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 a discussion, 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.
