Erin Wilkerson, a global fellow and lecturer at Duke Kunshan University and co-founder of the political art collective and production company Creative Agitation, is shaking up traditional filmmaking with a radical, grassroots approach she calls “feral filmmaking.”
Feral filmmaking challenges the polished, hierarchical world of mainstream cinema. It embraces mobility, simplicity and at its core, it’s about telling real, powerful stories with whatever tools are available — even a smartphone.
The approach draws inspiration from Third Cinema, a movement that began in Latin America in the 1960s and focused on using film to inspire social change. It also borrows from the fast, do-it-yourself style of Newsreel filmmaking, which captured grassroots protests and political movements in the U.S. during the 1960s and ’70s.
Wilkerson also incorporates a technique known as critical fabulation, developed by scholar Saidiya Hartman, who is known for reimagining the lives of enslaved people through historical and literary narratives. It blends fact and fiction to imagine the untold or suppressed parts of history — especially stories left out of official records.
“I believe it is a work of implementing permaculture,” Wilkerson said, referring to her recent project “Strange Flower.” “Firstly, this is resistance work that questions the myth of a single culture. But there is also community work that leaves space for excluded voices and stories, refusing to represent elite culture.”
She emphasized how accessible technologies like mobile phones and free software such as DaVinci Resolve allow creators to break away from traditional industry standards. “There is currently an opportunity to reject elite tools, hierarchical systems and methods,” she said. “Truly embracing the ‘imperfect movie’ model proposed by Julio García Espinosa,” a Cuban filmmaker who believed film should be made by everyone — professional films can be made, and made well, on tiny budgets with the right kind of training.
The term feral itself is key to Wilkerson’s vision. Like weeds that grow and thrive in unexpected places, this form of filmmaking is wild, adaptable and determined to exist outside rigid industry rules. In her own words, it is “subversive and stubborn, disregarding borders and fences, and working toward a new and wild cinema.”
Wilkerson’s work, both collaborative and solo, has been featured at major international film festivals including the Venice Biennale, Locarno, the Viennale and the Berlinale. Her 2021 film “Nuclear Family,” created with her partner, Professor Travis Wilkerson, received a Mención Especial at the Mar del Plata International Film Festival and was screened at more than 20 festivals worldwide.
Her solo practice draws on her background in landscape architecture and often explores ecological and global themes. Her 2023 film “The Second Burial” streamed on MUBI Latin America and was showcased at Prismatic Ground in New York, FICUNAM in Mexico, Arica Docs in Chile and INTERSECCIÓN in Spain.
Wilkerson explores the full philosophy behind her approach in her 2025 article, “Feral Filmmaking: Wilding Cinema as a Decolonial Act,” published in the international film journal La Furia Umana.
