Symposium Day Five - Resounding Archives: The Politics of Listening to The Moving Image

Sonntag, 22.9.2024

10:00–11:30
Panel 9
Speaking Up

Since the 1960s, the primary task of independent, political, and militant cinema has been to lend a voice to those who would otherwise go unheard. These films were often created by collectives whose members not only developed new modes of production, but also a new distribution and cinema practice intended to have a transformative effect on socio-political life. In this context, programs and manifestos were created which continue to reverberate today.
Fiona Berg (Berlin) will discuss feminist networks, festivals, and manifestos.
Ahmeed Refaat (Cairo) will talk about the 2nd Afro-Asian Film Festival that took place in Cairo in 1960.
Moderation: Brigitta Kuster (Berlin/Zurich)

12:00–13:30
Panel 10
Pirate Sounds: Composing Histories From Acoustic Fragments and Debris

After found footage films came found sound music, the creative borrowing of not just styles, rhythms, and rhymes, but entire building blocks of musical compositions. The two most significant cultural movements of the last three decades in a global perspective, hip hop and Afrobeats, provide the outlines of a new cultural order which is also a re-ordering of a shared archive of images and sounds of emancipation.
Tom Simmert (Mainz) will speak of pirate media and YouTube archives in Nigerian music.
Aboubakar Sanogo (Ottawa) will discuss hip hop and how it remediates what we might call the “African Emancipation Library.”
Moderation: Erica Carter (London)

Born in Iran in 1986, Hadi Alipanah is a film critic, journalist, and scholar. He began his career in 2008, writing reviews for specialized short film magazines and several other journals and newspapers. For many years, he has organized short film festivals, curated short film screenings, and supervised the production of hundreds of shorts. In 2015, he founded FiDAN, Iranian short film magazine as an independent platform for introducing Iranian short films and filmmakers. His ongoing research on the history of short films in Iranian cinema led him to discover the activities of the short film collective Cinema-ye Azad, which was active in Iran between 1969 and 1979, as well as more than 300 forgotten 8mm shorts.

Ayman Nahle is a visual artist, filmmaker, cinematographer, film editor, and film archivist. Since 2014, Nahle has collaborated on E-Flux New York’s project The Institute of the Cosmos as the cinematographer for films by Anton Vidokle. He has also co-produced and directed many short films. His work has been showcased in cinemas, film festivals, galleries, and museums around the world. Since 2020, he has been actively involved in archival practices, contributing to various workshops and research projects as an audiovisual archivist for the collections of UMAM Documentation & Research (UMAM D&R).

Monika Borgmann-Slim is a film director and journalist. She co-founded UMAM Documentation and Research (UMAM D&R) in Lebanon in 2005 along with Lokman Slim, with whom she co-directed UMAM D&R until his assassination in February 2021. As Director of UMAM D&R, she is responsible for the management of projects, research, and archives (audiovisual and written) on themes related to violence and conflict, carceral dynamics, memory, and art and cultural history. She has both German and Lebanese citizenship.

Mohamed Soueid, after studying chemistry at Lebanese University, began working as a film critic and writer. His publications include books on Arab cinema (in Arabic). Since 1990, he has produced several independent films as well as works for television. He became known internationally through his autobiographical Civil War Trilogy: Tango of Yearning (1998), Nightfall (2000), and Civil War (2002). Soueid is considered a pioneer of the Lebanese essay film. He taught for several years as a film professor at Saint Joseph University, Beirut, and in 2002 became a producer at O3 Productions, the documentary film subsidiary of the MBC Satellite Group. Soueid continues to work as a director of independent films as well as author and columnist.