Walking with Moana: Exploring Belonging with a Camera and a Cat

RESEARCH STATEMENT

Walking with Moana: decolonizing film practice in the company of a cat

It is dark and the cicadas call incessantly, an invisible orchestra. Moana sits, looking. She walks forward tentatively, pushes her nose deep into a plant, smelling something, I cannot smell. She walks on. Suddenly she leaps after a moth, or rushes after a cockroach. The burst of speed over, she sits. I wait. Place presses close on me. I lift the camera to my eye, and there she is, in the light from my head-torch, a small sinuous grey body walking carefully along a green verge, tail flicking. I wonder what I will make with the footage that might convey the experience of these walks. This research explores how I translated my evening perambulation with Moana into a film to express the qualities of an experience that is the same but different every night. Intended as an essay film, I discovered that the most apt structure was that of the music video. The music video form is based on rhythm and offers an immediacy absent from narrative, exploiting “spatial and temporal disjunction” (Lynch 1984, 56) to build meaning. I began, as I always do, exploring belonging.

The need to belong 

As a creative practice researcher, knowledge is made through my body, a subjective, immersive practice (Gibson 2010), full of chaos and complexity (Haseman and Mafe 2009). At the heart of my practice is a decolonising ethos to honour my tūpuna (ancestors) who were Ngāi Tahu, a Māori iwi (tribe). This means prioritizing other kinds of knowledges: the intuitive, the embodied and the liminal. Academic knowledge is traditionally valued above the “dogma, witchcraft and immediacy” (Smith 2012, 50-51) of people and cultures judged as “primitive”, and it in this space of immediacy and connection that work with Moana falls.  

In keeping with indigenous methodologies, I work from the inside. My vulnerabilities are central to my research; my “epistemological/theoretical position is not outside …. It’s my being!”  (Diversi and Moreira 2009, 53). I am adopted. Haunted by abandonment, we can experience feelings of not fitting in, not belonging (Haenga Collins 2017), however, the need to belong is “powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive” (Baumeister and Leary 1995, 497). I have explored belonging in place (Rogers, Gough-Brady and Berry 2022), on fabric (Rogers 2020), and through entanglements with the non-human. Previously, foxes in my back garden in Belfast, Northern Ireland, helped create belonging in a new place (Rogers 2024). Here, in another new place (Queensland), I turn to a beloved cat.  

The non-human 

Indigenous ways of knowing can offer ways of co-inhabiting with the non-human that are less extractive, brutal, and power-based (Heise 2016). In non-Western cultures, the central tenant is connectivity, and human life is not valued above other kinds of life (Tidemann, Chirgwin and Sinclair 2010).  My Ngāi Tahu kin emphasise that the mana (authority), mauri (life force) and tikanga (customs and practices) of the tītī (the muttonbird, or sooty shearwater), an important mahinga kai (food source), must be maintained. They see themselves as spiritual guardians, a role vital to the health of human and non-human (Lyver and Moller 2010).  

Donna Haraway (2008, 3) speaks to a similar relationship when she calls on us to view our ordinary entanglements with the non-human as a rich and strange waltz, a “becoming-with”. This idea of movement, of to-ing and fro-ing, connects to belonging itself, which Elspeth Probyn (1996) describes as being always in flux and flow. Haraway works with her companion (a dog) in a game of shepherding sheep, and she writes that she and her dog are “training each other in acts of communication we barely understand” (2008, 16). As Moana and I meander, following now established routes, she keeps an eye on me, waiting when I lag behind, creating what Adrian Franklin (2015) describes in his autoethnographic account of his relationship with his cat Miffy; an “us.”  

Eva Meijer (2022) undertook a similarly detailed observation of her domestic companions, living with laboratory mice. She describes coming to know them individually, of seeing the way they made meaning in their lives. For Meijer, this as a political act, a deep act of respect that recognizes their complexity and completeness. She argues that her mice “co-shape” research questions (206). Her careful attention is a guide for me. She also reminds me to write about power. There is “love and exploitation, trust and domination” (Candea 2010, 244) here, and I do intervene sometimes, to rescue lizards or to (try and) stop her eating very large cockroaches or spiders which can make her vomit.  

