Essay Film and Narrative Techniques

Romana Turina is associate professor at Arts University Bournemouth. She is a writer, filmmaker and historian. While leading research in the ‘Essay Film’ for the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS), Romana engages in the creative processes. Her work includes the essay films Lunch with Family (2016) and San Sabba (2016), shortlisted at the AHRC Research in Film Awards 2018 and awarded at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards 2018. In 2024, she completed the essay film Three Sisters in a Sketchbook (2024), selected at the LA Independent Women Film Awards 2024, and the Hollywood Independent Filmmaker Awards and Festivals 2024. Romana received her Ph.D. in theatre, film and television from the University of York, UK. She taught creative writing and screenwriting at the University of Indianapolis, the University of York and the University of Greenwich. Kiki Tianqi Yu is a writer, filmmaker, curator, and reader in cinematic art at Queen Mary University of London. She is the PI of AHRC funded project 'Daoism, Cinema and Wellbeing' (2025-28) and also working on Sinophone women’s cinema, creative documentary and experimental nonfiction. She is the author of ‘My’ Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China (EUP, 2019), co-editor of China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the 21 Century (Bloomsbury 2014) and her publications appear in Screen, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Studies in Documentary Film, etc. Her films include Memory of Home (2009), China’s van Goghs (2016), and The Two Lives of Li Ermao (2019). Her curatorial projects include the film season Dancing with Water: Women’s cinema from Contemporary China.

• List of FiguresPreface – Laura RascaroliIntroduction: Essay Filmmaking as Creative Research – Kiki Tianqi Yu and Romana TurinaPart One: Journeys and Nature of Thinking1. Chaos or Process? Some Remarks on the Work Process of an Essay Film – Jouko Aaltonen2. The Collector/Sampler/Editor: A Feminist Perspective on the Screenwriting Process – Judith Rifeser3. The Future of Thinking: Notes on Animation and the Essay Film – Richard WrightPart Two: Dialogic Practices4. Father-land: Narratives of Memory in a Place of Conflict – Kayla Parker5. Heliographies of Change: Marianna Christofides’ Days In Between (2015) – Brenda Hollweg with Marianna Christofides6. Personal Monument: Remembering an Awkward Love – Louis HothothotPart Three: Work-in-Progress: From Still to Moving Images7. Three Sisters in a Sketchbook: Photography as Prosthesis in the Essay Film Form – Romana Turina8. ‘into the frameless distance – city of (no) memory’: Itinerant Research for Photo/Filmic Practices – Patti Gaal-HolmesPart Four: Nature of the Essay Film and Cinema as Knowledge Production9. Black Essay-filmmaking and Essay-filmmaking as ‘Black’ – William Brown10. Filmmakers as ‘Magicians’ and Cinema Can Be Dangerous – Kiki Tianqi Yu in Conversation with Lei Lei Notes on Contributors