Black Atlantic Cinema

Nächste Veranstaltungen

Flânoirie: inscribing mobility through walking in Black German film
8. Mai 2025 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

Karina Griffith (Berlin)

A young university student searches for a room to let. An American GI searches for love between visiting record shops 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, BRD 1972, Olingo, Emile Itolo, DDR 1966, 11 min.

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Veranstalter
Institut für Theater-, Film- und Medienwissenschaft der Goethe Universität und Kino im deutschen Filmmuseum in Kooperation mit dem Forschungszentrum „Normative Ordnungen“, dem Forschungscluster „ConTrust – Vertrauen im Konflikt“ und der hessischen Film- und Medienakademie; realisiert mit Mitteln des Adickes-Fonds der Goethe Universität

Encruzilhadas das águas / Water Crossings, routes for the Black Brazilian Cinemas’ experiences
15. Mai 2025 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

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.

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African Boats and Scenes of Mourning in the Postcolonial Black Atlantic
5. Juni 2025 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

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.

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The Black Altantic and the Politics of Self-Representation in the Cinema: A Critical Analysis of Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019)
26. Juni 2025 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

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.

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Diasporic Aesthetics, Intermedial Dialogues. The films of Nicolás Guillé Landrián
3. Juli 2025 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

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.

Filme:
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.)

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The Intimacies of Four Continents in Caribbean Cinema
10. Juli 2025 - 18:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

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 / 18 Uhr: My Mother’s Place, Richard Fung, 1990, 49 min.
8 pm / 20 Uhr: Wan Pipel, Pim de la Parra, 1976, 105 min.

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West Indies, the Black Atlantic and Knowledge: Med Hondo’s Ambulatory Cinema
17. Juli 2025 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

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 “unconsciousses.” 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 of African 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.

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Ruptures Beyond the Frame
24. Juli 2025 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

Lecture: Awa Konaté (Abu Dhabi / London)

This presentation explores the significance of curating Black Atlantic cinema as an essential curatorial praxis of memory work, focusing on its capacity to confront double consciousness and offer alternatives for Black survival. Engaging with W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of seeing oneself “through the eyes of a nation that looked back in contempt,” the presentation propounds the ways in which curators vis-a-vis filmmakers in the Black Atlantic draw upon the political work of film to rethink today’s globalised world. Moving beyond the restrictive frameworks of the nation-state and national cinemas, the concept of Black Atlantic Cinema provides a transnational lens through which African and diasporic filmmakers articulate histories of displacement, resistance, and world-making across three continents and several centuries. Med Hondo’s Soleil Ô (1970) dramatizes the alienation of African migrants in France, capturing the psychic dissonance of double consciousness within a neocolonial European landscape. Similarly, Martina Attille’s Dreaming Rivers (1988) poetically meditates on migration and diasporic memory, constructing a cinematic language that resists the linearity of national belonging. By curating these films within a Black Atlantic Cinema framework, this presentation argues for a transnational curatorial approach that foregrounds cinema as both a continental and diasporic medium—that not only reveals the fractures of double consciousness, but also generates new modalities of Black being and survival beyond the borders of the nation-state.

Awa Konaté is a curator, art consultant, and founder of the curatorial platform Culture Art Society (CAS). Her curatorial practice draws on archival research, Black feminist pedagogies, and memory work, with a particular interest in interdisciplinarity and lens-based practices of African descendant artists, and their resonance within global contemporary art.

Films:

Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun) Med Hondo, Mauritania/France 1970, 98 min.

Dreaming Rivers Martina Judah Attile, UK 1988, 30 min.

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Vergangene Veranstaltungen

A DEUSA NEGRA (Black Goddess. BR/NG 1979. R: Ola Balogun)
31. Oktober 2024 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

Einführung: Didi Cheeka (Lagos) und Vinzenz Hediger (Frankfurt, ConTrust)

Lecture: Crossing the Black Atlantic: Ola Balogun and A Deusa Negra (1978)
Reversing the course of the middle passage a significant number of relatively well-to-do -Afrobrazilian families relocated from Brazil to Lagos in Nigeria in the early 20^th century. In his 1978 film “A Deusa Negra” pioneering Nigerian film director Ola Balogun, who is himself from one of those families, tells the parallel histories of the transatlantic slave trade and one young contemporary Nigerian’s search for his Afro-Brazilian roots.
Didi Cheeka is an off-Nollywood filmmaker, critic and archivist-activist in Lagos.
Vinzenz Hediger is professor of cinema studies at Goethe Universität Frankfurt.

