Works from Radical Film School – Part I: The Image Is Not Enough

The image is not enough. The ongoing genocides committed by Israel in Palestine and broader West Asia, live streamed on social media as the world watches, demonstrate this. The systemic complicity of Israel’s allies, and their repression of solidarity movements, cheapens state narratives about freedom of expression and defending democracy. What does this mean for moving-image practice? The evidence-image no longer compels the world’s authorities to act. What does it mean to work with material from state and colonial archives when those institutions hold images as trophies and expressions of violent conquest?

In this programme of short films, participants of Radical Film School take the archive into their own hands, fragmenting and reworking existing images through their own subjectivities and positionalities in order break with the kinds of passive spectatorship and ambient viewing that characterises our digital present. The archival material presented in these films ranges from national histories to personal and family videos, and the dismantling and remixing of these audio-visual documents serve to foreground the socio-political dynamics and frictions embedded in this source material. 

Across these experimental works, different interventions into the archive are staged, and many hands are shown ripping, recaptioning, sharing, overlaying, and placing in dialogue fragments from the past and the present. As the old world burns and the new world struggles to be born, these films attempt to build an alternative world out of the embers.

In the tradition of archival sabotage, Autonomy Transition exposes imperial practices of manipulative control over bodies and land. By repurposing Israeli and British state-funded archival media, the film deconstructs the original imagery and messaging, exposing the pillars of an imperial regime pinkwashing colonial actions through homonormative agendas. The work questions the validity of affirming trans identity if such formal recognition is contingent on embedding oneself in genocidal practices. The work suggests that state affirmation is not intrinsically a sign of progress, but a marker of homonationalism. Transsexuals don’t belong in the military; they belong in the revolution.⚧

Composed of black-and-white archival aerial photographs of Jamaica on the cusp of independence, this film explores the colonial logics embedded in acts of image capture. The film re-appropriates images taken as part of photographic surveys – images initially used to delineate plantation boundaries, manage land tenure, and prospect for mineral resources including bauxite. They index British anxieties about a lack of geographic knowledge and a desire for economic control. Through the eyes of a bird instrumentalised to gather information on the land, the film travels towards Cockpit Country, a region that partially lies within Maroon territory. Though officially protected, it remains under threat from mining. The film questions extractive geographies that exclude local epistemologies and considers the enduring echoes of colonialism’s visual regimes.

A Series of Light and Motion is an essay film about programming postcolonial film and Third Cinema in the Second World. It critically interrogates the cultural and political contexts of Georgia and the Caucasus and their position in West Asia and along the peripheries of Europe. The film was co-directed by Vanga Mikashavidze and Anuka Ramischwili-Schäfer of Third Cinema Days in Tbilisi, Georgia, and was originally created for darkmatter journal. 

Part of an ongoing research project, this work-in-progress excavates the director’s personal archives. Family videos from the early 2000s, recorded by her journalist father Serhat İncirli, are assembled to reveal fragments of a politicised familial life at a time when he was contending with the possibility of political exile from Cyprus. Both father and daughter mediate their experiences of the world through the camera and text. Through repetition, ritual, and conversation, this work explores the director’s perceptions and experiences of memory, cultural identity, and displacement during their childhood in the diaspora.

Drawing from archival footage and video diaries filmed in Accra, Ghana (2020), this short presents a non-linear journey through time, Black Film archives, the somatics of singing, and speculative poetry. Using the tool of mosaic layering, the film interweaves static, children embodying airplanes, figures in flight, Dionne Brand's No Language Is Neutral, and voice to create a multi-textured meditation on what Saidiya Hartman refers to as ‘scraps of the archive’.

A History of Sadness examines the complex evolving bond between mother and daughter through the lens of displacement and identity, focusing on three generations of Iranian women: a grandmother, a mother, and her daughter.