Dastevezi is a new hybrid-journal/archive hosted by the University of Heidelberg and founded by Jürgen Schaflechner and Max Kramer. The journal/archive is committed to promoting various modes of knowing by offering a platform for knowledge production and research on South Asia in both audio-visual and textual forms. (more…)

“United Screens” is a long term research and exhibition project that intends to create a platform through which a network of community cinema programmers can be enabled to screen quality alternative cinema, from a de-centrally curated database of alternative cinema/video works. (more…)

In the current political climate in India, any act or voice of dissent is considered a ‘protest’. In such a setting, what then really constitutes a protest? In his lecture Ujjwal Utkarsh will scrutinise the possibility and the potential of the observational form of film making as a form of radical film making. (more…)

The “Palestinian Film Unit” (PFU) was a collective of film makers and researchers founded in the 1960s, who engaged in the production of films and documentaries within the framework of the “Third Cinema movement”. During the Lebanese Civil War in 1982, the PFU archive was bombed, and most of the archival materials were destroyed. Only the few films that were sent to film festivals in Europe and the Arab world survived. (more…)

In the mid Eighties at the German Film and Television Academy in West-Berlin, a second generation of video activism was growing up – mostly in night shifts at the school´s one and only 3/4 inch video editing studio, room “546”. (more…)

LCVA is preserving the work of the Community Video movement in the 1970s and 80s, in London and South East England. In the early 1970s portable video recording equipment became available, and for the first time it was possible for individuals and communities (outside of mainstream broadcasting) to make their own television. (more…)

Oliver Ressler’s work has focused on global warming as a central theme ever since he first began to exhibit. One of his first solo exhibitions was “100 Years of Greenhouse Effect” at Salzburger Kunstverein (1996). Several exhibitions, films, installations, billboards and photographic works on the theme have followed since then. (more…)

The video “O que nos nutre” was commissioned by the Goethe-Institute Rio, Brazil. The German curator invited a group of artists with the intention to show the first “Indigenous World Games”, an Olympiad of indigenous peoples, as an “innocent” counterpart of the Rio Olympics. (more…)

In “One plus one” (1968), Godard famously proclaimed: If an intellectual wants to be revolutionary, he has to stop being an intellectual. Many notions of radicality around 1968 are struggling with the question how the relation between thinking/aesthetics on the one hand and acting/politics on the other can be overcome. Does one need to take sides? If so, which side would it have to be? Is it a false dichotomy in the first place? (more…)

Daniel H. Mutibwa’s recently published book titled “Cultural Protest in Journalism, Documentary Films and the Arts: Between Protest and Professionalisation” takes a transnational and interdisciplinary approach encompassing a range of theoretical perspectives (more…)

Artists Zayne Armstrong and Ellinor Aurora Aasgaard will introduce their experimental serial moving-image project Days, which emerged from a common need for alternatives to state and commercial media funding. The series is a fictional drama, based on the long-running, U.S. daytime television soap opera Days of Our Lives. (more…)

I freely tell stories that appeal to cineastes and fine art viewers and that challenge the traditional seeking audience very much. I don’t seek the positive opinion of the audience, but research in my field of film, formally and interdisciplinarily. I mix cartoon with experimental and real film, feature film with performance and music video. (more…)

The late 1920s saw the first large scale wave of radical political film making in Germany. Deploring ‘how broadly and deeply the cinema influences and confuses proletarian audiences’, Béla Balázs cried out in 1922: ‘We must create our own film companies! This is absolutely necessary!’ (more…)

During the Weimar Republic, communist organisations contributed tremendously to the establishment of a tradition of worker writers. Thus factory workers were encouraged to write about their experiences in labour and life. As a result of her research into original poems, songs and epigrams by workers writers about the housing question, Ina Wudtke decided to write some agitation texts herself, (more…)

What does radical film mean today? All cinematic forms, styles and intentions are capable of taking on a radical character. There are no concrete modes of distribution or exhibition that are exclusively radical – at least theoretically. What makes a film radical today, as Third Cinema proposed fifty years ago, is a particular way of approaching reality that, because of it, provokes a reaction on the part of the audiences. (more…)

The massification of digital technologies of image recording, the participatory web and video-sharing platforms such as YouTube have deeply transformed the way in which filmmakers can portray and approach reality. (more…)

In neoliberalism ‘the story’ has become a universal currency. Today, every commodity has a story to tell. The neo-liberal subject is obliged to tell their life story as a story of coming to oneself, of healing or self-discovery. Self-realization here means that we do not exist without a story. (more…)

Defined by Peter Snowdon, vernacular videos belong to the multiple series of gestures and actions through which individuals gather, both online and offline, to enact the people as the possible subject of another history. (more…)

Passing the Rainbow was created in collaboration with Berlin film maker Elfe Brandenburger, filmmakers, actresses, activists and Sandra Schäfer, visual artist and film maker, in Kabul between 2002 and 2007. The film deals with strategies to undermine the rigid gender norms in Afghan society: on the level of filmic staging, in political work and in everyday life. (more…)

Watch Before Deletion investigates the pivotal role of gossip in the construction of sexual desire by taking El-Kotchina, an alleged sex film starring an Arab music icon in the 1980’s, as its point of departure. A sound film par excellence, El-Kotchina was entirely constructed in the collective imagination of the Egyptian public through aural networks of gossip, rumour and hearsay. (more…)

The lecture introduces queer guerrila film practices in the People‘s Republic of China. Using the Beijing Queer Film Festival (BJQFF), Shanghai Queer Film Festival (ShQFF) and China Queer Film Festival Tour (CQFFT) as examples, this lecture highlights socialist and democratic principles in film festival programming and organisation, as well as the tactics through which film festival organisers circumvent government censorship and commercialisation. (more…)

How can political videos from civil society effectively assert themselves on the Social Web against the dominance of advertising, entertainment and propaganda? This is the central question of a joint research project that will be presented in this lecture. (more…)

Cypriot thinker Ulus Baker defines video as an “instrument for recording” or a “document-device”, cinema and photograph are also primarily a means of recording. While cinema is an expensive industry, video enjoys the freedom to penetrate in the personal worlds of its users. (more…)

This lecture will focus on two films, which have subject matters that have been actively suppressed by the Turkish state because they go beyond the boundaries of the ethno-nationalistic model aggressively implemented since the establishment of the Republic, thus creating a threat to the integrity of Turkey. (more…)

In this lecture I wish to explore the question ‘What is radical film’ with a Deleuzean twist — thus rather asking “What can radical film be(come)” or “What can it do?”. Approaching this question from an ecological perspective, one can extrapolate a novel potential of film making/activism that I will coin ‘Parasitic Activism’ through probing the (originally Berlin-based) eco-porn platform Fuck for Forest. (more…)