Film: A DEUSA NEGRA (Black Godess. BR/NG 1979. R: Ola Balogun)
„Der junge Nigerianer Babatunde gibt seinem Vater am Sterbebett das Versprechen, in Brasilien nach Spuren der dort einst versklavten Vorfahren zu suchen. Von einem Can-domblé-Ritus ausgehend, führt seine Reise immer tiefer in die fremde Kultur und verschafft ihm in einer traumgleichen Sequenz ein tieferes Verständnis vom Leid und der Widerstandskraft seiner Ahnen. Mühelos verbindet Balogun Gegenwärtiges mit Vergangenem, reale mit magischen Welten, Diskurs mit Trance. Zur hypnotisierenden Atmosphäre trägt auch die mit repetitiven Mustern und Verzerrungen spielende Musik des nigerianischen Schlagzeugers Remi Kabaka bei.“ (Arsenal e.V.)

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LITTLE SENEGAL (DZ/FR/DE 2001. R: Rachid Bouchareb)
14. November 2024 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

Lecture: Boukary Sawadogo (New York)

Lecture: Blackness: Politics and Affect of Kinship in Little Senegal
Little Senegal (2001) by the Algerian French director Rachid Bouchareb brings to the fore Africa’s relation to Black America through intimacy, affect, and a space with fraught history to race and racism. While African Americans face the challenge of double consciousness, Africans who experience the American notion of race for the first time must contend with triple consciousness as Black, African, and immigrant.
Dr. Boukary Sawadogo is Associate Professor of cinema studies and Black Studies in the Department of Media and Communication Arts at the City College of New York – City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of five books and the founding director of the Harlem African Animation Festival.

Film: LITTLE SENEGAL (DZ/FR/DE 2001. R: Rachid Bouchareb)
Nach 30 Jahren Arbeit für das Museum der Geschichte der Sklaverei auf der Insel Gorée vor Dakar begibt sich der Senegalese Alloun in Rachid Boucharebs LITTLE SENEGAL nach New York, um seine amerikanischen Verwandten zu besuchen, deren Ahn:innen als Sklav:innen verschleppt wurden. „While African Americans face the challenge of double consciousness, Africans who experience the American notion of race for the first time must contend with triple consciousness as Black, African, and immigrant. Who is Black in America? How are narrative and duality in representations deployed to portray complex interpersonal relations among Black people in America?“ (Boukary Sawadogo)

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CONFUSION NA WA (NG 2013. R: Kenneth Gyang)
21. November 2024 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

Lecture: Didi Cheeka, Vinzenz Hediger

Lecture: Nollywood and the Black Atlantic. On Kenneth Gyang’s “Confusion Na Wa” (2013)
Rather than wait for government support or European money Nigerian filmmakers in the 1990s started a film industry from scratch and on their own terms. Initially influenced by Brazilian soap operas Nigerian video films told stories with a local focus which soon found a global audience. Kenneth Gyang’s “Confusion Na Wa” (2013) is increasingly emerging as one of the most influential films of “New Nollywood”. In a conversation with Tunde Aladese, one of its stars, Didi Cheeka and Vinzenz Hediger address the diasporic dimensions of the film’s Transatlantic references.
Didi Cheeka is an off-Nollywood filmmaker, critic and archivist-activist in Lagos
Tunde Aladese is a writer, screenwriter and actress based in Lagos and Berlin. She is the star of “Confusion Na Wa”.
Vinzenz Hediger is professor of cinema studies at Goethe Universiy Frankfurt am Main

Film: CONFUSION NA WA (NG 2013. R: Kenneth Gyang)
Inspiriert von Fela Kutis Song „Confusion“ erzählt CONFUSION NA WA die Geschichte einer Gruppe von Menschen, deren Leben im Laufe eines Tages miteinander verwoben werden.

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THE TERROR AND THE TIME (GY 1979. R: Victor Jara Collective)
5. Dezember 2024 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

Lecture: Iyabo Kwayana (New Hampshire)

Lecture: Terror and the Time: A Reflection on Poetic Resistance
This talk will explore the poetry of Martin Carter as a powerful source of anti-colonial resistance, particularly within the context of Guyanese social and cultural movements. As the child of Eusi Kwayana, one of the interviewees in the film and one of the dear friends to the late Martin Carter, I witnessed Carter’s influence extends beyond words, inspiring a poetic resistance that fueled the liberatory imaginaries of the filmmakers of Terror and the Time and those contemporaries engaged in resistance movements.
Iyabo Kwayana is an an educator and independent filmmaker whose film career spans from serving as director of photography for fiction films, to director or (co)cinematographer for award-winning documentaries, to directing and editing archival experimental films that leverage minstrel imagery to NASA footage to articulate personal trauma and catharsis.

