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Fire, film and ancestral dreaming

screening + lecture + conversation with Elisabeth Povinelli, Karrabing Film Collective

Friday March 20th - 7pm doors & food, 8pm screening & conversation

Co-organised by Fireplace Cinema, Blue Screen and Caillou Film Festival

Location: SMOG, Avenue Van Volxem 380, 1190 Forest

Supported by: Future Narratives / RITCS school of arts

Entry: free donation in support of the collective 'on est là'

More info

We are delighted to welcome you to a special evening of screenings by the Karrabing Film Collective in conversation with founding member and critical theorist Elizabeth Povinelli.

Having written on the impasse between liberal systems of law and value, and indigenous worlds in Northern Territory, Australia, Elisabeth Povinelli is a co-founder of the Karrabing Film Collective as a means of collective storytelling and territorial assertion. Consisting of over 50 members, the indigenous media group employ film and art installations as a form of grassroots resistance and self-organisation. Meaning ‘low tide’ in the local Emmiyengal language, karrabing refers to a form of collectivity that exists beyond government-imposed strictures of land ownership.

The collective emphasise that the films themselves remain secondary to their ongoing struggle for land recognition. In conversation with Povinelli, we consider how filmmaking as a medium and film spectatorship as a mode of encounter, might contribute to politics of territorial resistance and to a refusal of life as prescribed by neo-capitalist norms. If cinema is a technical apparatus brought forward by colonialism and conditioned by extraction, how might it also—haunted by ghosts from the past—reflect the stories of ancestral beings and enduring connections to land?

Film Program

"When the Dogs Talked" by Karrabing Film Collective

Australia 2014, HD video, 29 min, English & Emmiyengal with English subtitles

The search for a family member at the request of the housing authorities propels an extended family on a journey across land and sea, re-enacting the Dog Dreaming. Songlines are recounted and the children question the meaning of the ancestral Dreaming in their contemporary lives filled with hip-hop and hunting for food.

"Day in the Life" by Karrabing Film Collective

Australia 2020, HD video, 32 min, English & Emmiyengal with English subtitles

Day in the Life explores the ordinary obstacles Indigenous families face as they move through an ordinary day. Across five chapters – Breakfast, Playtime, Lunch Break, Cocktail Hour, and Dinner Time – and an audioscape directed by its younger members, Day in the Life is a visual and sonic landscape that dramatises and satirises the settler forms of governance and extractive capitalism that Karrabing members encounter over the course of a day.

Biography

Elizabeth A. Povinelli (1962) is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Informed by settler colonial theory, pragmatism and critical theory, Povinelli's writing has focused on developing a critical theory of late liberalism that would support an anthropology of the otherwise. She is the author of books and essays as well as former editor of the academic journal Public Culture. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University in 1991.

Povinelli is one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective founded in 2010. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, and the Contour Biennale.

This event take place in the framework of Fireplace Cinema: a Coming Community through Film? A research project on cinema, community and reconfigurations of the economy of empathy in collective film spectatorship by Gawan Fagard (RITCS/ULB) and is co-funded by Future Narratives at RITCS School of Arts.

Level Five Blue Screen is a Brussels-based, bimonthly screening programme focusing on film and video works by visual artists. The program is curated by Emma van der Put, Alasdair Asmussen Doyle and Chloé Malcotti and takes place at the collaborative artists' studio Level Five and at SMOG.

Caillou Film Festival From 26-29 March the second edition of Caillou Film Festival will take place at Mona curated by Lietje Bauwens and Lea Vromman. The festival explores the strategies used in territorial struggles and the role of cinema in resistance, showcasing activists in all their diversity, highlighting how film can document, influence, and participate in struggles. Alongside screenings, workshops and discussions bring together Brussels-based activists to reflect on past successes and future possibilities.

Film and media practices in times of geopolitical turmoil

screening + conversation with Ilyas Yourish

Thursday March 19th - 7:00-10:00 pm

In the framework of de @vonden at cinema ritcs.

info & tickets

Kamay - a film by Ilyas Yourish and Shahrokh Bikaran

Belgium, Afghanistan 2024, 106’ Persian with English subtitles.

Deep in the mountains of Afghanistan, a Hazara family – a historically oppressed ethnic people – tries to uncover the truth behind the sudden death of their daughter, Zahra, who moved to Kabul to study. In this poetic and poignant film, her sister Freshta narrates countless hours on the road, administrative and technological obstacles to justice... until the Taliban’s rise to power.