On film, the non-human is often examined in minute (artificial) detail, creating an “impossible intimacy” (Bousé 2003, 123). They are canonised, made exceptional, or represent nostalgia for wildness, the way we used to be.  There is also trickery: tame non-humans as nameless stand-ins for when wild non-humans refuse to behave or even show (Louson 2021). Brett Mills argues (2010) for the non-human to be given the same rights as the human, for privacy. To not be filmed. I consider this but believe we are companions; we know each other and trust each other enough for this to take place. 

The film 

The filming does distract. My attention is on the shot and the sound; the details that make up my shooting practice. Catherine Gough-Brady describes how she changes her camera height when filming the Darling River - with no humans in frame there is no need to put the camera at head height (Rogers et al. 2022). I am shooting while holding onto a lead or following her closely if she walks free. I film Moana from the height that I watch her from and I use the headtorch that helps me make sure she is not getting in trouble. I love this random pattern of light and darkness. I also set up my camera trap to trigger as we pass by. Then I buy a small pet camera and hang it on her leash under her chin. The footage is rough and surreal.   

In the edit, I am stuck for a long time. At first, I make an essay film as I did for The Red God (Rogers 2024), but I realise how that makes the film about me. I want to de-centralise myself. I try cutting in a linear way, striving for a narrative, but this imposes an artificial structure. I want to show the sameness of it, the rhythm, and the sensual element, how the experience is both heightened and calm. The music video format offers a way of representation that foregrounds the experiential and bold visuals. “Typified by fragmentation, reflexivity, non-linearity” (Railton 2011, 44), music videos are art and advertising, flippant and serious. As Vernallis notes, the music comes first (2004) but here the rhythm is our walk together, throbbing cicadas the percussion. Walking with Moana is aligned with “art” music videos,as Railton (2011) calls them, a genre that adopts modes of art film practice, for example, anti-realism, sound out of sync, and self-reflexivity.   

I fill the screen with smaller and smaller versions of Moana and play with time and motion. The film is non-linguistic, offering a “democratic” bridge to the more-than-human (Carbonell 2022). I find a piece of Baroque music with a bold and gorgeous beat. Now her small grey legs seem to dance as I lift her to the stool to put on her harness. Brief titles give the viewer a strange and disembodied sense of direction; OUT, UP, ALONG, with a sting of music, like a cat rushing after prey. Giving the work a sudden energy and then back into the stillness of contemplation.  

Conclusion 

Walking with, filming and editing the film about Moana has been a process of “moving away from the self and focusing on the actual other” (Meijer 2022, 232). I cannot replicate the repetition and quiet joy I experience on these walks. But I have created a non-narrative, non-linear visual accumulation. An appeal to your senses, and an invitation for you to take a filmic walk with her. 

Walking with Moana contributes to creative practice knowledge through exploring the intersections of music video form, the quotidian domestic and the non-human. It adds to the fields of research exploring entanglements with nonhuman and contributes to research in the field of belonging. This film suggests new avenues of research for filmmakers wanting to explore alternate ways of expressing and representing their companion non-human relationships.  

PEER REVIEW 1 

Christine Rogers’ Walking with Moana is a film that, like an evening fog, drifts in slowly and asks us to sit with uncertainty. It begins with a quote — “Learning to see others is to allow oneself to be transformed” — and the ambition behind that sentiment is palpable. We are to walk not through the world, but with it, and in this case, with a tethered cat named Moana. The film is saturated with atmospheric cues: the cicadas hum, the shadows stretch, baroque music flares and vanishes like a thought you meant to write down but did not. There is pleasure in this tactility, in the insistence on mood as method. But as much as the film invites us into a more-than-human sensorial space, it sometimes loses its own thread. What transformation, exactly, are we undergoing?

