The screening on November 17 at La lumière collective will be followed by a workshop with Filipa Cesar on November 19 at the GEM Lab.
SPELL REEL (2017) Screening on Nov 17 (7:30 pm):
An archive of film and audio material in Bissau. On the verge of complete ruin, the footage testifies to the birth of Guinean cinema as part of the decolonising vision of Amílcar Cabral, the liberation leader who was assassinated in 1973. In collaboration with the Guinean filmmakers Sana na N’Hada and Flora Gomes, as well as many allies, Filipa César imagines a journey wherein this fragile matter from the past operates as a visionary prism of shrapnel, with which to look through. Digitised in Berlin and screened at various locations – in what would come to resemble a transnational itinerant cinema – the archive convokes debates, storytelling and forecasts. From their screening in isolated villages in Guinea-Bissau to European capitals, the silent reels are now a place from which people may search for antidotes to a world in crisis.
WORKSHOP with FILIPA CESAR on Nov 19 (6 pm):
Starting with Filipa’s account of the archives of militant cinema in Guinea-Bissau, the workshop aims to continue the debates, embodied in Spell Reel itself, about the significance of historical decolonial projects for imagining alternatives to the world in crisis.
These events are part of Politics of Alternative Media, a project conceived as a series of workshops, screenings, and lectures organized by a collective of researchers, artists, and curators gathered around la lumière collective, Concordia University’s Global Emergent Media Lab, and Feminist Media Studio. It aims to foster the exchange of ideas about grassroots, non-commercial and emancipatory practices using media as instruments of mobilization, empowerment, and community building. As an effort to counter the intensified reconfigurations of media landscape according to neoliberal logics, the project advocates forms of media cultures accessible to everyone and is simultaneously invested in reimagining alternative media formations. PAM is curated by Giuseppe Fidotta, Sima Kokotovic, and Sanaz Sohrabi.
These events are in collaboration with La lumière collective, VISIONS, The Goethe-Institut Montréal, and Cinema in the Midst of Struggle.
About VISIONS: VISIONS is a monthly screening series of experimental and non-fiction film founded by Benjamin R. Taylor in Montreal, Canada. The series shows under-represented and unconventional works that look at reality with a different point of view.
About The Goethe-Institut Montréal: The Goethe-Institut is the Federal Republic of Germany’s cultural institute, active worldwide. They promote the study of German abroad and encourage international cultural exchange.
About Cinema in the Midst of Struggle: https://www.globalemergentmedia.com/cinema-in-the-midst-of-struggle Based out of Concordia’s Global Emergent Media Lab, Cinema in the Midst of Struggle is a public screening series that aims to raise awareness of historical and contemporary anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist struggles. Our programming explores a wide spectrum of historical models of political filmmaking that have been produced in response to specific infrastructural and contextual dynamics. These case studies are separated by time and geopolitics, but each challenge the necessity of an idealized form of a pure activist film-work by exemplifying real projects that took on the resources of their circumstance to make a political intervention, or bring light to an urgent struggle. Understanding the relations between these films, the political struggles they participate in, and the alternative modes of production, distribution, and exhibition they represent, provides us with a unique opportunity to better understand the dynamics and necessity of internationalist solidarity in the global fight for economic and social justice. CIMS 2019-2020 is organized by Sarika Joglekar, Marco Meneghin, and Tanvi Rajvanshi. - Sarika Joglekar, Marco Meneghin, and Tanvi Rajvanshi.