This curatorial program explores how audiovisual anthropology mobilises the archive to unlearn colonial visual regimes while forging new epistemic and sensorial pathways. Drawing on collaborative, sensory and narrative approaches this program proposes a research in and through Cinematic Ethnography not as a window onto the world but as subversive, performative, experimenting practices capable of generating new knowledge through form/content relations. Cinematic ethnography emphasises critical reflexivity, collaboration, and sensory experience over representational mastery—approaches that seek to dismantle extractivist habits and invite shared, situated worlding and sensory/knowledge-making.

At the centre of my current research is the critique of dominant cinematic structures as “predatory concepts” that impose Western, linear, evolutionist principles onto global filmmaking, thereby restricting the expressive and epistemological range of narratives and intentions that can be told. This predatory dominance is not merely aesthetic; it is deeply political, reproducing colonial forms of temporality, conflict, and subjectivity. Against this hegemony, the films in this program exemplify the destabilisation of the authoritative representation and recalibration of audiovisual pedagogy and practices.

Archives as Decolonial Method

The programmed films challenge the archive’s historical role as a colonial apparatus—an instrument that ordered, classified, and fixed subjects within epistemic hierarchies. The archival image here becomes a site of friction and possibility. Through re-editing, superimposition, fragmentation or erasure, filmmakers can interrogate the “materiality and texture” of existing audio-visual archives, asking whether new meanings can emerge through “re-matching, re-using, recalibrating” rather than generating new images that repeat extractivist habits of production. Não há Imagens transforms absence into critique, foregrounding the impossibility—or refusal—of the colonial image. Perfect Harmony revisits familial and personal histories, turning memory into an embodied, haptic encounter that resonates with the aesthetics of sensory ethnography. Sina uses found footage to evoke the or legal traumas of the protagonist. disorient destabilises Western narrative expectations through sensory and radical asynchronism, proposing a space of disorientation and critical reflection on the experience of migration. The films assembled here do not merely show archives; they think with them, exposing their colonial inscriptions while proposing new relations between past and future. Across these works, the archive becomes a performative site: not a repository of truth, but a dynamic material through which viewers confront how history has been constructed, withheld, or imposed. 

Why ? - Pedagogy and Politics

One day, a student came to me and said he had found a fantastic ‘subject’ for his master film project, namely the ‘Iranian gay community living in Istanbul’. He added that he had direct access to them and had already met people in the community who agreed to be filmed. Most anthropology or film studies supervisors, or even maybe a film producer, would have said, ‘Great, it seems like you have access to a rare ethnographic fieldwork or subject to be filmed’, but I just asked him ‘Why ?’. Why did he want to make this film, why did he want to spend six months or more of his life studying or filming this community, and why should he and not someone else make the film? He did not anticipate these ‘Why’ questions and could not answer them directly. What I asked was what lies (to him) beyond this incredible access and content. What is the real incentive–the intention beyond making this film? Understanding why and why me seems a basic, natural question to ask oneself before embarking on a film or a research project, but it is often overshadowed by questions of what, where, how, whom, and how many; in my view, subsidiary questions or topics that derive from knowing one’s intentions – why do we want to do this project? This also resonates with a pedagogical insistence to ask students why another image must be produced at all, and whether meaning might instead emerge from “re-using, recalibrating” existing materials to counter dominant regimes of visibility 

Experimental cinema is not a genre but a mode of critical learning, by rejecting the notion that universities or film schools should prepare students for industrial norms or dominant forms. Instead, students are invited to make short exercises that privilege sensory experience, collaborative authorship, and the reworking of archival material. The ‘student’ films and exercises in this program—each emerging from distinct educational ecosystems—demonstrate how experimentation allows filmmakers to interrogate their own positionalities and the structures shaping their images. This is “Research in and through cinema”: a methodological orientation that treats filmmaking as a means of thinking rather than a form of representation. It aligns with multimodal anthropology, sensory ethnography, and the performative turn in visual anthropology, in which research emerges through encounters, collaboration, and iterative experimentation. Experimenting with cinematic ethnography in educational contexts enables spaces where theory and practice intertwine, where form dialogues with content, and is inseparable from intentions, where students and filmmakers are encouraged to invent approaches that align with their lived experiences rather than with imposed cinematic norms.

By foregrounding intention, materiality, and sensory experience, this program challenges the colonial sedimentations of the image and invites viewers into an epistemic reorientation. An encounter of cinema as a decolonial methodology: practices of unlearning, re-imagining, and sensing otherwise.