How do we depict the world and ourselves through social media?
To produce her short film My Life in the Sunshine, artist and anthropologist Noha Mokhtar, in collaboration with Mounira Mokhtar, invited ten young second-generation immigrants living in Geneva to re-enact their Instagram stories in front of her camera. Her compilation focuses on how they shape ideal worlds in which their social identities and cultural backgrounds, shine through.
While imitating the well-known app’s editing techniques such as switching between still and moving images, making abrupt cuts, and adding music, the analogue medium challenges these modes of self-expression. Unlike our smartphone front cameras that enable us to take better selfies, a 16 mm camera does not give us the same degree of control over our image.