Art Magazine
UN World Conference on Women, Mexico City, 1975 | UN Photo/B. Lane
Film as Memory, Film as Resistance, co-edited by Elham Rahmati, Vidha Saumya, and Danai Anagnostou, gathers six commissioned texts exploring cinema’s role in shaping migration narratives, documenting resistance, addressing caste and social exclusion, and tracing feminist and collective filmmaking across India, Latin America, and Europe.
READEditorial: Film as Memory, Film as Resistance
Film as Memory, Film as Resistance, co-edited by Elham Rahmati, Vidha Saumya, and Danai Anagnostou, gathers six commissioned texts exploring cinema’s role in shaping migration narratives, documenting resistance, addressing caste and social exclusion, and tracing feminist and collective filmmaking across India, Latin America, and Europe.
Amidst this uprising, several feminist film collectives emerged, adding to this momentum by making films and videos that disrupted the representations of women on screen, challenged their seclusion from the public sphere, and both fuelled and documented feminist campaigns and events. Despite the magnitude and significance of feminist cinema, its influence remains largely unspoken.
READWomen’s Uprising and the Latin American Film Collectives of the 1970s and 1980s
Lorena Cervera’s essay presents several feminist film collectives that challenged mainstream cinema by engaging in political debates, documenting activism, and creating spaces for women’s voices across Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. By showcasing their largely overlooked work, Cervera emphasises their enduring cultural and political significance.
Art functions both as representation and as a tool for shaping society. Independent Iranian cinema could have offered an alternative narrative to the official one, defended Afghan migrants against exclusionary policies, upheld their human dignity, and fostered a more realistic understanding among Iranians. Instead, the Afghan individual has rarely been a concern in Iranian society.
READTracing Hazaras in Iranian Cinema: Historical Perspectives and Reflections
For over a century, Afghanistan’s Hazaras have endured violence, displacement, and marginalization. Their migration to Iran and subsequent representation in the cinema of Iran reveal enduring stereotypes, struggles for dignity, and the intergenerational impacts of historical trauma on this community.
Aïnata (2018), shot in South Lebanon, is the debut documentary by the Lebanese research-based artist and filmmaker, Alaa Mansour. The memories being reconstituted in the film are those of Aïnata, a town in South Lebanon nestled within olive and tobacco farms, plagued for decades by Israeli occupation and violence.
READMemory and the Fractured Image: A Review of Alaa Mansour’s ‘Aïnata’
In her review, Shams Hanieh explores how Alaa Mansour’s film Aïnata (2018) uses visual fragmentation and reconstruction to more truthfully represent memory under colonial violence. When our world and histories feel so distorted, what other form could their representation take?
Bahujan narratives in media and popular culture are invariably mitigated through a savarna gaze that disregards Bahujans as people with agency, complexity, and vibrant histories of resistance. In such a milieu, Jyoti Nisha undertakes the immense and multifaceted task of unpacking the historical denial of Bahujan stories in media and popular culture, interrogating how history and mythology collude with contemporary violence.
READFutures Held Together by Memory: A Review of Jyoti Nisha’s ‘Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Now and Then’
Jyoti Nisha’s feature-length homage is a compelling love letter to the Ambedkarite-Bahujan community. It is an act of care, archiving, and resistance, preserving intergenerational stories of anti-caste struggle, both historical and contemporary.
In her most recent work, Inquilab Di Kheti (Farming the Revolution, 2024), which is also her most ambitious, Nishtha traces the year-long farmers movement (2020-21) against the three unjust farm laws announced by the Indian Government in June 2020. Nishtha’s film opens up the everyday textures and rhythms of this massive and ultimately successful movement.
READCultivating Resistance: An Interview with Nishtha Jain
Ananya Parikh, a professor at the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts, interviews India’s leading documentary filmmaker, Nishtha Jain, on her documentary Inquilab Di Kheti and the cinematic language of revolution.
Drawing from personal and inherited rituals of listening and transmission, Athanasiou approaches channeling as a method of research and self-making, a way to attend to what remains inaudible. Voices treats the body as an instrument of transmission, an interface through which stories, desires, and ghosts circulate. The result is an unstable cosmology of voices that blur the line between belief and authorship, revealing how history itself might speak through us.
READMaking Friends Across Time: A Conversation Between Margarita Athanasiou and Lorena Juan
Through a correspondence that unfolded between Berlin, Athens, and Lesbos, artist Margarita Athanasiou and curator Lorena Juan exchange thoughts on voice, permission, and possession. Their letters trace how belief, friendship, and channeling become feminist technologies—ways of speaking through, and with, others across time, bodies, and worlds. Voices (2024), Athanasiou’s latest work, marks the starting point for this dialogue.