Non-Aligned Narratives: Films from the SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA Program
Galo E. Rivera and Bethan Hughes
the curatorial duo from the SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA initiative
Non-Aligned Narratives: Films from the SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA Program
All film archives contain images marked by the fingerprints of imperialist violence. Colonial crimes are not only captured within the frame but within the systems of collection, preservation and display in which the image is embedded. Though emitted, denied, covered-up, ignored, silenced, and redacted, traces of other realities and stories outside the frame are always present.
Interrogating the film culture we inherit – what it shows, what it doesn’t, and who it is for – has been an integral part of SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA’s mission to create a cinema space that reflects and serves the transnational society in which we live.
This is a process that requires more than bearing witness alone. Contextualisation and conversation are crucial in connecting the dots and understanding the legacy of these images in the present.
For this event, we have chosen two films from our recent program that represent what this work might look like in practice. Each screened as part of a different series, together they give an insight into the imperfect processes of decolonising, exposing the perversity of the coloniser's strategies, community building and questioning that we do alongside collaborators from both near and far. We hope they spark conversations for you.
Kamal Aljafari’s 2024 work A Fidai Film was brought to SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA by this year's edition of ALFILM - Arab Film Festival Berlin. In 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and raided the Palestine Research Center archive, which preserved historical films and images of Palestine. In the face of this loss, Aljafari constructs a counter-archive by intervening in fragments of footage, even physically abstracting subjects from the foreground of the image entirely. What truths lie in the ground/landscape around, behind and beyond the figure?
Entwicklungsland — Revisited is Nnenna Onuoha’s intervention in material from SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA’s own archive as part of the project THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY: DOING ARCHIVES DIFFERENTLY. First aired in 1975, the BBC Schools documentary Living in a Developing Country: Ghana, City was designed to teach British schoolchildren about daily life for two families living in Ghana. Shortly after its broadcast, the documentary was acquired, re-edited, and translated for German classrooms. Nearly fifty years later, Nnenna returned to Accra to explore how the city—and the lives of the two featured families—had evolved. With a subtle wit crafted through creative use of translation, voice over and shifts in time, the filmmaker questions the reductive and patronising perspective of the original material and allows the families to be represented on their own terms.
* We initially planned to include Ousmane Sembène’s 1988 film Camp de Thiaroye in this program. The film is a masterclass in countering the colonial strategy of erasing inconvenient truths and justifying atrocities committed against allies in the name of preserving the European status quo. It exposes the forced migration of military personnel from colonized territories to fight European wars, a strategy that remains in play today. However, due to the several technical and logistics complications, it cannot be shown. An abridged version is available on YouTube – we urge those interested to seek it out.
Postal address
© 2025 Arsmediale — Forum of the Experimental Cinema
19/33 Yaroslaviv Val str01034 Kyiv, Ukraine
Non-Aligned Narratives: Films from the SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA Program
Galo E. Rivera and Bethan Hughes
the curatorial duo from the SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA initiative
Non-Aligned Narratives: Films from the SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA Program
All film archives contain images marked by the fingerprints of imperialist violence. Colonial crimes are not only captured within the frame but within the systems of collection, preservation and display in which the image is embedded. Though emitted, denied, covered-up, ignored, silenced, and redacted, traces of other realities and stories outside the frame are always present.
Interrogating the film culture we inherit – what it shows, what it doesn’t, and who it is for – has been an integral part of SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA’s mission to create a cinema space that reflects and serves the transnational society in which we live.
This is a process that requires more than bearing witness alone. Contextualisation and conversation are crucial in connecting the dots and understanding the legacy of these images in the present.
For this event, we have chosen two films from our recent program that represent what this work might look like in practice. Each screened as part of a different series, together they give an insight into the imperfect processes of decolonising, exposing the perversity of the coloniser's strategies, community building and questioning that we do alongside collaborators from both near and far. We hope they spark conversations for you.
Kamal Aljafari’s 2024 work A Fidai Film was brought to SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA by this year's edition of ALFILM - Arab Film Festival Berlin. In 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and raided the Palestine Research Center archive, which preserved historical films and images of Palestine. In the face of this loss, Aljafari constructs a counter-archive by intervening in fragments of footage, even physically abstracting subjects from the foreground of the image entirely. What truths lie in the ground/landscape around, behind and beyond the figure?