Film: THE TERROR AND THE TIME (GY 1979. R: Victor Jara Collective)
THE TERROR AND THE TIME des Victor Jara Collective untersucht, begleitet von der Poesie Martin Carters, den britischen Kolonialismus in Guyana, indem er sich auf drei historische Momente konzentriert. „Der titelgebende Terror ist der britische Kolonialismus in Guyana; die Zeit ist 1953, das Jahr der ersten Wahlen unter einer provisorischen demokratischen Verfassung.“ (Courtisane, Gent) „Als Kind von Eusi Kwayana, einem der Interviewpartner im Film und einem guten Freund des verstorbenen Martin Carter, habe ich miterlebt, wie Carters Einfluss über Worte hinausging und einen poetischen Widerstand inspirierte, der die befreiende Vorstellungskraft der Filmemacher von THE TERROR AND THE TIME und der in Widerstandsbewegungen engagierten Zeitgenossen beflügelte.” (Iyabo Kwayana)

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MANDABI Die Postanweisung (SN 1968. R: Ousmane Sembene)
19. Dezember 2024 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

Lecture: Daniel Fairfax (Frankfurt)

Lecture: Symbolic Capital: Mandabi (1968) by Ousmane Sembene
An adaptation of his own novella Le Mandat, Ousmane Sembene’s Mandabi (1968) was the first feature-length film made in the Wolof language, following Senegalese independence in 1960. The protagonist Ibrahima (Makhouredia Gueye), an endearingly feckless unemployed man who lives with his two wives and a brood of children in Dakar, has his life turned upside down when a money order for 25,000 CFA francs arrives from his nephew in France. Working in an ironic mode, Sembene’s focus on the trans-national capital flows symbolised by Ibrahima’s money order highlights the continued economic control that France wields over its former African colonies.
Daniel Fairfax teaches film at Goethe-University Frankfurt, where he coordinates the international master degree in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies. He is the author of The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968-1973 (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), has translated the writings of Jean-Louis Comolli, Christian Metz and Jean-Pierre Meunier.

Film: MANDABI (Die Postanweisung. SN 1968. R: Ousmane Sembene)
“Ibrahima, ein liebenswerter arbeitsloser Mann, der mit seinen zwei Frauen und einer Vielzahl von Kindern in Dakar lebt, gerät aus dem Gleichgewicht, als eine Zahlungsanweisung über 25.000 CFA-Francs von seinem Neffen in Frankreich eintrifft. Während er den größten Teil des Geldes für die Rückkehr des Neffen in den Senegal aufbewahren soll, verstrickt sich Ibrahima in einen bürokratischen Alptraum, als er versucht, seinen Identitätsstatus festzustellen, um die Zahlungsanweisung einlösen zu können. Ousmane Sembenes MANDABI, eine Adaption seiner eigenen satirischen Novelle Le Mandat, war der erste abendfüllende Film, der nach der Unabhängigkeit Senegals im Jahr 1960 in der Sprache Wolof gedreht wurde.” (Daniel Fairfax)

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SAMBIZANGA (1972. R: Sarah Maldoror)
16. Januar 2025 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

Lecture: Jennifer Blaylock (Rowan University)

Lecture: The Thin Green Line Between Canons and Revolutions. On Sarah Maldoror’s Sambizanga (1972)
What happens to the revolutionary grainy aesthetics, the militancy of the imperfect image, the subversive qualities of the damaged 16mm print, when a film enters the artistic canon? This talk will compare the degradation of 16mm Sambizanga prints in circulation in the United States during the #BlackLivesMatter movement with the recent restoration of the film and its new edit of a critical scene centered on “Black joy,” to argue that the scratches of small gauge material history release a revolutionary affect that is different from the aestheticization of revolution emphasized in the conservative act of Sambizanga’s restoration.
Dr. Jennifer Blaylock is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Radio, Television & Film at Rowan University.

Film: SAMBIZANGA (AO/FR/CD 1972. R: Sarah Maldoror)
SAMBIZANGA spielt im Jahr 1961: Der Befreiungskampf gewinnt auch in Angola Momentum. Mit Bildern des Alltäglichen erzählt Sarah Maldoror die Suche Marias nach ihrem Ehemann Domingos: Er wurde inhaftiert, weil er sich der Revolution angeschlossen hat. Dabei legt Maldoror mit Feingefu¨hl das Alleinsein einer Frau auf einer beschwerlichen Reise offen, und nimmt Zeit und Mu¨he in den Blick, die nötig sind, um diesen Weg zuru¨ckzulegen. Marias Marsch, ihre Suche, entpuppt sich als einfu¨hlsame und kraftvolle Metapher fu¨r das Leiden des angolanischen Volkes und dessen „Entwicklung eines revolutionären Bewusstseins“. (S. Maldoror)

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Key Works of Afro-Brazilian Short Film
23. Januar 2025 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film: Black Atlantic Cinema

Lecture: Janaína Oliveira (Rio de Janeiro)

Lecture: Key Works of Afro-Brazilian Short Film
Janaína Oliveira has 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: tba

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LA PERMISSION (FR 1967. R: Melvin van Peebles)
13. Februar 2025 - 20:00 - 23:00

Lecture & Film „Black Atlantic Cinema“

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 organised programs for the Whitney Biennial in New York and was visiting lecturer at Universität Basel.

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