Lecture: Ayo Coly (Dartmouth)

In this presentation, I query the trope of the African migrant boat in recent African cinemas. The trope has emerged in response to the phenomenon of the so-called “death-boats” that attempt to smuggle African migrants and refugees across the Atlantic to Europe. My presentation reads the trope in conversation with scholarship on the Black Atlantic and on modalities of mourning in the wake of the Middle Passage.

Ayo A. Coly holds the Class of 1925 Chair at Dartmouth College where she is a Professor of Comparative Literature and African and African American Studies.

Film: The Pirogue, Moussa Toure, Artmattan Productions, Senegal 2013, 87 min.

Lecture: Janaína Oliveira (Rio de Janeiro)

“We are always in the middle of the journey,” says essayist and poet Dionne Brand in A Map to the Door of No Return. The crossing of the Atlantic marks Black people’s historical and aesthetic experiences, bringing fragmentation and incompleteness, but also the crossroads that shape lives in the African diasporas. The Encruzilhadas das águas / Water Crossings program offers a path for thinking about the Atlantic routes that shape Black cinemas in Brazil, proposing the encounter of contemporary works with Zózimo Bulbul’s pioneering film, in a kind of cinematographic panorama through the waters.

Janaína Oliveira holds a Ph.D. in History and is a professor at the Federal Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IFRJ). She is Head Programmer at the Zózimo Bulbul Black Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro and on the programming committees for FINCAR (Festival Internacional de Cinema de Realizadoras) and International Women Filmmakers Festival in Recife.

Film Program:
Alma no Olho (Soul in the eye), Zózimo Bulbul (Brazil, 1973, 13 min)
NoirBlue, Displacents of a dance, Ana Pi, Brazil, 2018, 27 min.
Se o mar tivesse varandas (If the sea had balconies), Aline Motta, Brazil, 2017, 9 min.
Mal di Mare (Seasick), João Vieira Torres, France/Brazil, 2021, 15 min.
Mar de Dentro, Lia Letícia, Brazil, 2024, 8 min.
De um lado do Atlântico (On One Side of the Atlantic), Milena Manfredini, Brazil, 2017, 7 min.

Organizer
Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at Goethe University and Kino im deutschen Filmmuseum in cooperation with the research center “Normative Orders”, the research cluster “ConTrust – Trust in Conflict” and the Hessian Film and Media Academy; realized with funds from the Adickes Fund of Goethe University

Karina Griffith (Berlin)

A young university student searches for a room to let. An American GI searches for love between visiting record stores and gigging with his band.
Olingo and They Call It Love, respectively, are both black and white student films featuring wandering Black male protagonists in Germany. In her lecture, Karina Griffith introduces the termflânoire films, which she uses to describe works spearheaded by Black authors of German cinemas that refuse the stagnation of affects such as consternation (Betroffenheit) in exchange for active vibes. Flânoire filmsare characterized by their representations of unfettered Black mobility in Europe and a focus on respect rather than belonging.

Dr. Karina Griffith teaches in the Faculty of Architecture, Media and Design as Professor of Intersectional Visual and Media Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). She holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto and a Masters in Feature Film from Goldsmiths College London. She has been part of the curatorial team of the Berlinale Film Festival section Forum Expanded sinc 2021, and she is one of 12 fellows selected for the 2025 VILA SUL residency program in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil.

Films: They Call It Love, King Ampaw, FRG 1972, Olingo, Emile Itolo, GDR 1966, 11 min.

Lecture: Greg de Cuir Jr

Lecture: A Black American in Paris
Melvin van Peebles left the United States to live and work in Europe in 1959, and was invited to Paris for screenings on the strength of the short films he had made a few years earlier. After finding success as a journalist and novelist he would go on to direct his debut feature film La Permission in 1967 – in French – making him a pioneer of not only independent but also international Black cinema. This talk will explore van Peebles’ film work as something of a missing link in the history of French cinema, also a fascinating outlier in the history of Black cinema, and for its subversive depiction of the modern forms of “double consciousness” that Black men must negotiate both at home and abroad.
Greg de Cuir Jr is co-founder + artistic director of Kinopravda Institute in Belgrade. In 2024 he organized programs for the Whitney Biennial in New York and was visiting lecturer at Universität Basel.

