• Fri 04 05 2018 •
Spell Reel

mit FILIPA CÉSAR & SANA NA N’HADA
moderated by KATRIN MUNDT

In 2011, an audiovisual archive resurfaced in the West African city of Bissau. What is left of the material, which was almost completely destroyed, bears witness to the beginnings of a Guinean cinema that saw itself as a part of the political struggle for liberation during the period from 1963 to 1974. This conforms to the notion that poet, politician, and independence fighter Amílcar Cabral ascribed to the medium of film. With the Guinean filmmakers San Na N’Hadaand Flora Gomes as well as many others, Filipa César has resurrected the remnants of the archive, embarking on a journey that conveys unique documents from the past to a present where they become a visionary prism.

The archival material was initially digitized in Berlin, and then ‒ in the form of an itinerant cinema ‒ was shown, critiqued, and discussed in different locations in Guinea-Bissau. Spell Reel is the result of a multilayered and collective research project that returns to the places in which the original films were made, showing them in public for the first time – often with the filmmaker present. Between remote villages in Guinea-Bissau and European capitals, a mobile transnational cinema emerges, turning the archive into a place where people seek alternative concepts to a world in a state of emergency.

96', in various languages with English subtitles

Venue: Filmclub 813 in der Brücke, Hahnenstraße 6, 50667 Cologne 7 €