Events & Veranstaltungen

Panel discussion with Karina Griffith, Yagi Taffere and Enoka Ayemba, moderated by Sheri Hagen.

Film is more than a cultural product – it is a social space. This panel examines the relationship between film, community and festival: how do films bring people together, and how do communities in turn shape the medium? Drawing on grassroots and international A-festival perspectives, the conversation asks how communities influence programming and formats – and how Community Spirit can be strengthened without becoming a marketing gesture.

Karina Griffith is an artist, curator and Professor of Intersectional Image and Media Theory at the UdK Berlin, and has been part of the curatorial team of the Berlinale's Forum Expanded section since 2021.

Yergalem »Yagi« Taffere is a Berlin-based Eritrean-born filmmaker, photographer and performer whose work centres the narratives of Black women and girls.

Enoka Ayemba is an independent film curator, film critic, and festival consultant, as well as a member of the selection committee for the Pan-African Film Festival (FESPACO).

Toto Bissainthe
Sarah Maldoror, Frankreich, 1985, 4 min. French with English subtitles

La ronde des vodù : en hommage au peuple haïtien (The Voodoo Dance: A Tribute to the People of Haiti) Elsie Haas, Haïti, 1987, 52 min. Creole with English subtitles

Sarah Maldoror, the first woman of color to direct a feature film, is widely revered as the matriarch of African cinema—a medium she treated as a vital tool for political struggle and liberation. In her short film documentary Toto Biss52ainthe, Maldoror turns her lens toward the legendary Haitian singer and actress. The film highlights a deep-seated creative connection: back in the 1960s, both women, alongside visionary figures like Samb Makharam and Timité Bassori, were core members of "Les Griots," a groundbreaking theatrical ensemble that redefined Black dramatic arts.

The voodoo dance offers an in-depth exploration into the role of Voodoo in Haitian culture from the perspectives of Voodoo priests, government officials, historians and politicians. Attacked by Western clerics and declared a "superstition" by law in 1935, Voodoo has always been a source of empowerment for the average Haitian. And scholars argue that despite the exploitation, romanticization and vilification of voodoo, it remains an authentic and stabilizing cultural base of everyday Haitian society.

Et les chiens se taisaient (And the Dogs Were Silent)
Sarah Moldoror, France, 1974, 12 min. French with English subtitles
La Machette et le Marteau (The Machete and the Hammer)
Gabriel Glissant, Guadeloupe, 1975, 70 min. Creole

Followed by a talk with Fanny Glissant and Annabelle Aventurin

A recording of excerpts from a play by Aimé Césaire, in which the Rebel expresses himself in a long, painful poem before the Mother, shouting his revolt against the enslavement of his people. The two actors, Gabriel Glissant and Sarah Maldoror, perform in the storage rooms of the Musée de l’Homme dedicated to sub-Saharan Africa, incorporating three spectators into their performance as silent witnesses. A few images of wooden statues and masks from the reserves, as well as glimpses of Martinican landscapes, punctuate the film.

La Machette et le Marteau is a groundbreaking 1975 documentary filmed during the sugar cane workers' strikes in Guadeloupe. Widely recognized as the first authentically Afro-Caribbean film, it delivers a raw and unvarnished portrait of the island thirty years after departmentalization.
Through direct accounts from the cane cutters themselves, the film explores their harsh working conditions and the driving forces behind their resistance. It offers a critical examination of Guadeloupe's complex social hierarchy, shedding light on the agricultural and industrial proletariat as they unite to challenge foreign economic monopolies and reclaim their autonomy.

Fanny Glissant is a French documentary film producer, writer and daughter of Gabriel Glissant, director of La Machette e le Marteau.

Annabelle Aventurin is a film archivist and curator, specialising in restoration with a focus on African and Afrodiasporic films.

Johanne Gomez Terrero, Dominican Republic, Spain 2024, 91 Min., Spanish with German subtitles
Sugar is far more than just a sweetener—it embodies a history of colonization, exploitation, and human resistance. Visually striking, this film blends documentary, fiction, and theater into a powerful work that opens up vast room for reflection.
At its center is young Makenya, who lives on a Caribbean sugar plantation. When she becomes unexpectedly pregnant, she embraces her fate and, alongside her family, fights against the daily injustices they face.
Political and stylistically impressive cinema that unites themes we all too often view in isolation.

What does it mean to make community visible in cinema? When does the act of seeing, remembering, and storytelling together become a political practice in itself?
Starting from these questions, the masterclass embarks on a film-historical and aesthetic exploration of African and Afro-diasporic cinema. It traces a path from colonial visual regimes and the struggles for interpretive authority over one’s own image to the anticolonial and pan-African film movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and on to contemporary diasporic and transnational forms of filmmaking.
The focus is on the works of Sembène Ousmane, Sarah Maldoror, Med Hondo, Haile Gerima, Safi Faye, and many others. For these filmmakers, cinema is not merely a medium of representation, but a space for self-empowerment, resistance, and collective memory. Their films do not portray community as a given unity. Instead, they reveal its contradictions, exclusions, and fractures, and explore the conditions under which solidarity can emerge at all.
Using selected films, the masterclass examines the ways in which community is constructed on screen: through shared spaces and memories, through voices and bodies, through work, migration, and resistance, but also through absences and disrupted senses of belonging.
The central question is who can speak, remember, and form an image of themselves—and what political spaces emerge when this possibility is collectively fought for. African and Afro-diasporic cinema is not presented here as a homogeneous cinematic tradition, but rather as a fluid network of relationships, experiences, and aesthetic practices that transcends national borders and historical contexts.
Enoka Ayemba is an independent film curator, film critic, and festival consultant, as well as a member of the selection committee for the Pan-African Film Festival FESPACO.

Maia Lekow, Christopher King, Kenia 2025, 100', English
Followed by a conversation with the curatorial and organisational team
Shiro and Wachuka have never tackled a project like this before, but their determination to
redefine what the formerly whites-only McMillan Memorial Library can be pushes them through each challenge. Their friendship gives us a glimpse into their warm personalities, and their candidness about their frustrations draws us into their journey, making us feel like we’re right there with them.
Directors Maia Lekow and Christopher King capture the complicated work to restore a library and the deeper challenges of confronting colonial legacies. As the library team sifts through archival images, they face conflicting emotions of anger and appreciation, grappling with what aspects of this colonial history should be remembered and what can be left behind. When are compromises justified in the larger conversation about decolonization? The result is a nuanced exploration of legacy and reclamation that extends beyond the library’s walls.