Further information and program: Here…

Organizer
Institute for Theatre, Film and Media Studies at Goethe University and Kino im deutschen Filmmuseum in cooperation with the research center “Normative Orders”, the research cluster “ConTrust – Trust in Conflict” and the Hessian Film and Media Academy; realized with funds from the Adickes Fund of Goethe University

Lecture: Aboubakar Sanogo (Ottawa)

West Indies is not only Med Hondo’s most formally accomplished work, but it is also his most powerful manifesto and cinematic treatise on the Black Atlantic and its status as an archive, a repository and producer of multiple (beyond the DuBoisian double), contradictory, superimposed yet complementary consciousnesses and “unconsciouses”. To retrieve and reactivate them, he produces an ambulatory mode of filmmaking that also doubles an epistemology for humanity’s very future.

Abouakar Sanogo is an associate professor of cinema at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. A scholar and curator of African cinema, Sanaogo is also the initiator ofAfrican Film Heritage Project (AFHP), a partnership between FEPACI, Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Film: West Indies, ou les Nègres marrons de la liberté, Med Hondo, France/Algeria/Mauretania 1979, 105 min.

Lecture: Usha Iyer (Stanford)

his program of two films from the Caribbean – a fiction feature and a documentary will extend the frame of the Black Atlantic by considering connected migrations across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, and histories of African enslavement and Asian indenture. The many connections and frictions between African, Indian, Chinese, Javanese and indigenous cultures of the Caribbean reveal the intimacies wrought by plantation capitalism between four continents – Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe.

In the experimental documentary, My Mother’s Place (1990) fourth-generation Chinese-Trinidadian-Canadian video artist, Richard Fung, weaves a loving portrait of his mother, Rita Fung, whose grandparents came to the Caribbean from China as indentured laborers in the mid-19th century. Wan Pipel, released a year after Suriname’s independence from the Netherlands, features a rich tapestry of characters and locales that captures the Black and Brown Atlantic as well as the energies of a newly decolonized nation.

Usha Iyer is associate professor of film and media studies at Stanford University and the author of Dancing Women. Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020).

Film program:

6 pm / 6 p.m.: My Mother’s Place, Richard Fung, 1990, 49 min.
8 pm / 8 p.m.: Wan Pipel, Pim de la Parra, 1976, 105 min.

Lecture: Jessica Gordon-Burroughs (Edinburgh)

Lecture: Diasporic Aesthetics, Intermedial Dialogues. The films of Nicolás Guillé Landrián
Afro-Cuban filmmaker and artist Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s final cinematic work in exile, Inside Downtown, co-directed with Jorge Egusquiza, has barely been discussed in the growing critical literature on his oeuvre. This omission points to the persistent difficulties of making visible cinematographic works produced outside national production systems. However, it also derives from the gaps and displacements in the supports and media that inevitably accompany diasporic production, and that often disguise unexpected continuities in the trajectory of an artist.
Jessica Gordon-Burroughs is Lecturer in Latin American Studies and Visual Culture at the University of Edinburgh. Her essays have appeared in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and Discourse.

Films:
COFFEA ARÁBIGA (1968. 18 min.)
OCIEL DEL TOA (1965. 17 min.)
EN UN BARRIO VIEJO (1963, 9 min.)
LOS DEL BAILE (1965. 6 min.)
INSIDE DOWNTOWN (2011. 30 min.)

Realized with funds from the Adickes Fund of the Goethe University.

Lecture: Femi Shaka (Port Harcourt)

Paul Gilroy’s seminal work, The Black Atlantic (1993), is cardinal to an understanding of the “ideas of the nation, nationality, national belonging, and nationalism” as experienced by blacks in the diaspora. But as Zeleza (2005) noted, “Gilroy’s central concern was to deconstruct the idea of the black race, to divorce it from any African essence or presence, to demonstrate its fluidity, mutability and modernity, and that black Atlantic cultural identities emerged in transnational and intercultural spaces of the diasporic experience itself.” This is where the work becomes problematic. Mati Diop’s film, Atlantics (2019) offers a starting point for a critical discussion of how members of the refugee diasporas are represented in the cinema.

Femi Shaka is professor of cinema studies at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria.

Film: Atlantics, Mati Diop, France/Senegal/Belgium 2019, 105 min.