The Expression of the Hands: In Conversation with Jessica Sarah Rinland

For over a decade, the films of Argentine experimental filmmaker, Jessica Sarah Rinland, have unfolded as spaces of discovery where touch performs a kind of thinking that reveals more intuitive ways of knowing. Her cinema, in a sense, reanimates the materiality of the earth, reminding us that knowledge is never only what is classified or catalogued but also what is felt, handled, and sometimes gently taken apart. Working almost exclusively on analogue formats – 16mm above all – Rinland builds her films through rhythms and encounters in which meaning [el sentido] gradually takes shape, as if coaxed into being.

Above all, hers is a cinema of touch. Rinland works closely with archivists, archaeologists, anthropologists, biologists, and conservationists – fields of practice that make visible the affective labour embedded in scientific inquiry. In her films, it is their hands that guide us: hands that clean, restore, classify, record, caress, and investigate. The faces of her subjects, by contrast, often remain unseen, shifting our attention to the expression of the body. Through these hands and their gestures, knowledge becomes something not only intuited but also shared and plural. And it is at this point where Rinland draws a parallel between the researcher and the work of the filmmaker: both rely on sensuous observation of their environment to engage in a thought-process that responds to the logics of perception and the living earth. 

At the Festival Internacional de Documentales de Santiago (FIDOCS) 2025, Rinland presented a selection of short films made between 2011 and 2022, accompanied by a program of works by Argentine experimental filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch, curated by Rinland herself.¹ By organising this retrospective, she not only initiates a conversation across two generations of Argentinean artists, but also opens a space where her own aesthetic affinities resonate with those who have shaped her practice – figures like Chick Strand, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Jem Cohen, among others who have expanded the possibilities of non-fiction and experimental film. The result is a cinema as singular as it is collective: made by many hands that now touch ours. And it is from within this constellation that the following conversation between Jessica Sarah Rinland, Cristóbal Escobar, Tiziana Panizza, and Catalina Donoso unfolds. 

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Cristóbal Escobar: You’ve mentioned that La expresión del ciego / Expression of the Sightless (2015) marked a turning point in the way you work. Could you tell us a bit more about that experience and how it shaped your practice?

Jessica Sarah Rinland: I started filming in the 2000s, but I hadn’t really reflected on what I was doing back then. Expression of the Sightless was key because that’s when I understood two fundamental things. First, that I was interested in responding to the people in front of and behind the camera. We always arrive with ideas when shooting film, but in that work I let myself be guided by what happened in the encounter itself. There, I also realised I didn’t want to film David’s face – the main character, a sculptor who lost his sight at nine – because his blindness became immediately apparent. I preferred that the viewer sense it gradually, that his condition not become “the most important thing,” and that the film mirrors his tactile experience of exploring the sculptures. That’s why I followed his hands and the movements with which he imagined the entirety of each piece. That way of filming – centred on hands and interactions – then became a constant in my work. The title of the film is also a reference to Harun Farocki’s The Expression of the Hands (1997), where he speaks of gestures as both revelation and stage, and of how manual labour always leaves traces. His thinking is always with me.

Expression of the Sightless

Escobar: Close-ups and sound play a key role in your films, beginning perhaps with Expression of the Sightless.

Rinland: I think that since that film I’ve understood that I’m not filming “hands” so much as the relationship between hands and tools, hands and materials, hands and other beings. The close-up allows me to concentrate on that interaction and, at the same time, gives me very rich sound. Close-up sound constructs a space the image doesn’t show: proximities, frictions, breaths… I’m interested in how that space unfolds around what we see. I also think a lot about something Trinh T. Minh-ha says regarding the wide shot as a supposed “guarantee of reality.” She questions that idea, and I do too. Everything is selection, everything is framing, and in that sense the close-up opens you to other sensorial possibilities.

I work in 16mm, and that determines much of how I frame. I shoot very little material – for example, Monólogo colectivo / Collective Monologue (2024) took five years to make and I only filmed eight hours in total. I record far more sound than image, and I spend a lot of time with people, animals, and places without filming at all. There are frustrations, especially around access to sites that haunt me. At the Buenos Aires zoo I had many problems getting in – problems I didn’t have in museums. But I learned that not everything can be filmed, and that not everything needs to be. The discipline of 16mm forces you to prioritise presence over capture. Above all, I’m interested in forming friendships and collaborations, and I hope that something of that process – though not always explicit – can be felt in my films.

Escobar: And in your films, the relationship between what is seen and what is heard opens up spaces where the boundary between documentary and fiction dissolves.

Rinland: Yes, absolutely. I’m interested in how sound activates the imagination: you can see a detail in close-up, but the sound expands it or transports you elsewhere.

