Deconstructing Paperlessness: Documentary, Mise-en-scene and Participation in Feminist and Decolonial Film Practices; the Case Study of LALA

This paper critically examines LALA, a hybrid documentary-fiction film rooted in feminist, decolonial, and participatory filmmaking practices. Using an autoethnographic lens, the project reflects on the ethical and creative challenges of representing “paperlessness” —a condition of legal and symbolic invisibility experienced by second-generation Roma youth in Italy. Drawing on bell hooks’ concept of the “politics of location,” the work situates personal and collective trauma as sites of cultural critique and transformation. The film’s participatory development, including workshops inspired by Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire, and Pina Bausch, fostered co-creation and embodied storytelling with marginalised teenagers. This paper explores how fiction, performance, and lived experience interweave to disrupt dominant narratives and reclaim agency for those rendered invisible by state structures. LALA thus emerges not only as a film but as a political and reparative process—one that reimagines representation through vulnerability, collaboration, and intersectional resistance.