Collaboration in documentary filmmaking and its discontents: Reflections from the field

Abstract Collaborative practice can sometimes be flawed and exploitative. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork within an Indian Muslim women's organization, my article examines the co‐creative practice and its pitfalls and what it ultimately reveals about reflexivity and the politics of (self)representation. I discuss how my attempt at making a collaborative/co‐authored film project with my research participants became difficult to realize in its theoretical and methodological intent, for the collaborators inevitably fall across different positionalities and accesses to power. Rather than succeeding at co‐writing the film, the experience revealed how the power dynamics can be even more pronounced in collaborative filmmaking practice.