Lost and Found

When talking about territories, one should always seek to uncover their history and the complicated, often abusive means by which they get to be owned by certain dominant groups. The terms “losing” and “finding” strongly relate to chance. A key element of oppression suggesting that global power relations and spheres of influence have an element of randomness in them. Nature was often described in history as a vast, inexhaustible resource, a threat to human existence, a source of fascination and horror, one that has to be tamed together with its foreign inhabitants. It is a perspective that dominated the worldview set in place by the explorers, which still governs the unjust balance of power in the colonizer-colonized dynamics nowadays. Territories were turned into private property and then seemingly restituted to their occupants. This selection of films aims to uncover the relationships of dependence, subservience and control still present in the so-called liberated world. (Emil Vasilache)

TO PICK A FLOWER

Shireen Seno | Duration 17 min

Taking images of plants and trees as starting points, this video essay presents archival photographs from the American Colonial Era in the Philippines (1898–1946), exploring the relationship between humans, nature and their entanglements with empires.

SOUM

Alice Brygo | Duration 31 min

While occupying a former bank and waiting to be able to legally assert their domicile, three squatters build their own memories in an attempt to reconcile their non-Western heritage with a present of assimilation.

NOTES FROM THE PERIPHERY

Tulapop Saenjaroen | Duration 14 min

Shot in the peripheral areas of the Laem Chabang port, Notes from the Periphery interrogates the notion of territoriality, globalized networks, and ownership through fragmented relations of the affected sites and communities nearby, shipping containers that become a policing tool, and barnacles.

MOUNE Ô

Maxime Jean-Baptiste | Duration 16 min

Presenting the festive events which accompanied the screening of a film where the director’s father played a role, the images in Moune Ô reveal the remnants of the colonial inheritance within a Western collective unconscious, always marking the other through stereotypes.

GOLDEN JUBILEE

Suneil Sanzgiri | Duration 19 min

Beginning with scenes of the filmmaker’s father navigating a virtual 3D rendering of their ancestral house in Goa, India, Golden Jubilee reconsiders ideas of freedom, loss and recovery in the wake of colonial and neo-colonial theft.

Meniu