Havana, Cuba
Toronto, Canada
Spanish with English Subtitles
Joanna Kocsis writes: This film was my way of exploring the work of knowledge creation with the ontological and epistemological understanding of knowledge as social, created, performed and resistant. The methodological choice to use film aimed to support the development of knowledge creation activities with groups that have been historically left out of the positivist project of knowledge production. It emerged from a three-year research engagement that explored the identity work and meaning-making of a group of racially- and territorially-stigmatized young people living in Old Havana, Cuba to better the experiences of a group conventionally considered “at-risk”.
The film production came near the end of my fieldwork. Before they began writing the film, the teens created their characters, building identities using details from their own lives and the lives of people around them. Some of them expressed a feeling of identification with the characters they created and others insisted their characters were modelled on others, and had little in common with their own experiences. The collective creation of characters led them to be more complex and multidimensional, as each character was created using various points of view and voices. Beyond adding depth, the use of composite stories had the further benefit of protecting the anonymity of individuals whose experiences might be sources of creative inspiration, as stories blended together multiple lives into collective narratives.