The film’s subject, a cat on a night-time walk, is deceptively simple, even disarming. Rogers resists the urge to anthropomorphize, and this is commendable. The camera does not dominate; it drifts, it lingers, it accepts opacity. Yet, in the attempt to decentralise the human gaze, the work occasionally veers into formal affectation. The split screens, the mosaic compositions, the pink and black lighting, the backwards-moving cats — these visual gestures are evocative, even hypnotic, but at times feel untethered from a clear research question. One begins to wonder: is the film exploring Moana’s experience or enacting the filmmaker’s projection of aestheticised otherness? And does the baroque music — arch, knowingly referential — serve as a distancing mechanism or an invitation?

There is no question that this is practice-as-research, and the film has real value in that frame. It interrogates the politics of movement, the ethics of looking, the possibility of shared time. It exposes the limits of visual legibility and invites a multispecies phenomenology. Yet the insights it offers remain more suggestive than developed. The film gestures toward theories of posthuman intimacy and relational ontology but stops short of fully engaging with them. We are given the  affect, the texture, the rhythm — but not always the reason.

Still, this is a work that stays with you. It leaves residue, not resolution. And perhaps that is its point. But for a viewer, or a peer reviewer, looking for the ways in which method generates insight, the film might benefit from greater formal economy or a clearer articulation of what, precisely, is at stake. In its best moments, Walking with Moana reminds us that knowledge can  be ambient. But, in others, it risks becoming ambient at the expense of knowledge.

The research statement accompanying Walking with Moana would benefit from a clearer articulation of the central inquiry driving the work. At present, the statement gestures toward multispecies relationality, the poetics of walking, and the visual ethics of interspecies intimacy, but stops short of naming a specific problem or question the work seeks to address. One senses that the artist is attuned to the slipperiness of seeing — of knowing — an animal companion, and yet the statement leans more into affective resonance than critical precision. The result is that the creative work, while rich in tone and texture, feels somewhat unmoored in terms of its research contribution.

There is a compelling dissonance between the film’s formal experimentation and the slow

rhythm of the cat’s movement. The use of mosaic screens, fragmented text, and abrupt transitions create an aesthetic tension that could be further interrogated: does this fragmentation reflect the limits of human perception? Is it a strategy for decentralizing the human subject? Or is  it, in moments, an indulgence in aesthetic abstraction that risks obscuring rather than illuminating the film’s subject? These formal choices could be sharpened by a clearer account of what transformation — epistemological, relational, or affective — the film seeks to enact for either the filmmaker or the viewer. The work would benefit from a revised research statement that identifies a core question or tension it engages, situates the film more clearly within specific theoretical fields or artistic lineages (multispecies ethnography, experimental nonfiction, posthumanist visual culture) and clarifies its contribution to knowledge. Additionally, in the edit, the artist might consider paring back some of the more stylized sequences in favour of moments where Moana’s movement or presence can speak more directly. These adjustments would allow both the film and the statement to move from suggestive to incisive, clarifying not only what is

seen, but why that seeing matters.

In sum, Walking with Moana is a thoughtful, formally ambitious work that demonstrates a commitment to embodied inquiry and perceptual experimentation. With greater critical framing and a more focused articulation of its research aims, the piece could make a more potent and lasting contribution to the field of creative practice-as-research.

PEER REVIEW 2 

Christine Rogers’ Walking with Moana (2025) is an authentic, nuanced exploration of their nightly perambulation with their cat, Moana. Opening with the provocation “learning to see others is to allow oneself to be transformed” (Meijer 2022), we experience first-hand these evening journeys, the footage “rough and surreal’” (Rogers 2025), alongside the never-ending calls of the cicadas and birds. The film plays with repetition and manipulation of action, tapping into a sense of recursive contemplation. This is interrupted and disrupted with sudden stings of directional words on screen accompanied with bursts of baroque musical stanzas. The filmmaker identifying how this echo’s Moana’s quiet, sensual stealth that is suddenly broken by a leap after a moth.

