imageNATION A Student-produced documentary on image-based discrimination in modern culture.

(2012) In October 2011, in my third year of film I took a module on documentary filmmaking. One of the requirements of this was to create your own 15-minuet documentary as part of a group. When the group met and went over ideas for our documentary we all had very different ideas. We eventually settled on doing a documentary on image, yet what was to be the exact focus of the piece was unclear to us at the beginning. After going over a few ideas we decided to pack up our kit and take it to the very image aware streets of Camden and interview subjects with a few varied questions to see what their thoughts were on image. We found that people were mostly concerned with what they wore, why they wore it, what their concerns were about others thoughts on their image, and judgements they made of others. This lead us to decide to do our piece on image-based discrimination and the judgements we all make of different people everyday based on the clothes they where. We chose a wide range of people as our formal interview subjects. These included; modern punks (figure 1) , a very pretty girl that loved pink, a black
Figure 1- Dan one of our punk interviewees. man whos friends accused him of being too white, a lesbian who as been abused for not dressing feminine enough (figure 2), a man who considered himself to dress plainly and a woman who loved her labels.

By showing such a wider range of people we represented that however you dress you will be subject to judgement. We even got the interviewees to point out people that they would judge for the way they dress, even though they dont like it when people make the same assumptions of them. The ideology of the piece was to identify that this is a part of our modern culture and to hopefully get the viewer more aware of it. It was well received by the audiences we showed it too. The documentary works well to spark conversations and debates, as well as making us look internally to our own misconceptions of others. By bringing to light the physical or verbal abuse these people have had to deal with, and how it makes the feel we managed to bring to light a subject that is often trivialised.

Figure 2 - Clare, who has had abuse for the way she dresses.

Different audience always had a n alternative t view as well, as we all have a personal view of our own image and that of others. This documentary did not aim to give answers, but more to raise questions and trigger an internal thought process instead. Which our audience feedback told us we achieved well.