In a Film Quarterly interview in 1970, Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha extolled that "we must be able to conceive of people all over making films in any form, in any shape, in any manner ... in every different way." His exhortation might as well apply to the newer and more progressive call to involve communities in employing film to tell local narratives using site-specific modes of production. In geography, the shift to the digital somehow opened up different modes and approaches in visual storytelling. Geographer and filmmaker Jessica Jacobs said that because "film is ... integral to the way people in the 21st century understand their world ... [it] helps geographers achieve a better understanding of how we experience our lived environment" (2016, p. 453).
For the 12th and last Heo/Geo Lecture Series for 2025, the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS) together with Film Geographies (Films in Place), the Film Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), the Geographic Society of UP (GeogSoc) and the Junior Philippine Geographical Society (JPGS) present Place-making intangible heritage and climate mitigation with storytelling to be delivered by Jessica Jacobs on Thursday, the 4th of December 2025 at 5:00PM in Pavilion 2248. In her presentation, Dr Jacobs will talk about the research endeavor called Storytelling for All.
Storytelling for All was a community-led research project providing heritage focused filmmaking workshops to Bedouin communities in the South Sinai. The films created from this project include a series of short felted animations made by Bedouin women from St, Catherine's and Dahab. Each film offers a different story of a unique place, told by the people who live there.
The project set out to critically engage with the ways in which Bedouin cultural heritage, particularly women’s heritage, has been romanticized, extracted, or rendered invisible within national development agendas, tourism economies, and Eurocentric academic frameworks (Jacobs 2020). While there is a reasonable amount of digital content available online about Bedouin culture, the vast majority of it is about men and produced by men. This presentation argues that community practices of handcrafting held by women are a form of matrilineal knowledge transfer that, if adapted for digital use, can contribute to a future oriented practice able to support climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as being a form of engagement with a hard to reach community that can contribute more broadly to sustainable economic development.
For her presentation, Dr Jacobs will discuss the films produced by the project and argue that the stories they contain not only offer advice on sustainable practices for climate change mitigation and adaptation they also show us vital the role of matrilineal intergenerational knowledge transfer is, in keeping this knowledge, alive.
The Heo/Geo Lecture by Dr Jacobs is preceded by a 2-hour film workshop called 'Crafting Your Research Story with Film' from 2:30-4:30PM on 4 December in Pavilion 2248. To join in this workshop, please click this link to participate, or just paste this link to your browser: https://forms.gle/zzE6UQ8CajhRhHXr6
Dr Jacobs is a Research Fellow at the Queen Mary University of London. Her work focuses on heritage and tourism in the Middle East with a particular interest in how heritage is visualized, remembered and enacted through the production of tourist space. Dr Jacobs' research methods and outputs use filmmaking, creative mapping and other community focused strategies that aim to engage a wider audience within the scope of academic research and knowledge production.
Dr Jacobs is the founder of Film Geographies, an online forum for films and filmmaking as a form of academic practice and knowledge production. Film Geographies organise two annual calls for films AAG Shorts and RGS-IBG Shorts, to promote films by geographers and films about geography. Founded in 2016, Film Geographies now have over 150 films online.
The Heo/Geo Lecture Series is a monthly lecture given by academic scholars, field-based geography practitioners, members of the local community, and spatial justice advocates to share their knowledge- and practice-based research undertakings. Jointly presented by the UP Department of Geography and the Philippine Geographical Society (PGS), the Heo/Geo Lecture Series which previously underwent several iterative rebranding, emplaces geography as a discipline that not only straddles the realms of natural/physical and social sciences, humanities, political ecologies, regional and area studies, GI technologies and geospatial storytelling, it is also a vibrant and convivial space that welcomes multiplicities and a plurality of voices. The name Heo/Geo is itself an acknowledgment of the various understandings, meanings and pronunciations of geography in its indigenous and vernacular forms as well as the Anglicized name that has since been adopted and adapted to the local lexicon.
Dr Jacobs's lecture is the inaugural MELANGE Lecture speaker presented by the MELANGE research group of the UP Department of Geography. MELANGE stands for Media, Literary Geographies and Geohumanites, and the lecture is in line with the SDGs #4 (Quality Education), and #13 (Climate Action) of the United Nations.
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Notes:
Gordon Hitchens (1970). The Way to Make a Future: A Conversation with Glauber Rocha, Film Quarterly, 24.1 (Autumn, 1970), pp. 27-30.
Jessica Jacobs. (2020). Fabricating herstory: Using embroidery to map Bedouin tribal borders in South Sinai. Journal of Arts & Communities, 11.1-2, pp. 109-127.
Jessica Jacobs (2016). Filmic geographies: the rise of digital film as aresearch method and output, Area, 48.4, pp. 452–454.
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