With an introduction by Ariana Naser and in collaboration with NADOE network

Film and Media Practices in Times of Geopolitical Turmoil

A conversation with Ilyas Yourish, moderated by Gawan Fagard

During this conversation, filmmaker Ilyas Yourish will dialogue with the audience about his film practice within and beyond the making of Kamay. Deeply involved with the history of the Afghan region and its people, as well as personally subjected to the violent turmoil of the Taliban take-over after the withdrawal of American troops in 2021, the making of this film reaches far beyond what it shows on screen. We’ll speak of the ethics of documentary filmmaking in times of humanitarian emergency, the responsibility of a director towards the people on the other side of the camera, the complexity of negotiating economies of empathy and the challenge as a filmmaker to create an allyship with decency, truth and justice.

Biography

Ilyas Yourish founded Kamay Film in Afghanistan in 2018 with the goal of developing and producing films centered on themes like identity, trauma, history, and memory, particularly focusing on his homeland and its people. However, in 2021, he was forced into exile to Belgium, where he has since lived and worked. Born and raised in Kabul, Ilyas began his career as a multimedia journalist and TV show producer in 2011 while studying at the Journalism Faculty of Kabul University. Transitioning to a full-time filmmaker in 2019, he brought to his work a rich background shaped by his earlier contributions to various social research projects. From 2012 to 2019, Ilyas served as a research coordinator, researcher, and data analyst, contributing to projects exploring topics such as extremism, radicalization and mobilization, women's rights, and the dynamics of power, security, and local governance in conflict-affected districts. Throughout the past decade, Ilyas has extensively traveled within Afghanistan, gaining unique access and in-depth knowledge of his homeland. These experiences profoundly informed his artistic explorations. Today, he is active as a director and producer both on his own films and of films of colleagues around the world. His projects, including Kamay, have garnered support from esteemed film foundations and festivals.

Ariana Naser is a jurist, specialized in international human rights law and sustainable development for global justice. Her work often pertains to economic development, social inclusion and combatting racism and xenophobia.

NADOE network is a community-based organisation located in Brussels focusing on the improvement of the living conditions of the Afghan diaspora in Belgium as well as in Europe. The organisation works on different levels to connect, support, and work with Afghan diaspora and European organisations and entities to improve cooperation and mutual development.

'bottom wide' media practices

workshop with Marinho De Pina

Tuesday 9 december 2025 14:00-17:00, Ritcs school of arts, campus kaai, Brussels

In collaboration with Future Narratives and zintv

info

registration

Artist, writer, activist and Marinho De Pina will give a participative workshop on the intertwinings between media theory and media practice within a context of unequal struggles. Marinho de Pina is involved in the Mediateca Onshore at Malafo, Guinea-Bissau, a versatile place where media archiving, cultural initiatives, ecological activism and community projects are coming together. Marinho will walk us through various alternative positions and methodologies that they have developed throughout his work both as an artist, a community organiser and a multimedia activist. Especially the notion of ‘bottom wide’ - as opposed to the hierarchically inspired ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ will be explored in this workshop, trying to create a circular space in which relations of authority and power are questioned and unlearned.

Biography

Marinho de Pina is a filmmaker, transdisciplinary artist, performer, poet, musician and writer. He is currently a research assistant at the Centre for Studies on Socioeconomic Change and Territory in Lisbon doing his PhD on “Sacred Spaces in Bissau”. Since 2017, he has been working on Mediateca Abotcha in Guinea-Bissau with Filipa Cesár, Sana na N’Hada and Suleimane Biai, a programme for the cultural creation of dreams and utopias with the local community there.

The Mediateca Onshore is an arts and culture platform in a socially and ecologically sensitive area in Guinea-Bissau. As a venue, it hosts archives, workshops, seminars, production and community gatherings. As a network, it acts as a hub for transferring local, South-South and mundializing knowledge through performing arts, archival practices, moving image and digital media. It articulates practices in the fields of art, agroecology, traditional knowledge and media as contribution to social, economical and environmental justice.

Zintv is a Belgian audiovisual collective and training center focused on audiovisual education for social change, offering workshops in documentary, fiction, and social reporting to empower citizens and associations, aiming to create media free from commercial constraints and rooted in real-life experiences, acting as a tool for cultural resistance and citizen empowerment in Brussels.

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thinking cinema in circles

screening + masterclass with Marinho De Pina

Monday 8 december 2025, 19:00-22:00 at cinema Ritcs, Brussels

In collaboration with Future Narratives and zintv

info & tickets

The film Resonance Spiral takes us inside the Mediateca Onshore in Malafo, a community arts initiative in Guinea-Bissau. Co-director Marinho De Pina joins in for a masterclass on how we can think cinema in circles of encounter, transnational solidarity and witnessing.

