Oliver Ressler and Zanny Beggs’s film The Right of Passage is exemplary, in my view. Today, in a world that – at least until Covid – has largely been globalized, though perhaps still retaining the new imperial form of the economy we have known for thirty years, it would be reasonable to expect borders to disappear. And yet, borders have never been so numerous, so cruel, so radically erect. … In Ressler’s and Begg’s video, my passport – fake, I must say: made up for the film – carries many visas, but so does the real one in my pocket. I was prevented from moving for a long time – first by jail, then by exile, and finally again by incarceration. But since 2003, I have gone around the world many times… I would like the front of my passport to carry the wording that features in the video, inspired by Magritte: “This is not a citizen”. I deserve it; I would be proud of it. But what about other people? Those who died in Melilla? The bodies in the Strait of Sicily? …If mesopolitics is the powerful politics of the milieu, if the common is radical democracy, new institutionality and subjectivation, then perhaps the time has come for a global citizenship, and passports that declare: “this is not a passport; this simply documents my belonging to the brotherhood and sisterhood of the living, whether human or not”.
Antoni Negri
There’s a distinct pleasure that washes over you as you experience a piece of filmmaking that pushes against the boundaries of the form of storytelling it is working within… Dharawal country-based filmmaker and artist Zanny Begg uses her creative force and brilliance to explore the truth that hides within contested histories.
Andrew F Peirce, The Curb.