Using their creative practice in the form of a music video aligned with art practice, Rogers has created an interesting non-narrative essay. Visual music video tropes of multiple images invite us to consider the rhythm of the cicadas, the walking gait and cat bell while highlighting the repetitive and recursive action of the evening walk. The viewer is drawn to the nuanced developments of each evening. Moana discovers new elements to explore or places to swish her tail. Although we are invited to see the non-human, the human is ever-present.

The filmmaker states their desire to de-centralise themselves in the film and although the film features only Moana, the cat, use of POV camera cannot avoid placing the filmmaker within the story. Other camera angles have been included, at Moana’s height and a camera worn around her neck, however, the head lamp and camera coming from the filmmaker’s eye height reinforces the filmmaker as observer and symbiotic partner within the action. Moana wears a cat lead, a consistent and constant visual connection between filmmaker and cat. This does support the filmmaker’s rich contextual references of indigenous ways of knowing and the entanglements of our relationships with non-humans. The domestic companion is discussed from an indigenous perspective as being valued equally to human counterparts and about the fluid co-dependence between both human and non-human. However, as alluded to in the filmmaker’s statement, the imbalance of power and the influence of the ever-present human could offer further discussion and valuable insight to this research.

Great work I have enjoyed diving into your evening walks!

Video

The cat collar camera offers significant opportunity to further explore this concept from Moana’s perspective. Unfortunately, what is presented here is limited visually and I wonder if this footage represents an alternate filmic exploration. Would love to see where this may lead!

Written statement

It is clear that belonging and sense of place are core to your creative process. I can also see that this could be an integral part of this video work, especially given the re-visiting to familiar places in each night walk. However, in the written statement I find this section to be taking me in an alternate direction and I wonder if it would be stronger with this truncated.  

RESPONSE TO PEER REVIEWS

Firstly, I would like to thank both of my reviewers for their time and expertise. Both have engaged with my work in a deep and thoughtful manner, and I was delighted to read of their responses to the film. Their feedback has helped me to shape my thoughts on what exactly it is I am doing in making a film of my beloved companion, Moana, beyond the pleasure of combining my love of filmmaking with my nightly walk with her.  

Responses to Peer Review 2

Peer reviewer two asked that I speak further to the imbalance of power that exists between Moana and myself, and to the influence that I, as the “ever-present human” exert. I have added an additional statement to this effect in the revised research statement.

They suggested that the images that I gleaned from the cat collar camera were limited and wondered if there might be further, more interesting footage to be used? Unfortunately, the cat collar camera was a disappointment. Moana took no notice of it, but without attempting to strap it to her in a firmer manner, which would surely have made her notice it, the size and lightweight nature of the camera meant it bobbed around on her cat collar, producing simply weird images. The night-vision mode produced the bright purple images as the sensor is hitting her chin, but I do love how her whiskers are outlined. Turning the night-vision mode off and relying on available lighting gave me almost nothing of any use. Overall, it’s a gimmick and most of the footage is unusable. 

In addition, they argued that the adoption section, which provided background to my explorations of belonging, took them in a different direction and suggested this could be trimmed. I agree; please see the revised research statement.  

Responses to Peer Review 1

This reviewer called for more significant alterations to my research statement to clarify what research question the film was answering and the fields of theory that I speak to in this work. This proved to be extremely helpful for me to further focus this research. 

They make four specific suggestions which I will speak to:

• Refine the research statement to more clearly identify the core question or tension the work engages [with]. 

• Expand on the film’s relationship to specific theoretical fields or artistic lineages — e.g., multispecies ethnography, experimental film, or expanded documentary.

• In the edit, consider paring back some of the more self-consciously stylized sequences in favour of moments where Moana’s movement or presence speaks more directly.

• Offer a more explicit account (in the statement or within the work) of what transformation is being sought — for the filmmaker, the viewer, or both.

