FMT Assistant Professor Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz’s documentary film, “How to Tell a True Immigrant Story,” has been selected to premiere in the shorts competition at the Locarno Film Festival this August. Now in its 72nd year, the Locarno Film Festival is recognized as a prestige festival for independent, auteur cinema from around the world.
The film was also selected for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival’s online exhibition, “Disruptions,” and will have its UK premiere at Encounters VR, and its domestic premiere at the Adirondack Film Festival in Glens Falls, NY in October.
“How to Tell a True Immigrant Story” is a documentary in 360º spherical video that interrogates the “immigrant” construct and documentary’s complicity in that construction. The film proceeds as a poetic, sensorial tapestry of voices and experiences as recounted by Latinx community members in upstate New York.
“This film, I hope, is less about “immigrants” and more about the ways we are all implicated in constructing “the immigrant,” about what could come to light beyond the shadow of this construct which is at once ever-expanding and constricting,” says Aggie.