotta’s poetry film Butterfly, seeks to extend the possibilities for the moving image to communicate poetically and celebrates the act of creative place making. It does this through visually showcasing Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, and anchors the film in specific geographies, aided by voice-over and a loose narrative shape. 

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​In Walking with Moana, Christine Rogers introduces the viewer to a cat’s nocturnal perambulations. This multilayered non-linear work highlights human non-human entanglements as Moana moves through the natural habitat, engaging in an embodied conversation with place and with Rogers, who sometimes leads, other times follows. Rogers’ practice is informed by indigenous methodologies which encourage us to explore other kinds of knowings and as Moana walks, the viewer is asked to experience the nightly repetition, the differences, and the “quiet joy” of her journeys. Rogers presents new possibilities for the researcher-filmmaker wanting to explore non-traditional, non-linear belongings. 

Cassandra Tytler’s a skin, a sea, an island, a prison is an experimental work that questions racialised notions of nature and human bodies through an atmospherically layered audio-visual composition to challenge and disrupt notions of whiteness and the hidden violences associated with representation. Vocal mimicry comprising bird calls, weather sounds and AI generated speech blurs boundaries between the human and nonhuman to evoke a sense of how sound may be tactile. The work is deliberately troublesome and seeks to interrogate and expose who and what is expendable within the materiality of contemporary popular culture. 

We then feature two documentaries that delve into complex ecosystems related to insects. The documentary Wild Honey: Caring for Bees in a Divided Land, by Seth Keen and Lisa Palmer, documents a nocturnal honey harvest in West Timor. In doing so, it employs a Research-Integrated Documentary (RID) methodology that involves collaboration with stakeholders (researchers and cultural consultants), enabling them to become co-creators in the documentary design and production. 

Nima Bahrehmand and August Black’s audio-visual essay, The Feeders, is a creative and critical research project by the End of Us art collective, which explores imaginative thinking around waste, survival and transformation. The film records the sonic landscape created by the digestion and decay of styrofoam, to create a dialogue between waste and renewal. The Feeders is a living project, constantly transforming as we test ideas against the aesthetic and as the worms themselves reshape their environment, realising the potential in the intersection of art and scientific research.

This audio-visual essay is followed by a further two documentary projects, which adopt and showcase the possibilities of new technologies to engage audiences. The interactive documentary (i-doc) titled Kuyululu Archival i-Doc represents a second venture into interactive storytelling from broadcast documentary producer and director, Nicole McCuiag. This i-doc, created using Klynt software, serves as an interactive archive of filmmaker Ayten Kuyululu, a Turkish immigrant to Australia, whose films often explore the migrant experience. Kuyululu Archival i-Doc combines talking head interviews with Warren Kuyululu, Ayten’s son, and Turkish professor Ahmen Gurata, alongside footage from Ayten Kuyululu’s films. This combination invites viewers to assemble an understanding of Kuyululu’s influential filmmaking career.

Also adopting interactive technologies (alongside more traditional media formats), The Holocaust Project, presented by Bobbi-Lea Dionysius, Peter Hegedüs and Jaclyn McLendon, is a multi-platform storytelling project consisting of three screen works: Sorella's Story, a 16-minute Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) film; To Never Forget, an 82-minute feature documentary; and In Their Name, a 26-minute broadcast documentary. These three interconnected components, which were inspired by a photograph taken in Latvia in 1941, interrogate the complexities of the Holocaust and its ongoing impact on individuals and geopolitics in the current era. The accompanying research statement explores the authors’ goals in relation to transmedia storytelling and audience diversification.

Liam Branagan, meanwhile, offers the CVR narrative short film, An Indefinite Life, which explores an asylum seeker’s experience of offshore detention. Drawing upon the affordances of the 360-degree video format, while also featuring conventional 2D images, the project uses slow cinema techniques to explore setting and pacing. As Branagan’s research statement outlines, this involved a process of experimentation and iteration with the spatialised, immersive format. 

The next three works present reflective and performative explorations of a variety of subject matter. The experimental documentary by Ben Mendelsohn, You Are My Face, is the result of an exercise where film academics choose a significant scene from film history and re-perform the dialogue. In this film, Mendelsohn braids his experience learning to play and sing the Wilco song "You Are My Face” with his own autoethnographic musings about his thoughts about his own identity as an academic and the emotions that motivate him to research, teach and create. The film uses fragmentation to promote an interpretive and impressionistic approach to ethnographic filmmaking.

Catherine Gough-Brady’s Making With explores the creation of three short films with a group of village elders, Attitude: Ageing Well in Clunes. Shifting her approach from working “for” to “with,” Gough-Brady embraces a co-creation methodology rooted in care and collaboration. The project, especially Joy Film, became a reflective tool for the group, prompting organisational changes and a re-evaluation of their volunteer efforts. This research highlights the effectiveness of filmmaking “with” as a reflexive and trust-building tool, valuable for screen practitioners exploring the nexus of care and documentary filmmaking.

Helen Gaynor’s film CALM THE F**K DOWN is a provocative filmmaking experiment that gives voice to the male inner psyche through female performers, to examine male violence against women and children. In her accompanying research statement, Gaynor reflects on the production process, addressing the ethical complexities involved in making the film and its significance in contributing to public discourse on male violent behaviour against those they purport to love.

The issue then features one screenplay work: City of Echoes by Andrew O’Keefe and Jack Rule explores the notion that “living a creative life is an act of bravery.” Inspired by the paintings of Jeffrey Smart, the story follows a musician and a dancer who use their art to escape an oppressive urban landscape. The accompanying research statement reflects on the authors’ creative challenges in writing for virtual production, highlighting the importance of aligning screenwriting practices with emerging virtual production technologies.

Lastly, Adam Sekuler’s Really Good Friends is structured with two dualities. The first, a stated straddling of documentary and fiction through a re-enactment approach, and the second, a telling of two stories in parallel. Sekuler describes the film as “a story not about romantic love but deep friendship,” and the work challenges outsider notions of how intimacy is practiced within BDSM friendships and communities. 

Individually, each of the works presented here contributes to the practices of storytelling within screen production. Collectively, the works provide a sense of some of the important emergent conversations within creative practice research and contribute to a community of practice for practitioner academics in the field of screen production.  

Thanks to Carina Böhm for her attention to detail as copy editor for this issue.

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