Everyday Journeys

Everyday Journeys is a series of 11 participatory short documentary films that capture the ordinary yet distinctive movements and routines of everyday life in and around Cape Town. Each film follows a participant as they travel through the city, revealing the textures, rhythms, and hidden patterns of urban life from a personal perspective.

The films were made using a participatory approach, combining first-person footage, captured via a body-mounted camera worn by the participant, with observational footage, filmed by the director from his own perspective. This dual perspective invites viewers to see the city as an inhabited space rather than a distant object — spaces infused with habits, attachments, and meanings that shape urban life.

Created by filmmaker and researcher Liam Creighton, in collaboration with the participants and researchers Lavinia Brydon, Bibi Burger, Sanele kaNtshingana and Janina Schupp, the series is informed by ideas of phenomenological anthropology. Scholarly reference points include: ​​Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz’s Rethinking Observational Cinema (2009), the ethnography of the near as considered in Marc Augé’s Non-Places (1995), and concepts of place attachment as detailed in Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) and Irwin Altman & Setha M. Low’s Place Attachment (1992).Together, these films make the familiar strange, revealing overlooked details of movement, connection, and care that make up the ordinary life of a city.

Everyday Journeys is created as part of the British Academy-funded research project Imagining the Ordinary City: Arts, Placemaking and Everyday Urban Lives.