My Jewish London - co - creativity as an answer to marginalization, citizenship and nationalism: Performance and Identity in Co-Creative Documentary Practice

The mainstream UK documentary archive holds very few examples that explicitly address LGBT+ Jewish (London) experience. This paper finds in the archive a narrow band of conventional, ‘authentic’ narrative norms – safe interior spaces occupied by safe, stereotypical characterisations – that are exclusionary. Through a co-creative practice-based research methodology, this paper proposes a documentary mode of ‘walking’ films with a number of gay Jewish men that challenges both the stereotypical Jewish identities previously represented and the documentary narrative structures used to construct them, and which facilitates more open, ‘performative’ configurations of identity.
This paper proposes an activist co-creative agenda to enable community members themselves to understand and provoke change in their representation. Issues of audience are central to the thesis: who is the audience for non-mainstream film practice? Do they differ from the assumed audience of mainstream documentaries, and how is that significant in terms of affecting social change?