Entwicklungsland — Revisited is Nnenna Onuoha’s intervention in material from SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA’s own archive as part of the project THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY: DOING ARCHIVES DIFFERENTLY. First aired in 1975, the BBC Schools documentary Living in a Developing Country: Ghana, City was designed to teach British schoolchildren about daily life for two families living in Ghana. Shortly after its broadcast, the documentary was acquired, re-edited, and translated for German classrooms. Nearly fifty years later, Nnenna returned to Accra to explore how the city—and the lives of the two featured families—had evolved. With a subtle wit crafted through creative use of translation, voice over and shifts in time, the filmmaker questions the reductive and patronising perspective of the original material and allows the families to be represented on their own terms.
* We initially planned to include Ousmane Sembène’s 1988 film Camp de Thiaroye in this program. The film is a masterclass in countering the colonial strategy of erasing inconvenient truths and justifying atrocities committed against allies in the name of preserving the European status quo. It exposes the forced migration of military personnel from colonized territories to fight European wars, a strategy that remains in play today. However, due to the several technical and logistics complications, it cannot be shown. An abridged version is available on YouTube – we urge those interested to seek it out.
Postal address
© 2025 Arsmediale — Forum of the Experimental Cinema
19/33 Yaroslaviv Val str01034 Kyiv, Ukraine
Non-Aligned Narratives: Films from the SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA Program
Galo E. Rivera and Bethan Hughes
the curatorial duo from the SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA initiative
Non-Aligned Narratives: Films from the SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA Program
All film archives contain images marked by the fingerprints of imperialist violence. Colonial crimes are not only captured within the frame but within the systems of collection, preservation and display in which the image is embedded. Though emitted, denied, covered-up, ignored, silenced, and redacted, traces of other realities and stories outside the frame are always present.
Interrogating the film culture we inherit – what it shows, what it doesn’t, and who it is for – has been an integral part of SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA’s mission to create a cinema space that reflects and serves the transnational society in which we live.
This is a process that requires more than bearing witness alone. Contextualisation and conversation are crucial in connecting the dots and understanding the legacy of these images in the present.
For this event, we have chosen two films from our recent program that represent what this work might look like in practice. Each screened as part of a different series, together they give an insight into the imperfect processes of decolonising, exposing the perversity of the coloniser's strategies, community building and questioning that we do alongside collaborators from both near and far. We hope they spark conversations for you.
Kamal Aljafari’s 2024 work A Fidai Film was brought to SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA by this year's edition of ALFILM - Arab Film Festival Berlin. In 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut and raided the Palestine Research Center archive, which preserved historical films and images of Palestine. In the face of this loss, Aljafari constructs a counter-archive by intervening in fragments of footage, even physically abstracting subjects from the foreground of the image entirely. What truths lie in the ground/landscape around, behind and beyond the figure?
Entwicklungsland — Revisited is Nnenna Onuoha’s intervention in material from SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA’s own archive as part of the project THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY: DOING ARCHIVES DIFFERENTLY. First aired in 1975, the BBC Schools documentary Living in a Developing Country: Ghana, City was designed to teach British schoolchildren about daily life for two families living in Ghana. Shortly after its broadcast, the documentary was acquired, re-edited, and translated for German classrooms. Nearly fifty years later, Nnenna returned to Accra to explore how the city—and the lives of the two featured families—had evolved. With a subtle wit crafted through creative use of translation, voice over and shifts in time, the filmmaker questions the reductive and patronising perspective of the original material and allows the families to be represented on their own terms.
* We initially planned to include Ousmane Sembène’s 1988 film Camp de Thiaroye in this program. The film is a masterclass in countering the colonial strategy of erasing inconvenient truths and justifying atrocities committed against allies in the name of preserving the European status quo. It exposes the forced migration of military personnel from colonized territories to fight European wars, a strategy that remains in play today. However, due to the several technical and logistics complications, it cannot be shown. An abridged version is available on YouTube – we urge those interested to seek it out.
Postal address
19/33 Yaroslaviv Val str01034 Kyiv, Ukraine
© 2025 Arsmediale — Forum of the Experimental Cinema
