Jem Cohen

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan while his father was there working for the U.S. Agency for Information and Development.

I think there's a great documentary tradition predicated precisely on not knowing in advance what a film will encompass. Counting (2015) takes that road via a blend of city symphony, essay, diary - all of which, by necessity, unfold as the film is created. (For what it's worth, Museum Hours (2012) carried the same strategy into the realm of the narrative feature). That said, I had plenty of ideas. I wanted to make a record of street life in a number of disparate cities within a limited time period, so as to measure recurrent ways in which people, animals, landscape, and politics interact within roughly the same global moment. I wanted to witness how displacement and real estate-driven destruction have become so interwoven into the fabric of urban life that they seem almost natural. I wanted to explore notions of observation vs. surveillance and to touch on the way protests spring up and seem, deceptively, to vanish. I wanted to indicate ways that music and animal life and light itself serve as antidotes, and so on. And I also wanted to make a film that by its own form questions the ways that documentary, even as it gains currency in the culture, is increasingly boxed in and expected to hew to formulas. So, I started by gathering footage from my archive, and then from my time in NYC and abroad, and then I'd shape it around certain themes or possibilities. Then I continued shooting and editing and dipping into my archives - all in parallel, rather than sequentially, the way most traditional movies are made. But it mostly all comes down to looking and listening carefully to the world, and then doing battle in the edit room. [2015]