Resonance Spiral by Filipa César and Marinho De Pina

Documentary, Portugal/Guinea Bissau/Germany, 2024. Digital, 92’ - ov st en

Synopsis

In September 2022, the Mediateca Onshore in Malafo, Guinea-Bissau, was inaugurated, which marked half a century of Guinean film production. Resonance Spiral documents the construction of this community cinema space – although much more is created along the way. Part of a project spanning decades initiated by filmmakers such as Filipa César, Sana na N’Hada and Marinho de Pina, the building is a place to preserve the history of militant history in Guinea-Bissau and a portal to make audiovisual archives of the country’s revolutionary movement accessible. The film accompanies workshops in the multifunctional structure, while women from an agricultural workers’ association listen to recordings of Amílcar Cabral from around 1970 making the case for the liberation of women. The filmmakers shine a light on the inherent tensions within their project and question the norms of the documentary. Whether in conversations with mangroves or absorbed in moving images, Resonance Spiral is a fascinating experiment in creating community through cinema.

Masterclass

The screening is followed by a Masterclass with co-director, activist and writer Marinho De Pina in conversation with film scholar Gawan Fagard. The focus lies the idea of cinema spaces not as places for distribution and consumption of images, capitalising on an economy of affect, but instead opening cinema as an active space of participation, emancipation and witnessing. How can the makeshift space of film become a ‘con-templum’ - a space where communities gather for a moment away from everyday hardships? What role can an itinerant, mobile cinema and a non-aligned media archive play in the process towards transnational solidarity between various liberation movements and peripheral communities? How to keep that fire burning at 24 frames a second?

Biography

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the transformative fuel of self-organised cinema spaces

screening + community conversation with Alain Kassanda

Thursday 13 november 2025, 18:30 soup, 19:30 intro + film until 22:30 at Cinemaximiliaan, Brussels

Co-organised with Akab kino, Brussels with support of Ritcs & ULB

info

Filmmaker Alain Kassanda takes us on a journey in the heart of the Thursday Film Series at Ibadan University, Nigeria. What starts off as a weekly film club, becomes a beating heart for a student uprising. The screening will be followed by a community conversation on the critical potential of non-institutional, self organised film initiatives.

Coconut Head Generation by Alain Kassanda

Documentary, France/Nigeria, digital, 89’ - ov st en

Synopsis

The older generation sometimes disparagingly calls them “coconut heads” (or “brainless youth”), but the students at the University of Ibadan, the oldest in Nigeria, are anything but that. They follow-up their visits to a campus film club with in-depth discussions about subjects such as feminism, migration, human rights, colonialism, and politics. The debate gets heated sometimes, but always stays focused on the subject.

Nigeria and its neighboring countries face many issues. Unemployment and corruption are rife, freedom of expression is under threat, and student life is tough for many reasons. Alain Kassanda intercuts his observational shots of these passionate group discussions with atmospheric impressions of campus life full of commotion.

In the years that Kassanda films, from 2019 to 2021, students and their peers take to the barricades to resist police violence—there were even deaths at these protests in October 2020. This film, which shared the top prize at Cinéma du Réel, is a dynamic portrait of a generation of Nigerians using their intelligence and critical thinking to demand change.

Community Conversation with Alain Kassanda

After the screening, film researcher Gawan Fagard and members from the collective behind ACAB kino will host a community conversation with Alain Kassanda and the audience, exploring the potential of self-organised, non institutional microcinemas in peripheral and precarious conditions. To what extend does the screening room transform into a temporary safe space, a rehearsal room for new ideas, a revolutionary foyer, or a space for social emancipation? How to negotiate notions of inclusivity versus exclusivity, political necessity versus film aesthetics, film exhibition politics, the economy of electrical currents fueling the screenings?

Biography

Alain Kassanda, born in Kinshasa, left the DRC for France at the age of 11. After studying communication, he has been staging cycles of movie showings in various Parisian theaters. He then became the programmer of an art house cinema for five years, in the suburbs of Paris, before moving to Ibadan, in southwestern Nigeria, from 2015 to 2019. There he directed Trouble Sleep, a medium-length film centered on the road, depicted from the perspective of a taxi driver and a tax collector. This was followed by Colette and Justin, a feature film intertwining his family history and the history of the decolonization of Congo. Coconut Head Generation is his third film.

ACAB kino is a self-organised cinema space for community, solidarity, counterculture and resistance. It is a space for and by people organising against the systemic oppression worldwide by Western imperialism, resulting in numerous ongoing genocides, state police violence and common fascism, serving only the capitalist powers.

