Speaking Out: Film as a Culture of Memory
Speaking Out: Film as a Culture of Memory
- Date
- Feb 20th 2024
- With
- Agnes Lisa Wegner, Cece Mlay, Luck Razanajaona moderated by Dorothee Wenner
A number of films at this year's Berlinale speak to a culture of remembrance, positing it as a means of speaking out for the oppressed and giving a voice to those less often heard. That’s the spirit that also thrums through an incendiary documentary about the legacy of colonialism, Cece Mlay and Agnes Lisa Wegner’s Berlinale Special presentation “The Empty Grave", which follows two Tanzanian families as they search for the remains of their ancestors slain by German colonialists. Accompanied on stage by Berlinale Generation filmmaker Luck Razanajaona, whose feature "Disco Afrika: A Malagasy Story" is the first film from Madagascar to be screened at the festival, and echoes the African civil rights movements of the 1970s, an era that marked artistic and musical awakening as a continuation of the struggle for independence. This topical panel, positioned at the heart of this year's focus on the many languages of cinema, aims to highlight the diversity of their films and how histories of injustice and resistance can be addressed and redressed on the big screen today.
Agnes Lisa Wegner
After taking degrees in American studies and film sciences in Berlin and African-American studies at Harvard University, she worked for several years in non-governmental organisations in Germany. In 2013, she began to work as a freelance writer and filmmaker. Since then, she has written and directed a number of films that have screened in international festivals as well as on German public television and Netflix Europe. Her award-winning documentaries foreground an intense engagement with topics including discrimination, racism, human rights and solidarity.
Cece Mlay
The filmmaker comes from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and is currently working as an assistant director and creative supervisor at Kijiweni Productions. Her work ranges from mentoring young filmmakers in Tanzania to film production and exhibition. She has collaborated with artists from various disciplines and backgrounds on projects produced both by Tanzanian and international filmmakers which take a critical and honest look at social, political and historical issues. "The Empty Grave," co-directed with Agnes Lisa Wegner, is her debut feature film as a director.
Luck Razanajaona
The director comes from Madagascar and studied at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Visuels in Marrakech, Morocco. He has participated in and developed his projects at Berlinale Talents, Rotterdam Lab and La Fabrique des Cinémas du Monde in Cannes. His short films and feature-length documentaries have screened at numerous festivals around the world. “Disco Afrika: une histoire malgache” is his first feature-length fiction film.
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Dorothee Wenner
Dorothee Wenner is a filmmaker, film curator and writer based in Berlin. She serves as delegate to Berlin International Film Festival for the Subsahara-Africa region, as external curator at Humboldt Forum for film/cinema and others. Since inception in 2005, Dorothee belongs to the jury of Lagos based African Movie Academy Awards. Her latest work as a filmmaker was the web-series "Kinshasa Collection".