is Professor in Film at Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She works with film both as a research form and as a mode of artistic practice. Recent works include: When I grow up I want to be a black man (2017), Impunity (2014), 09:21:25 (2011). Recent publications include Places to Play: practice, research, pedagogy (2017), which explores the use of archive as an exemplar to rethink colonial images through “decolonised” film practices. She has edited a special issue of the Journal of African Cinema: ‘Film as Research Tool: Practice and Pedagogy’ (2018).
After moving from Johannesburg (Jo’burg) to Gothenburg (Go’burg), filmmaker Jyoti Mistry struck up a friendship with someone who went the other way: Katarina Hedrén, who was adopted by a white Swedish family, and moved to South Africa as an adult. This deeply personal take on race shows how ‘colour-blindness’ denies that racial prejudice exists but robs people of colour of words to talk about the discrimination they face.
South Africa is facing the process of developing a new identity for itself and its people, and to deal with its past. Jyoti Mistry looks at the meaning of nations and the nation state in examining this process of creation of a national identity. Story-telling, history and memory play vital parts, particularly in South Africa, in building this “whole”. In a story that has no end in sight, she looks at how a country is dealing with its past and stepping into its future.