I have more clearly identified the core question by focusing in on belonging and how I experience and express it in my nightly walk with Moana. I did not see how this research follows so clearly in the lineage of my other work. Through putting my finger more on what I am doing, I am clearer now on what the film is doing and not doing. In addition, this reviewer asks if the film does not show an aestheticised otherness that is in the end distancing rather than an invitation to walk with her. This is true; belonging is created for me - it does not need to, and indeed cannot, be created for you. You experience her as “other.” Moana and I are highly entangled. I believe the clarification in the research statement will help with what this reviewer describes as the “unmoored” nature of this research contribution. 

In addition, I changed the title to more clearly reflect the focus on belonging rather than decolonising. I work with a decolonising ethos, but I am not exploring decolonising per se, at least not in this work. This reviewer, in asking me to refine the research statement, helped me see this. 

I have added additional references to critical animal studies to connect readers into one of the fields where this research sits. In critical animal studies, researchers strive to make creative work that undermines the anthropomorphizing and human-centred basis of much non-human research and art. 

After careful consideration, I have decided not to revisit the film. My intention is to create a glimpse, a teaser, of what we do on our walks, a haiku. I believe through significantly revising my research statement, my creative choices have been made clearer. I have also given more context to the form through referencing Len Lye and his experimental films. 

On the final point, Lye’s idea of working to create “bodily empathy” (Smythe 2013) has brought more focus to what transformation I may be seeking in the viewer, although, for me, this is too strong a word. I do not believe any viewer/reader of my work will be transformed, but perhaps they may be teased and delighted by the shapes of my cat’s journey in the night. I describe in my revised statement how the mosaics of Moana, the bursts of music and disjointed rhythms aim to create a sense of aliveness and unpredictability that, I argue, lies at the heart of this human non-human relationship. Perhaps this viewer/reader might reflect on the particular shapes of belonging they are entangled with in their relationship with their companion animal. 

Thank you both again, these additions have certainly improved my work. 

REVISED RESEARCH STATEMENT 

Walking with Moana: exploring belonging with a camera and a cat (note: new title)

It is dark and the cicadas call incessantly, an invisible orchestra. Moana sits, looking. She walks forward tentatively, pushes her nose deep into a plant, smelling something I cannot smell. She walks on. Suddenly she leaps after a moth, or rushes after a cockroach. The burst of speed over, she sits. I wait. Place presses close. I lift the camera to my eye, and there she is, in the light from my head-torch, a small sinuous grey body walking carefully along a green verge, tail flicking. I wonder what I will make with the footage that might convey the experience of these walks, our close attachment as we experience the night together.  

This research describes how I translated my evening perambulation with Moana into a short experimental film that explores the question, “how can the belonging of my nightly walk with Moana be expressed in film?”  Intended to be an essay film, I discovered that the most apt structure for our nightly walks was that of the music video, a non-verbal short form based on rhythm that exploits “spatial and temporal disjunction” (Lynch 1984, 56) to build meaning. I began, as I always do, exploring belonging.   

The need to belong

As a creative practice researcher, knowledge is made through my body, a subjective, immersive practice (Gibson 2010), full of chaos and complexity (Haseman and Mafe 2009). At the heart of my practice is a decolonising ethos to honour my tūpuna (ancestors) who were Ngāi Tahu, a Māori iwi (tribe). This means prioritising other kinds of knowledges; the intuitive, the embodied and the liminal.  In keeping with indigenous methodologies, I work from the inside. Academic knowledge is traditionally valued above the “dogma, witchcraft and immediacy” (Smith 2012, 50-51) of people and cultures judged as “primitive”, and it is in this space of immediacy and connection that work with Moana falls. 

Belonging is at the heart of my research. The need to belong is “powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive” (Baumeister and Leary 1995, 497). I have explored belonging in place (Rogers, Gough-Brady and Berry 2022), on fabric (Rogers 2020) and through entanglements with the non-human.  Previously, foxes in my back garden in Belfast, Northern Ireland, helped create belonging in a new place (Rogers 2024). Here, in another new place (Queensland), I turn my lens on my beloved cat. 

