Film as Mediator employs an interdisciplinary methodology that combines elements of autoethnography, cinema and media studies, community archiving, and oral history to redefine our understanding of the Cypriot diasporic experience in Canada. This project is firmly situated within the counter-archival turn as it disrupts conventional national narratives by making space for an underrepresented segment of Canadian society to utilize film and other forms of audiovisual media as a means of historicizing differently. Correspondingly, the focal point of this project is a collection of twenty-two semi-structured video interviews with Cypriot Canadians across various generations that connect the intertwined threads of personal history, familial history, communal history, socio-cultural history, political history, film history, and film as history. In the process, interviewees were encouraged to provide photographs, home movies, and videotapes to use as memory triggers to delve deeper into their life story. These techniques demonstrate the role audiovisual media plays in both personal meaning-making and collective identity formation.
Principal Investigator
Theo Xenophontos is a PhD Candidate in the Cinema & Media Studies program at York University. He holds a BA from the University of Toronto (double major in Cinema Studies and English, with a minor in History) and a MA in Cinema & Media Studies from York University. He currently works for the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Greek Canadian Archives and is helping to establish their Cypriot Canadian collection. Previously, he has worked with such organizations as Archive/Counter-Archive and Vtape. His writing can be read in Found Footage Magazine and Ergon. He can be heard on the podcast "Cyprus: An Island Divided."
theox22@yorku.ca | Twitter | Linkedin
Features
Memories of 1974 - Written, Narrated, Edited, and Directed by Theo Xenophontos
Theo Xenophontos, “Film as Mediator.” Archive/Counter-Archive Working Paper Series (October 2022)