Cinemaximiliaan is a platform with and by newcomers, and started in 2015 with an open air cinema in an improvised camp at the Maximiliaan Park in Brussels, Belgium. The community quickly grew through the commitment of a vast network of volunteers, amongst them many newcomers. Cinemaximiliaan brings films in many remote asylum centers around Belgium on a regular basis and organizes film screenings with encounters and debates in private homes, in cinemas and in cultural venues. Everyone welcome at the dinner table, at the Living Room or for workshops on cinema, photography, storytelling, performance and more.

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Imprints of colonial history on film

screening + masterclass with Alain Kassanda

Wednesday 12 november 2025, 19:00-22:00 at cinema Ritcs, Brussels

info & tickets

Filmmaker Alain Kassanda presents Colette & Justin, his personal quest into his ancestor’s story as colonised subjects. The screening is followed by a masterclass investigating the closely knit relations between cinema and colonialism, with a focus on the Congolese context.

Colette & Justin by Alain Kassanda

Documentary, France/Belgique 2022, 89' - ov st en

Synopsis

This debut film by Alain Kassanda starts off as a process of self-examination: How well does he really know his grandparents? How true are his ideas about his birth country DR Congo, whose national identity was partly molded by the Belgian colonizers? And, by extension, how much does he know about himself? In Colette et Justin, Kassanda travels through time and his own past, in the process bringing postcolonial Congo to evocative life.

He gets his grandfather Justin and grandmother Colette to reflect on their lives, from their youth to their first encounter with a complex political period. The first years following Congo’s independence pass by in the form of a richly layered history that intertwines good and evil, and in which Justin is destined to have an important role. The deep imprints left by colonialism are a constant presence.

Kassanda successfully re-casts major political developments in the context of an intimate family film, with lively archive footage, the director’s own enriching memories and curiosity, as well as a poetic voice-over.

Masterclass with Alain Kassanda in conversation with Gawan Fagard

The history of cinema is deeply intertwined with the history of colonialism, not only as a technology and as an art form, but in the very process how cinema tends to ‘capture’ ‘shoot’ ‘document’ or ‘describe’ the so-called ‘other’ as a colonized subject. In Colette & Justin, filmmaker Alain Kassanda shows not only how the optical unconscious of the colonial camera has captured and systematically dehumanized colonized subjects through film, but also how the coloniality of medium itself can be delicately dismantled. By focusing on the material existence and the process of disappearance of photographic and filmic images, the filmmaker suggests that we can always remain ahead of the narrative. During this masterclass, film theorist Gawan Fagard and filmmaker Alain Kassanda discuss if and how the medium of film can be used to undo the notoriously extractivist relation between the filmmaker as a settler and the filmed subject as a disempowered individual, and which other operations can be brought in place to achieve such a goal.

Biography

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Film production politics: polyphonic witnessing and emancipation

film lecture by Olivier Marboeuf

Tuesday may 20, 2025 19:00-22:00 at cinema Ritcs, Brussels

info

In this lecture, writer, performer, independent curator and film producer Olivier Marboeuf will give us critical and thought-provoking insights into decolonial practice and theory in the field of independent filmmaking, including a selection of film fragments. The lecture is followed by a conversation with the audience, moderated by Gawan Fagard.

Starting from his speculative essay ‘towards a de-speaking cinema (a carribean hypothesis)’ Olivier Marboeuf inquiries about the representation of subaltern voices and their place in film. At which point does the call to speak up, to witness inequalities and to emancipate serve a neo-colonial purpose of reappropriation and exploitation of black bodies? How can a cinema of ‘productive refusal’ be a motor to reimagine cinema structures and creates ‘living commons’ inspired from the perspective of marginalized voices? How to project a choreography for a cinema that ‘de-speaks’ – a cinema of excess, of polyphony or cacophony – a cinema which flees from the oppressive relations in which the cinema system has placed those on the peripheries of cultural hegemony? How to move from cinematic representation as a mere metaphor towards an emancipated way of practicing life? What are the roles of producers, filmmakers, festivals, institutions and funding bodies within this dynamic?

Theoretical arguments in this lecture will be interpuncted by concrete examples and projections of excerpts from the film Ouvertures (2020) by The Living and the Dead Ensemble on which Olivier Marboeuf has acted as co-author, co-director and co-producer for Spectre Productions. There will be ample place for an open conversation with the audience.