The non-human

Indigenous ways of knowing can offer ways of co-inhabiting with the non-human that are less extractive, brutal, and power-based (Heise 2016). In non-Western cultures, the central tenant is connectivity, and human life is not valued above other kinds of life (Tidemann, Chirgwin & Sinclair 2010). My Ngāi Tahu kin emphasise that the mana (authority), mauri (life force) and tikanga (customs and practices) of the tītī (the muttonbird, or sooty shearwater), an important mahinga kai (food source), must be maintained. They see themselves as spiritual guardians, a role vital to the health of human and non-human (Lyver and Moller 2010). 

Companion animals can be important attachment figures, providing many well-being benefits (Zilcha-Mano, Mikulincer and Shaver 2012). But this is human-focused research (as so much non-human research is). In literature and film, animals often represent emotional tropes (such as dogs and loyalty). They are anthropomorphised, symbolic, non-individual (Milton 2020). To turn our focus from what the non-human teach us, or show us, is to work to see them each as individuals with their own desires, needs, personalities. 

Donna Haraway (2008, 3) calls on us to view our relationships with non-humans as entanglements that change both of us, a strange waltz, a “becoming-with”. This idea of growth and movement connects to belonging itself, which Elspeth Probyn (1996) describes as being always in flux and flow. Haraway works with her companion (a dog) in a game of shepherding sheep, and she writes that she and her dog are “training each other in acts of communication we barely understand” (2008, 16). As Moana and I meander, following now established routes, she keeps an eye on me, sometimes anticipating, sometimes waiting, sometimes striding out, creating what Adrian Franklin (2015) describes in his autoethnographic account of his relationship with his cat Miffy an “us.”  

Eva Meijer (2022) undertook a detailed observation of her domestic companions, living with laboratory mice. She describes coming to know them individually, of seeing the way they made meaning in their lives. For Meijer, this as a political act, a deep act of respect that recognises their complexity and completeness. She argues that her mice “co-shape” research questions (2022: 206). Her careful attention is a guide for me. She also reminds me to write about power. There is “love and exploitation, trust and domination” (Candea 2010, 244) here and I do intervene sometimes to rescue lizards or to (try and) stop her eating very large cockroaches or spiders which can make her vomit. I try as much as possible to let her lead the walks, aware that I dictate so much of her daily life. 

On film, the non-human are often examined in minute (artificial) detail, creating an “impossible intimacy” (Bousé 2003, 123). They are canonised, made exceptional, or represent nostalgia for wildness, the way we used to be. There is also trickery, tame non-humans as nameless stand-ins for when wild non-humans refuse to behave or even show (Louson 2021). Brett Mills (2010) argues for the non-human to be given the same rights as the human: for privacy. To not be filmed. I consider this but believe we are companions; we know each other and trust each other enough for this to take place. 

The film

Most nights Moana and I walk out together, around my property in Buderim, Queensland. Every night is the same but subtly different. But to choose to pick up a camera is to change my “becoming with”. My attention is now on the shot and the sound, the details that make up my filmmaking practice. Catherine Gough-Brady describes how she changes her camera height when filming the Darling River - with no humans in frame there is no need to put the camera at head height (Rogers, Gough-Brady and Berry 2022). I am shooting while holding onto a lead or following Moana if she walks free. I film her from my height, the height that I watch her from, and I use the headtorch that helps me make sure she is not getting in trouble. I love the random pattern of light and darkness that this creates on film. I also set up my camera trap to trigger as we pass by. Then I buy a small pet camera and hang it on her leash under her chin. The footage is rough and surreal, most of it useless. I cannot see any change in how she interacts with me as we walk out when I film her or do not. Sometimes she directs us and I follow. Other times I grow bored and encourage her along. Sometimes she wants to go indoors, she’s had enough, sometimes I carry her inside when I have had enough. Always, I feel a powerful connection to her, and I feel powerfully alive in the moment. How to express this via film?  

