FOCUS PROGRAM HAUNTINGS
With this year’s festival focus HAUNTINGS, we place a comprehensive program focus on the visible and invisible influences of past ghosts and possible futures on the present. The main and the supporting programme, as well as the programmes curated by Jacqueline Nsiah, Djamila Grandits and Lara Bellon, will deal with colonial hegemonies, neo-colonial practices and decolonial strategies – from the search for and reclamation of one’s own history to archival reappraisals and cinematic deconstructions.
In these programmes, Afrofuturist and indigenous counter-narratives to histories of continued violence will be outline, the ongoing effects of colonialism in the global South will be made visible, and the archival reappraisal of one’s own history and collective memory will become an act of resistance. Societal realities marked by persistent structural violence and armed conflict will be highlighted and ways of collective healing will be explored. The connections between historical conflict management and current political conflicts as well as the man-made climate crisis will be made visible and reflected upon.
In discussions, an in-depth film talk, masterclass and a keynote speech, we will examine the methods and narrative forms of dealing with ghosts of the past and present and engage with their cinematic realisations and meanings. From the cinema screens and in sound and dance performances, ghosts permeate the cinema space.
MAIN PROGRAM FILMS ON HAUNTINGS
IN FOCUS: HAUNTINGS
This film program traces the afterlives of colonialism, the weight of memory, and the ongoing struggles over representation, history, and belonging. From Ghana to Haiti, from the Netherlands to Tanzania, these films speak to the haunted present – a present where archives are contested, ancestors are misremembered or silenced, and identities are shaped through resistance.
The short film program opens with YOU HIDE ME, Nii Kwate Owoo’s urgent intervention into colonial looting and museum politics andmoves into Festus Toll’s poetic work THE STORY OF NE KUKO, where past and present collide in a search for belonging. Additionally, in DES RÊVES EN BATEAUX PAPIERS, Samuel Suffren evokes the fragility of hope amidst Haiti’s social turbulence.
The feature-length works continue this thread: DAS LEERE GRAB examines the scars of Germany’s colonial crimes in Tanzania and the refusal to forget. AU CIMETIÈRE DE LA PELLICULE uncovers a missing cinematic past in Guinea, making the act of filmmaking itself a form of resurrection.
Together, these works reveal not only what was stolen or lost, but also what endures – and what must be reclaimed.
A program curated by Jacqueline Nsiah
HAUNTINGS: SHORT FILM PROGRAM
HAUNTINGS: FEATURE FILMS
AU CIMETIÈRE DE LA PELLICULE
IN FOCUS: sonic frictions
What does it mean to translate the void?
Haunted images and imaginaries. Archives and narratives shaped and torn by erasure and colonial violence, instrumentalised for capturing, for locking down meaning. Sonic f(r)ictions features film practices that rebel against the image, offering speculative openings to counter-histories. They propose remixing, reassembling and resignifying as modes of contestation. Critical fabulation as a way to encounter voids and silences. By tearing, stretching and rupturing linearities, these practices disrupt the grammar of hegemonic logic and temporality, making space for spectres that transcend time-spaces and space-times, prefiguring possible elsewheres (and might have beens). Scrubbed soundscapes, rhythms, whispers and songs as sonic interventions and explorations gravitate toward the spaces between, beneath and beyond frames and framings. Bodies as sites of knowledge, gestures and movements as activated memory, as embodied historicity. Approaching archives by listening to the hum, as Tina Campt would put it, these films become searching movements toward what lies beyond capture – movements toward release, toward multiplicities. Three proposals, expanded by sonic extensions that bleed into the screening room, excavate ghosts, voices and appearances.
_______All three programs are accompanied by sonic extensions by Soñ Gweha aka SOÑXSEED
A program curated by Djamila Grandits & Lara Bellon
IN FOCUS: sonic frictions – SHORT FILM PROGRAM I
on altered truths and so-called archives
An incessant pull towards movement, embodied in both physical and narrative rhythms, repetitions and choreographies. Practices of layering, reassembling and resignifying material allow for dissonance and synchronicities between image and sound to reveal ruptures and open up spaces for reimagination and fabulation. Disrupting archival silence and violence through bodily gestures, choral arrangements and textual interruptions, embodiment and dance are posed as ways of knowing that contest hegemonic regimes of meaning and image making.
Onyeka Igwe is an artist and researcher working between cinema and installation, born and based in London, UK. In her non-fiction video work, Onyeka uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose a multiplicity of narratives.
_______ sonic extensions by Soñ Gweha aka SOÑXSEED
Films
ÉCOUTEZ LE BATTEMENT DE NOS IMAGES
IN FOCUS: sonic frictions – SHORT FILM PROGRAM II
“Sometimes, when the ghost smiles it hurts his face”
In three short films, the last co-directed with his sister Audrey Jean-Baptiste, Maxime Jean-Baptiste amplifies, echoes and traces notions of presence and continuity, language and archive. Rewinding becomes a speculative practice that allows for meaning to emerge in the glitch, allowing to sense and listen into the void between frames, inhabited by beats and voices ever resisting capture and co-optation. Diasporic movements in cinemas, on film, kinship and records transcend time-spaces and space-times, revealing continuities of colonial violences and erasures. An assembly of haunting vocal expressions of agency and resistance around Guyanese representation and experience.
Maxime Jean-Baptiste is based between Brussels and Paris. He grew up in France, in the context of the Guyanese and West Indian diaspora. His audiovisual and performance work is focused on archives and forms of re-enactment as a perspective to conceive a vivid and embodied memory.
_______ sonic extensions von Soñ Gweha aka SOÑXSEED
Films
THE NAMES HAVE CHANGED, INCLUDING MY OWN AND TRUTHS HAVE BEEN ALTERED
IN FOCUS: sonic frictions – THE LAST ANGEL OF HISTORY
,,It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet?”
John Akomfrah is a Ghanaian-born British artist and filmmaker whose influential work is characterised by investigations into memory, the legacy of colonialism, temporalities and aesthetics and the Black Diaspora. In response to the social unrests in Britain during the 80s, he co-founded the Black Audio Film Collective, a media workshop known for its seminal experimental film practices dedicated to Black popular and political culture. In his work, Akomfrah weaves together original footage with archival material to create stirring, layered narratives that juxtapose personal and historical memory, past and present.
_______ sonic extensions by Soñ Gweha aka SOÑXSEED
