Filming Precarious Subjects: A Conversation with Amandine Gay and Enrico Bartolucci

Abstract: This interview centers on the way French filmmaker Amandine Gay, along with her partner and producer, Enrico Bartolucci, articulate new ways of representing states of precariousness in their award-winning documentaries. It explores the ethics of filming precarious subjects caught in various situations, from displacement and dispossession to new forms of exploitation and marginalization, while simultaneously highlighting new forms of political subjectivity and resistance. In so doing, they attempt to decode the representational matrix of vulnerability, and avoid transforming precarious subjects into a commodifiable spectacle. As documentarians, not only do they seek to provide a visual space to restore suppressed stories but they also strive to build deeper relationships with their subjects, using their film aesthetics to work through the trauma of invisibility and marginalization.