Set against South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, WE ARE NOT AFRAID explores music’s critical role as resistance for political prisoners incarcerated in apartheid prisons over three decades (1960-1990), especially at Robben Island (which held Nelson Mandela for 18 years) and the Johannesburg Women’s Jail. Narrated by former political prisoners, with unseen historical archival footage, it shows how music performance–from indigenous African genres like isicathamiya, maskanda and mbaqanga to Cape jazz, migrant work songs, freedom songs, Western classical, rock, reggae and Indian ragas–provided resistance, community-building, therapy, collective memory, and identity-formation for political prisoners, transcending political, linguistic and ethnic differences to unite an oppressed people against a common enemy. Women’s narratives and songs expose the deadly gender-based violence that underlay structures of state violence and express their fight against both racial and gender oppression and dehumanizing prison experiences, which are historically overshadowed in liberation narratives. Through these resilient individuals, new testimonies and music, the film touches on broader questions about cultural expression as advancing social change and the uses of music by individuals protesting the violation of human rights under oppressive patriarchal regimes at the intersections of music, resilience, power, violence, gender, race, trauma and human rights.

The film excerpt focuses on highlights from the entire film that touch on the intersecting themes as described in the above abstract. The introduction/discussion will focus on South African field methods for capturing survivor/perpetrator testimonies, ethical approaches to ethnographic research and media-making in trauma-related research, and the importance of documenting crimes against humanity.

"Performing Black & Green: The African and Irish Musical Roots of Montserrat" is an ethnomusicological documentary exploring the intertwined histories of African, Irish, and English influences on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. Through a deep dive into the island’s musical traditions, the film examines how African and Irish cultural elements shape Montserratian identity, particularly during the annual St. Patrick’s Festival.

The documentary highlights the festival’s dual significance—celebrating Irish heritage while commemorating a failed African slave revolt that took place on St. Patrick’s Day in the late 1700s. With a focus on the towns of Salem and Brades, key sites of resistance and cultural expression, the film captures performances, oral histories, and ethnographic insights that bring Montserrat’s unique African-Irish legacy to life.

Filmed between 2023 and 2025, the documentary is currently in post-production. It integrates historical research, interviews, and immersive fieldwork to explore the deep connections between music, identity, and resistance in Montserratian culture.

The in-progress film, titled My Heart Is Not Above My Liver, has an estimated length of 40 minutes. It explores the musical lives of village women from Hubei Province during the 20^th century. Within a patriarchal social structure, instrumental ensembles, mostly consisting of suona (double-reed aerophone) and percussion and performed for rituals and ceremonies, are dominated by male villagers, while women often sing as entertainment. The initial filming began in response to the author’s grandmother’s request to document songs remembered by her elder sister, from whom she had originally learned them. Through revisiting these songs, which include wedding/funeral laments, didactic songs, and group songs, a full landscape of village women’s lifelong experiences gradually unfolds, narrating happiness, sorrow, and moral and marital life. Focusing on the life trajectory of Grandma Wu Jinlan (1934-2023), who was raised as a child bride, this film foregrounds the musical life and creativity of ordinary people (Nettl 2015), arguing for the affective support of song and its significance in revisiting life trauma. The film is in editing, with an experimental attempt to engage ethnographic film as a writing practice, exploring its possibilities above an alternative to a research report or an adjunct to fieldwork (Baily 2009). The excerpt discusses how the subjectivity of actors might be returned from the filmmaker during filming and editing, and how to balance scholarly aims with accessibility for a broader public audience. Conversations and songs in the film are in the local dialect, with bilingual subtitles in Chinese and English.

Within the epistemological framework of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, sound is understood not merely as the product of vibration, but as a manifestation and carrier of consciousness. For many Tibetans, sound exceeds the boundaries of hearing: it emerges from multispecies encounters with animals and ritual practices, while also holding affective intensities and sedimented histories.

This short film follows Bayang, a Tibetan environmental activist in Nasuoni village, Qinghai province, China, as she listens for and records the sounds of her homeland. Rather than treating sound as mere atmospheric background, the film approaches it as both method and medium—an ethnographic and cinematic practice of entering local lifeworlds. Through recording, attentive listening, and sonic narration, we accompany Bayang in rediscovering Tibetan ways of knowing: their nuanced classifications of wild animals and profound multispecies bonds; their cosmological understandings of death and the soul; and the ways sound provides a safer pathway for expressing both individual and collective memories of trauma.

By foregrounding listening as both method and cinematic form, the film invites viewers to encounter a world in which sound is not secondary to image, but a living force that binds environment, memory, and Tibetan modes of being.