News From Home. Short Films of the American Continent

What do we call home? News From Home is named after a film by Chantal Akerman in which the observation of the foreign city of New York is punctuated with letters from a mother in faraway Europe.

The programme shows short films from the American continent, contemporary indigenous works and older films from Latin American cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The focus is on language and landscape as well as the representation of home linked with the idea of a different reality. In viewpoints and fragments, the short films span an arc of several decades and various regions. The film programme stands against common, simplified images of indigenous films and their marketing.

Film programme

Mobilize (2015) – Caroline Monnet – 3 min
In this bracing short cut from archival footage, people from Canada's First Nations move from the woods to the tops of New York skyscrapers – almost all of which have been built in part by Mohawk iron workers.

Sin título (1974) – Carlos Ferrand – 14 min
A film, poor and silent as the people it portraits.

Impressions for a light and sound machine (2014) – Colectivo Los Ingrávidos – 7 min
A woman raises her voice and gives a painful and endless speech that with time becomes even more overwhelming, because her words are heartbreaking and permanent impressions in the collective memory, stabbing with words an old Mexican film, a celluloid that tears apart until its disappearance. An audiovisual experience of the current Mexican war.

Wawa (2014) – Sky Hopinka – 6 min
Featuring speakers of chinuk wawa, an Indigenous language from the Pacific Northwest, this film begins slowly, patterning various forms of documentary and ethnography. Quickly, the patterns tangle and become confused and commingled, while translating and transmuting ideas of cultural identity, language, and history.

The violence of a civilization without secrets (2018) – Jackson Polys, Zack & Adam Khalil – 10 min
Filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil, in collaboration with artist Jackson Polys, investigate the recent court case that decided the fate of the remains of a prehistoric Paleoamerican man found in Kennewick, Washington State in 1996. The video is an urgent reflection on indigenous sovereignty, the undead violence of museum archives, and post-mortem justice.

Aysa (1965) – Jorge Sanjinés – 19 min
A film without a single word except for a scream of Aysa. The story of the harsh and inexorable life of tin miners.

Bocamina (2019) – Miguel Hilari – 22 min
The colonial city of Potosí. At the pithole, faces of miners coming from work. At school, children look at old images from the mine. Images from other times?

The evening is curated by Miguel Hilari. Talk in German, films in Spanish and English with English subtitles.

Accompanying programme to What Matters – Work Presentation JUNGE AKADEMIE, 13 Mar – 10 Apr 2022