Introduces Mao Mollona, with Filipa César. The School of Mutation within the framework of the iteration Film Archive and Militant Cinema holds this online meeting on NOVEMBER 12th at 18:00 CET. Join us on Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89498935345?pwd=ZTlhODh0dVhkRjBRTExKWm8vMmVXdz09 Meeting ID: 894 9893 5345
Luta ca caba inda (The struggle is not over yet) On the militant film archives
For nearly thirty years, an archive of film and audio material was stored at the Guinean Film Institute in Bissau, institutionally neglected and on the verge of complete ruination. The material in it is a testimony of a decade of collective and internationally connected cinema praxis in Guinea Bissau, as part of the people’s struggle for independence from Portuguese colonialism (1963-1974) and subsequent nation building.
In 2012, in collaboration with the Guinean filmmakers Sana na N’Hada, Flora Gomes and Suleimane Biai and with institutional support from Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art (Berlin), artist Filipa César, curator Tobias Hering and many others embarked on a long term project aimed at re-accessing this archive. Its peculiar state, suspended between ruination and work-in-progress, activates questions about past promises and their contemporary pertinence.
The project was titled Luta ca caba inda (The struggle is not over yet), after one set of reels found in the archive, a documentary film from 1980 on post-independence Guinea-Bissau abandoned in the editing process. The title cursed the completion of the film, the struggle and also this never to be finished project.
In the course of the Luta ca caba inda project a series of discursive events and public screenings have been dedicated to activating the potencies of this collection. Luta ca caba inda, as an informal collective of people and praxis, enables an ecology of relations and spaces of care and subjectivity to emerge, materializing in collective assemblies where images and sounds of the archive are discussed between the filmmakers, and European and African audiences. Here the cinema acted as a collective editing room and assembly for reflecting on conditions of the present and projecting new futures.