Olivier Marboeuf is an author-storyteller, artist, independent curator, cultural theorist and film producer from Guadeloupe. In the early 1990s, together with French-Beninese author Yvan Alagbé, he founded éditions Amok (now Frémok), a research-based comics publisher that launched the legendary Parisian literary café Autarcic Comix. He then became artistic director of Espace Khiasma (2004 to 2018), a visual arts and living literature center based in the parisian outskirts and dedicated to minority representations, which contributed to introducing postcolonial theories to the French art scene through numerous exhibitions and encounters. From 2013 to 2024, he was also a film producer with Spectre Productions, producing some sixty artists’ films and documentaries from Ismaïl Bahri, Ana Vaz, Maxime Jean-Baptiste, Maxena Yehouessi, Filipa César (amongst others). Marboeuf is a member of the cinema and performance collective The Living and The Dead Ensemble. He currently divides his time between writing, drawing and activities linked to collaborative art practices. He is a founding member of the Réseau Indépendant des Travailleur-euses et Acteur-ices de l’Art (RITAA) in Guadeloupe, member of RAYO, an experimental pedagogy program in the Greater Caribbean, and of the international board of the Akademie der Künste der Welt de Cologne. Among his recent grants and residencies, for the academic year 2023/2024 he has benefited from the Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship at the University Institute of London in Paris (ULIP), where he initiated research about the archive of Caribbean diasporic presences in Paris and London. He is also writer in residence at La Maison Baldwin / Fondation Camargo in Cassis in 2025. In 2022, he published the essay 'Suites Décoloniales : s’enfuir de la plantation' and the poetry collection Les Matières de la Nuit, both published with Éditions du Commun. In 2025, his theatrical text La nuit juste avant le feu will be published by Editions Atlantiques déchaînés.

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Cinema (process, ethics, and aesthetics) as an act of empathy and solidarity

screening + masterclass with Kinshuk Surjan

Tuesday april 29, 2025 19:00-22:30 at cinema Ritcs, Brussels

info & tickets

Screening of the recently released film Marching in the Dark (2024) and following masterclass with film director Kinshuk Surjan and film theorist Gawan Fagard on empathy and solidarity through cinema. Often, filmmakers are told not to seek change but to ask the right questions. But when working with vulnerable communities, can we remain passive?

Marching in the Dark by Kinshuk Surjan

documentary, be/nl/in, 2024, 110' - ov st en

Synopsis

Intent on providing a better life for herself and her children after the suicide of her farmer-husband, Sanjivani struggles not only against the structures of a patriarchal society that incapacitates and renders invisible widows like her, but also with the mountain of debt left by her late husband. It is only when she joins a discussion group with other farmer-suicide widows that she discovers that she is not alone with her despair and grief – the suicide rate among peasants who took their lives in the face of crop failures and dumping prices on the globalised market is harrowing: 400,000 in the last twenty years. Empowered by community, shared stories of resilience, and unexpected solidarity, Sanjivani cautiously forges a path forward. With stunning cinematography and a warm empathetic eye for his protagonists, the director manages to render a careful representation of a complex subject.

Since its release at CPH:DOX in Spring 2024, the documentary Marching in the Dark has been on an impressive journey not only in international film festivals, but also within India, where the film was screened in cinemas, festivals and community centres on multiple locations. Now the film has been released in selected theatres in Belgium. Screening in presence of director and PhD candidate at RITCS, Kinshuk Surjan.

Masterclass with Kinshuk Surjan in conversation with Gawan Fagard

Often, filmmakers are told not to seek change but to ask the right questions. But when working with vulnerable communities, can we remain passive?

This masterclass explores empathy, solidarity, and impact through cinema. How is empathy structured within the cinematic apparatus? What can cinema do beyond representation? How can we create reciprocating, collaborative filmmaking? How can we be better allies to those we work with? To what extent can cinema amplify everyday resistance in precarious conditions? Does this contradict a director’s concern for set narratives, composition, light, and soundscape in a practical and philosophical manner?

Beyond the film’s sensory experience, how can film stand in solidarity with widowed farmer women? Should impact be expected only after the film is finished, or can the process raise awareness and foster change? Can a film emerge from a broader engagement rather than merely crafting a narrative?

Biography

Kinshuk Surjan is an Indian filmmaker based in Brussels and in Bhopal, India. His film Pola (2013) won the Indian National Student Film Award for Best Film & Best Script. During his master at DocNomads, his short film Divided Lines was screened at the 2015 Jihlava FF. His graduation film De Flandrien (2017) won the Wildcard of the Flemish Audiovisual Fund. All films were broadcast on CT1, WDR and VRT. His first feature documentary Marching in the Dark premiered at CPH:DOX in 2024. Currently, Kinshuk Surjan is finishing a PhD in Arts at the RITCS/VUB. His doctoral research deals with the precarious situation - often leading to suicide - of peasant families in India.

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