Lives are led: autobiographical film and the new documentary

This thesis consists of two parts: an autobiographical documentary film and a written exegesis. The film, My Lovers Both, is a record of two journeys back to my native South Africa wherein I confront aspects of my past. These two trips offer a means to explore a personal history around the experiences of immigration, displacement and exile. In the exegesis, I argue that autobiography is changing and rather than offering catalogues of public achievement, contemporary personal histories deal with sites of trauma and challenge dominant narratives of official memory. Likewise, the New Documentary is embracing fictional strategies and moving towards increased subjectivity and introspection. As a consequence, new forms are created that generate novel insights into causality and time. The exegesis goes on to examine the major influences on my work as a filmmaker and then articulates a reflective analysis of the creative process which produced My Lovers Both