Documentary Intimacies

This article theorizes documentary as a practice of intimate exchange through a reading of Emily Jacir’s epistolary film Letter to a Friend (2019)—a speculative, counterforensic investigation of her familial home in Bethlehem (Dar Jacir) as the site of a future crime. I explore the theoretical dimensions of this proposition and trace how Letter to a Friend develops its formal strategies of intimacy across different scales of relation. The film testifies to the violent control of movement within and across the borders of occupied Palestine and bears witness to the forms of kinship that survive within its interstices—forms it imbues with nascent political potential. I argue that by figuring the networks of collaboration, communal desire, and intimate binding which subtend its own production, Letter to a Friend models documentary’s capacity to not only visualize, but also incarnate, new forms of intimate and political relation.