Stop Filming Us: Interrogating and Inverting the Western Gaze

Stop Filming Us, a new documentary film by Joris Postema, opens at Film Forum in New York City on May 14, 2021, in theater and in virtual cinema. For more information click here.

The issue of cultural appropriation has been debated hotly and frequently in recent years—in literature, film, television, and visual arts. I’ve personally been in and around this debate for decades, and on some level it gets old and ceases to be productive or even interesting. 

Still, I am a proponent of continuing the conversation when it leads us away from oversimplistic policing of who is “allowed” to portray what, and instead enables us to Get Real about it.  In my experience—as writer, educator, and film programmer—white makers (well-meaning, self-proclaimed progressives) in all media are generally unsure, uncomfortable, and at times, yes, fragile, when writing, filming, portraying BIPOC characters and cultures.  A kind of consciousness-raising has been achieved, and this is good. Even so, if our main accomplishment is putting white makers “on notice,” and creating an eggshells creative environment, I’m not sure we’ve progressed all that much.  

The new documentary , by Dutch filmmaker , breathes a bit of fresh air into the stale, stiff debate.  In this age of post-post-post modernism, there is perhaps something earnestly old-fashioned—to a younger generation of cinephiles and post-colonial scholars—about the meta-documentary pivot that Postema makes in crafting his exploration of unconscious Western framing, aka the “Western gaze.” In the case of , however, the pivot