Recent years have seen a rebirth in documentary filmmaking, thanks to broader access to video technologies and means of distribution. However, approaches that explore alternative forms of narrative, representation and understanding, which have the potential of transforming the genre, are often overlooked. The Possible Movements Lab, based at the Hexagram Institute in Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, is dedicated to research, creation and education that address these possibilities, often neglected by mainstream documentary cinema.

Since 2007, the Possible Movements Lab, directed by Marielle Nitoslawska, has focused on experimental documentary and the questions it provokes. How do we perceive our world, and how as filmmakers do we represent that which we perceive? How do we construct narrative, convey an idea, express a voice? In posing these questions through its activities, the lab challenges the divide between documentary theory and practice and encourages new ways of imagining and realizing the documentary intent.

When the filmmaker confronts, analyses and absorbs the desire to observe, understand and experience her subject beyond conventional genre and structural parameters, the documentary impulse assumes new structures and cinematic rhythms. “Our research is guided by concerns both practical and metaphorical,” says Nitoslawska, “We are interested in making work in ways not supported by commercial cinema today in order to deepen our knowledge and understanding of those alternative approaches that cannot be explored easily in other environments. And we are concerned with asking the questions that will lead us to imagine other possible movements and to find original ways of creating them.”