MOVING - Filmmaking as a Practice of Touch

I am particularly interested in the brain as body — not an untouchable mind observing from the outside, but a chunk of living, throbbing meat, negotiating between the outer world and the inner, a membrane not unlike a cinema screen: the site where sender and receiver meet. It is this encounter that builds what we experience as reality: an active construction, not a fixed script, made and remade through prediction, sensation and memory. Reality is a slippery term — one that opens more questions than it answers — so my focus is less on defining it than on its instability: the moment an illusion falls apart, or scattered pieces suddenly fuse into a realisation. I locate these shifts concretely in my own trans experience, where perceptions of gender — my own and others' — can collapse and reshape themselves before my eyes, as well as in queer BDSM dynamics, where different codes and negotiated power structures produce distinctly different felt realities within the same encounter. From this knowledge, I rethink how we create and decode realities in filmmaking.

Understanding touch as a capacity to alter bodily states, shift perception, transform affective experience, open power relations to renegotiation, and move us, how might filmmaking engage with such touch in practice? When we say we are moved by a film, or that we want to touch someone with our filmmaking, what do we actually mean, and how intentional can we be with the moving?

Drawing on trans experience, queer BDSM practices, somatic therapies and neuroscientific understandings of embodied experience, I investigate how film touches and moves us in both desired and undesired ways — how it can also capture and trap rather than facilitate movement. The research explores these tensions to reveal where filmmakers might inadvertently reproduce harmful relational patterns and, more importantly, how we might intentionally create safer spaces for rehearsing alternative ways of relating, remembering and imagining. In doing so, I ask how filmmaking, as a technological practice often entangled with dominant narratives of progress, optimisation and normative foreclosure, might be reimagined as a practice of touch: one that supports movement and transformation without coercing bodies toward predetermined ways of being or becoming. Rather than treating the future as a fixed destination, the project explores how embodied encounters with film might open space for multiple futures, realities and possible selves to be sensed, negotiated and rehearsed.

Petra Bauer

So Mayer

2025-2030