In the edit, I am stuck for a long time. At first, I make an essay film as I did for The Red God (Rogers 2024), but I realise how that makes the film about me. I want to de-centralise myself, to absent myself as much as I can. I try cutting in a linear way, but there is no climax here, only rhythm and subtle change. It feels flat, like a nature documentary about the too-familiar. How can I show you how I feel as I observe her small grey body? I want to show how the experience is heightened and calm, familiar and strange. I watch her tail flicking and writhing, the way she moves towards and away from objects, her patterns of movement. One Moana on screen is not enough to express all of what I feel. I begin to fill the screen with smaller versions of her and to play with time and motion to suggest repetition and rhythm, sameness and difference and the movements of belonging.  

The music video format offers a way of representation that foregrounds the experiential and bold visuals. “Typified by fragmentation, reflexivity, non-linearity” (Railton 2011, 44), music videos are art and advertising, flippant and serious. The music typically comes first (Vernallis 2004), but here the rhythm is our walk together, throbbing cicadas the percussion. Walking with Moana is aligned with “art” music videos, a genre that adopts modes of art film practice, for example, anti-realism, sound out of sync, and self-reflexivity (Railton 2011). The film is non-linguistic, offering a “democratic” bridge to the more-than-human (Carbonell 2022). It also taps into experimental film practice such as Len Lye’s work, where bold and abstract visual and aural rhythms work to create what he calls “bodily empathy” (Smythe 2013, 74), a corporal engagement with cinema. 

I find a piece of Baroque music with a bold and gorgeous beat; its sheer beauty speaks to me of my emotional connection to Moana. Now her small grey legs seem to dance as I lift her to the stool to put on her harness. Brief titles give the viewer a disembodied sense of direction; OUT, UP, ALONG, that show the regularity of our walks, and the accompanying sting of music is like a cat rushing after prey. These musical chapter headings give the work a sudden energy, a sensation of surprise and delight which is what I can feel in my interactions with Moana in the to and fro of belonging. Hopefully, in keeping with Lye’s exhortation (Smythe 2013), through this film you experience a sense of the delightful aliveness and unpredictability that companion animals bring to our lives. 

Conclusion

Walking with, filming and editing the film about Moana has been a process of “moving away from the self and focusing on the actual other” (Meijer 2022, 232). I cannot replicate the quiet joy I experience on these walks, the moments of surprise, the belonging that is created between us. But I have created a non-narrative, non-linear visual accumulation that might suggest my entanglements with her. An appeal to your senses, and an invitation for you to take a filmic walk with her.

Walking with Moana contributes to creative practice knowledge through exploring the intersections of music video form, the quotidian domestic and the non-human. It adds to the fields of research exploring entanglements with nonhuman and contributes to research in the field of belonging. This film suggests new avenues of research for filmmakers wanting to explore alternate ways of expressing and representing their companion non-human relationships.

REFERENCES 

Baumeister, Roy. F., and Leary, Mark. R. 1995. “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation.” Psychological Bulletin 117, no. 3: 497-529. 

Bousé., Derek. 2003. “False intimacy: close-ups and viewer involvement in wildlife films”. Visual Studies 18, no. 2: 123-132.

Candea, Matei. 2010. ““I fell in love with Carlos the meerkat”: Engagement and detachment in human–animal relations.” American Ethnologist 37, no. 2: 241–258. 

Carbonell, Isabelle. 2022. “Attuning to the Pluriverse: Documentary Filmmaking Methods, Environmental Disasters, & the More-Than-Human.” PhD diss., University of California. ProQuest 30241739.

Diversi, Marcelo and Moreira, Claudio. 2009. Betweener Talk: Decolonizing Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Praxis. Taylor & Francis. 