As for fiction and documentary, I find the border very porous. I do a lot of foley to recreate sounds, so there’s always fiction in a documentary and documentary in a fiction – there is construction. For example, in Monólogo colectivo I used WhatsApp messages inspired by things zoo caretakers told me, but I modified them to create something that worked in the film. I think of these as different “realities” rather than “fiction.”

Catalina Donoso: In several of your films the idea of “replica” – architectural, museographic, biological – appears. Where does that interest come from?

Rinland: It comes from the convergence of many experiences. In my previous film Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another I worked with replicas in museums. Many of the Buenos Aires zoo’s enclosures imitate buildings from the animals’ places of origin. I rented an apartment right across the street and saw them every day from my balcony. That led me to research the archive with the zoo’s heritage historian, Majo Micale and to meet the carer who later became the film’s protagonist, Maca Loydi. At the same time, I was working with the Rewilding Foundation in the Iberá Wetlands, where I had also filmed in 2015. They work with animals undergoing reintroduction processes. Zoos, rescue centres, museums – they all share logics of replication, conservation, transfer, and adaptation.

Audience member: I’m interested in documentary but never know when to begin writing a script. How do you approach yours?

Rinland: In fiction I’ve written more scripts, but I’m terrible at following them. Still, you have to write them to apply for funding. In documentary, you need a long treatment usually. You can think of it as a blueprint, or a model, and maybe you’ll only use 2% of it. For example, in Monólogo colectivo we worked on a script for three years and hardly any of it ended up in the film but writing it was part of the research.

Tiziana Panizza: Your recent video installation works with camera traps and infrared technology. How did that idea emerge?

Rinland: I’ve always been interested in the history of camera traps. In the installation version of Monólogo colectivo, for example, I use two video channels. On one, you see infrared cameras at Rewilding recording a giant otter – an animal that was extinct in Argentina and is now being reintroduced. On the other channel, I use a thermal camera that today is often used for hunting, but I filmed with it inside the Natural History Museum in London, where taxidermised animals have been kept since the late 19th century. And something powerful happens in thermography: the dead animal has no heat of its own. The only thing visible is the human thermal trace on its body. The conservators were surprised by how long the warmth of their hands remained. That discovery opened conversations about what happens without us seeing it.

This project also dialogues with photographer George Shiras III, who in the 1880s adapted hunting methods to photograph animals without killing them. His archive is incredible, and I’m currently working on a book about him.

Panizza: So besides films, you also make books. How does that part of your practice articulate itself?

Rinland: That comes from my Fine Arts studies. I’ve always made handmade books – sewn, printed, with photographs. It was a physical way of working with images. I still make books but not necessarily tied to a film. They’re autonomous works with their own logic. I’m working on two now: one on Shiras, and another on the graffiti and environmental projects of Narcisa Hirsch, which will be called Jessica con Narcisa (Jessica with Narcisa). I think of it as a conversation with her – even though she’s no longer here – and with those who knew her. I want to walk through the city where she worked, speak to people close to her, and reconstruct that period through multiple voices.

Audience member: Earlier you said you’re no longer sure whether the “process” is always visible in the film. What did you mean?

Rinland: I had an experience working on a film that was ethically very difficult for me. I thought that conflict would be evident in the final work but people didn’t seem to perceive anything. Some did, but not everyone. That made me doubt. Maybe it’s not always visible. In my films I hope something of the process – the time, the interactions, the ethics of the encounter – can be felt. But I don’t know if it’s always legible.

Catalina Donoso: What you say reminds me of a seminar session in a Documentary Cinema Master’s I teach, where we invited the writer Matías Celedón. He said something that echoes what you’ve said about encounters: that rather than going out to look for something, you go out to understand, and that means something in you necessarily changes.

Rinland: Yes. Maybe filming and recording sound are secondary to that experience. The most important thing is being there and being curious. I have an example to respond to your question. Monólogo colectivo is a film about zoos and rescue centres, about bonds of care. The film begins in La Plata, where my mother is from and where I spent many summers. On New Year’s Eve people build huge effigies, up to nine metres tall, which are then burned. Since I started the film I accompanied a group of local kids, especially Franco, who has been building effigies since he was seven. I’m interested in juxtaposition: placing things together that don’t seem at first related. I had already done that in Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (2019) which begins with footage of a monkey with her babies. In Monólogo colectivo, the film begins with fireworks and then cuts to the zoo at night. I never explain that link. I’m curious to hear the viewers experience.

Panizza: And saying less is powerful. Sometimes we explain too much.

Rinland: That’s right. The power is in the sensation – what image and sound do when you let them work.

Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Masterclass at FIDOCS School 2025

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