Writing the Documentary with Andrea Luka Zimmerman

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Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a filmmaker, artist and cultural activist. Andrea grew up on a large council estate and left school at 16. After coming to London in 1991, she went to Central St. Martins.

Please note this recommended screening at the ICA to accompany the workshop. To reserve your place for the workshop please e-mail.

She is co-founder of the artists’ collective Fugitive Images (I am here and Estate: Art, Politics and Social Housing in Britain). Her film Estatea Reverie (2015, 83mins), tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate in East London and the utopian promise of social housing it offered, with a spirited celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity. Filmed over seven years, Estate reveals and celebrates the resilience of residents who are profoundly overlooked by media representations and wider social responses, and asks how we might resist being framed exclusively through class, gender, ability or disability, and through geography even. Estate was nominated for the Grierson Award best Documentary Newcomer, best Documentary East End Film Festival, the Aesthetica Art Prize, and the Jarman Award.

Her essay-film Taskafa, Stories of the Street (66mins, 2013), about resistance and co-existence and voiced by John Berger, is told through the lives of the street dogs of Istanbul. Taskafawas nominated for best Documentary at Golden Orange Film festival.

A founding member of Vision Machine, she worked in the USA and Indonesia, exploring the impact of globalisation, power, and denied histories. Her PhD (UAL 2007) examined the relationship between spectacular (Hollywood) and spectral (covert and special military operations) representations of political violence. From this period developed her forthcoming film Bo Gritz, Real Action Hero (2016), exploring US militarism and foreign policy through a character study of one of its most enduring rogue agents.

In 2014 she won the Artangel Open award for her collaborative project Cycle (2017) with Adrian Jackson (Cardboard Citizens).

Soul-Less-Ness is a curriculum for sound, voice and performance, exploring modes of production, methods of representation and the future politics of listening. The series includes three ‘Writing for…’ workshops, transforming written texts for radio, performance and documentary.