Fitzpatrick, Esther. 2016. “The Art of Letting the Ghost Come Back: A Serendipitous Tale of Exploring the Complex Issue of Becoming a Pākehā Educator.” PhD diss., University of Auckland. ResearchSpace Home, 2292/30913. 

Franklin, Adrian. 2015. “Miffy and me: Developing an auto-ethnographic approach to the study of companion animals and human loneliness.” Animal Studies Journal 4, no. 2: 78-115. 

Gibson, Ross. 2010. “The Known World.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, 8: 1-11. 

Haenga-Collins, Maria. 2017. “Closed Stranger Adoption, Māori and Race Relations in Aotearoa New Zealand, 1955-1985.”  PhD diss., Australian National University. Open Research Repository, 1885/132619. 

Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. University of Minneapolis Press. 

Haseman, Brad and Mafe, Daniel. 2009. “Acquiring Know-how: Research Training for Practice-led Researchers.” In Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, edited by Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean. Edinburgh University Press. 

Heise, Ursula K. 2019. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. University of Chicago Press. 

Louson, Eleanor. 2021. “Performing authenticity: The making-of documentary in wildlife film's blue-chip renaissance” People and Nature, 3: 1147–1159.  

Lynch, Joan D. 1984. “Music Videos: From Performance to Dada-Surrealism.” The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 18, no. 1: 53-57.  

Lyver, Philip. O’B. and Henrik Moller. 2010. “An Alternative Reality: Māori Spiritual Guardianship of New Zealand's Native Birds”. In Ethno-ornithology: Birds, Indigenous Peoples, Culture and Society, edited by Sonia C. Tidemann and Andrew Gosler, 241-264. Earthscan.   

Meijer, Eva. 2022. “Learning to See Mice (Stray Philosophy III).” HUMANIMALIA 13, no. 1: 203-251.

Mills, Brett. 2010. “Television wildlife documentaries and animals’ right to  

Privacy”. Continuum, 24, no. 2: 193-202. 

Milton, Kay. 2020. “Anthropomorphism or egomorphism? The perception of non-human persons by human ones.” In Animals in person, edited by John Knight, 255-271 Routledge

Probyn, Elspeth. 1996. Outside Belongings. Routledge. 

Railton, Diane. 2011. Music Video and the Politics of Representation. Edinburgh University Press.  

Rogers, Christine. 2024. “The Red God.” Screenworks,14, no 2. Essay Film. https://www.screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-14-2/the-red-god 

Rogers, Christine. 2020. “Almost Always Clouds: Stitching a Map of Belonging.” In Wayfinding and Critical Autoethnography, edited by Fetaui Iosefo, Stacey Holman Jones, and Anne Harris, 151-167. Routledge.  

Rogers, Christine, Catherine Gough-Brady, and Marsha Berry. 2022. “Breathing places: Three filmmaking investigations.” In cultural geographies, 29, no. 1: 99-113.  

Smith, Linda. T. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd ed.). Zed Books Ltd. 

Smythe, Luke. 2013. "Len Lye: The vital body of cinema." In October, 144: 73-91.

Tidemann, Sonia, C., Sharon Chirgwin and Ross J. Sinclair. 2010. “Indigenous Knowledges, Birds that Have ‘Spoken' and Science”. In Ethno-ornithology: Birds, Indigenous Peoples, Culture and Society, edited by Tidemannn, Sonia C., and Andrew Gosler, 10-19. Earthscan.   

Vernallis, Carol. 2004. Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. Columbia University Press.   

Yngvesson, Barbara and Maureen A. Mahoney. 2000. “‘As One Should, Ought and Wants to Be’: Belonging and Authenticity in Identity Narratives.” Theory, Culture & Society, 17, no. 6: 77-110. 

Zilcha-Mano Sigal, Mario Mikulincer, and Phillip R. Shaver. 2012. “Pets as safe havens and secure bases: The moderating role of pet attachment orientations.” Journal of Research in Personality, 46, no. 5: 571-580. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2012.06.005.