Historical past isn't just a mere artifact. It can be a reference point from which to derive lessons or understand our present, as well as a dynamic continuum that responds to the unfolding events in our present.
As much as the past marks our achievements as societies, or its scars stand as stark reminders of humanity’s destructive tendencies, it is crucial to resist historical amnesia or mystification. The significance of re-evaluating and confronting the past is reinforced by the films in our selection.
Recalling the past takes different forms in SILENCE OF REASON, MOTHER OF ALL LIES and THE ETERNAL MEMORY. In SILENCE OF REASON, Kumjana Novakova retrieves from the archive of the Hague Tribunal harrowing testimonies of female victims of the Bosnian war, bringing them out of transcribed anonymity. This process of overlapping memory and history is given a therapeutic dimension in Asmae El Moudir’s THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES. Buried beneath layers of old lies, secrets, and intentional amnesia, the trauma of the 1981 bread uprising in Casablanca is now playfully excavated from her family’s memory through miniature models of themselves and their neighborhood. The intrinsic relationship between memory and identity on a national and personal level is manifested in THE ETERNAL MEMORY’s portrait of Augusto Góngora, a journalist whose life and career were dedicated to saving Chile’s historical memory during Pinochet’s dictatorship - only to confront later on, his own loss of memory.
Equally important in confronting the past is to trace the ways in which it is mirrored by our present - whether it is 2, 64 or 640 years ago. In CIOMPI, Agnès Perrais navigates from the Middle-Ages to present-day Florence, drawing a line of continuity in the fight against exploitation of the working class - between the Ciompi revolt of wool-workers and contemporary protests of migrant textile workers. Set within the volatile period of the 1960s Cold War and post-colonial movements of independence, SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT overwhelmingly echoes the present by examining the complex entanglements of geo-political influence and control over national resources around the newly independent DRC. Bringing us closer to our present, Daniel Kötter takes a road trip on the border separating Armenia and Azerbaijan, exploring how the past, present and looming future of geographies and human destinies, are shaped by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.