Director/Photography: Kirsten Johnson
Producers: Kirsten Johnson, Marilyn Ness
Production co: Big Mouth Productions, Fork Films
Editor: Nels Bangerter
Music: Wellington Bowler, Carla Kihlstedt, Dino Rešidbegović
REVIEW
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“Kirsten Johnson is a cinematographer who’s worked on some of the most notable documentaries of the past 20 years… Drawing on footage she’s shot for countless other directors, she’s assembled in Cameraperson a unique memoir of the images she says have most marked her. Her selection of personal encounters in some of the world’s most sorely troubled locations may initially seem random – until the absence of narrative purpose draws us into another level of enquiry about what we are witnessing and how it is marked by the cameraperson.

​Johnson’s inclusion of her own home movie footage makes us intensely aware that the eye that watches as ostensibly untended children in Bosnia play with an axe is the same eye that falls on her own darling twins. By the time we see several scenarios fully played out, the invisible cameraperson feels like someone we’re beginning to know. It may not be possible to watch this fascinating, beautifully layered film without thinking hard about the power and the limitations of the camera – or the documentary medium itself – as an instrument of compassion.”

— Bill Gosden, NZIFF 2016

"As a candid glimpse of how documentaries are made, “Cameraperson” is a fascinating tutorial for artists and audiences. (At one point, the director Laura Poitras can be heard asking Johnson whether she should repeat a particularly cinematic action, revealing just one of several tricks of a trade that often presents itself as unstudied and spontaneous.) Although free of narration or explicit suggestion, Johnson has created a primer in filmmaking ethics, from interacting with sources to whether and how to crop images and stage scenes.

Even more valuable, though, is how Johnson so poetically expresses the emotional costs of documentary work — her high degree of identification with suffering, and her ambivalence surrounding bearing witness to her subjects’ most intimate, painful moments — and how, at its finest, film creates space for empathy and compassion. 

At one point, a scientist Johnson is filming describes how pieces of matter can affect each other across time and space. In a mesmerizing series of images, encounters and delicate juxtapositions, “Cameraperson” testifies to a world in which it would be clear to see that we’re all connected, if only we took the time to look at one another with reverence and simply listen."

- Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Timaru   
Monday, 11 March, 7:00pm

Hamilton    
Monday, 18 March, 8:00pm

Dunedin  
Wednesday, 27 March, 7:30pm

Canterbury 
Monday, 15 April, 7:30pm

Queenstown  
Tuesday, 7 May, 8:15pm

New Plymouth
Wednesday, 29 May, 6:00pm

Auckland   
Monday, 10 June, 6:30pm
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Tauranga 
Wednesday, 19 June, 6:15pm

Nelson  
Thursday, 25 July, 6:00pm

Carterton  
Friday, 4 October, 7:30pm

Whanganui 
Monday, 4 November, 7:00pm

Wellington
Monday, 18 November, 6:15pm
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