Cinema as Assembly

with Forum Lenteng, Marinho de Pina (Mediateca Abotcha), La Voix des sans papiers de Bruxelles in collaboration with Mieriën Coppens and Elie Maissin, Marwa Arsanios, Massimiliano Mollona, Bojana Cvejić, Elettra Bisogno, Lara Khaldi, Elhum Shakerifar, Subversive Film and Robin Vanbesien. 

In a time of genocides and authoritarian crises, how can contemporary cinematic practices align with and support political imaginations striving for social justice and antifascist liberation? How do they help us rehearse these imaginations? Cinema as Assembly is a three-day study circle that invites the public to come together – as an audience, as thinkers and as makers – to explore cinema’s potential as both a method and medium that can help rehearse collective organisation, militant imagination and liberatory transformation.

Grounded in a relational geography of translocal struggles, imaginaries and resources, this study circle brings together film collectives from diverse locations (Jakarta, Malafo, Palestine, Lebanon, Brussels, and beyond) and with different cinematic practices. What insights emerge when they share their tools and methods for creating decolonial, speculative and collaborative narratives and methodologies in cinema?

The Cinema as Assembly study circle is co-conceived by Robin Vanbesien, Subversive Film, and Grégory Castéra as part of the World Histories of the Commons programme at KANAL-Centre Pompidou. It builds on the Ciné Place-Making study circle developed by Vanbesien in 2022 at Kaaistudios.

Supported by the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) of the Government of Flanders x Robin Vanbesien’s doctoral research Ciné Place-Making at Sint Lucas Antwerpen Research Group (SLARG) & Antwerp Research Institute of the Arts (ARIA) x Mohanad Yaqubi’s research Aesthetics of Transnational Solidarity Cinema/ Archival Sensations Cluster at KASK & Conservatorium

The full programme can be found here.