Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema’s Futures with Remnants of the Past

Vinzenz Hediger is Professor of Cinema Studies at Goethe Universität Frankfurt, where he directs the DFG Research Training Program „Configurations of film“ (www.konfigurationen-des-films.de) and the area studies project CEDITRAA – Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia (www.ceditraa. net). He is a co-director of GU’s research center ConTrust – Trust and Conflict under Conditions of Uncertainty. His research covers film theory, film and media history, documentary forms, and organizational media and supply studies.

Añulika Agina is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at the Pan-Atlantic University Lagos researching Nigerian film and cinema-going cultures. Funded by the European Research Council in 2019, she joined the Screen Worlds project at SOAS University of London as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow to investigate Nigerian screen cultures, which led to the production of a documentary on film exhibition titled Behind my Nollywood Screen (2022).

Hadi Alipanah is an Iranian film critic and journalist. He is the founder and director of FiDAN—Iranian short film magazine.

Gaby Babić is a film scholar, curator and programmer. Between 2010 and 2016 she worked as artistic director for goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film. She joined Kinothek Asta Nielsen in 2018 and has been its sole artistic director since 2020. Together with Heide Schlüpmann and Karola Gramann she founded the film festival Remake. Frankfurt Women's Film Days.

Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock is a curator and researcher at SAVVY Contemporary where she is part of the participatory archive project Colonial Neighbours. She received her MA in Postcolonial Cultures and Global Policy at Goldsmiths University of London. In her work within the permanent collection of SAVVY Contemporary she looks for colonial traces that are manifested in our present. Lately co-curated the yearlong research and exhibition program HERE HISTORY BEGAN. TRACING THE RE/VERBERATIONS OF HALIM EL-DABH (2020–2021).

Erika Balsom is a scholar and critic based in London, working on cinema, art, and their intersection. She is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London and holds a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. She curated various exhibitions such as the recent “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image” (2022) together with Hila Peleg.

Marie Sophie Beckmann is a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. She completed her doctorate in 2021 as part of the DFG Research Training Program “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University Frankfurt.

Mareike Bernien lives in Berlin and works as a filmmaker and lecturer in the field of film research and critical archival practices. A research-based approach determines her work, in which questions of memory politics and media archaeology are negotiated. Her most recent works include: Sun Under Ground (2022) and Depth of Field (2017), both co-directed with Alex Gerbaulet. Since 2018 she has been part of the production platform pong film and works there, amongst others, with Merle Kröger on the archival project The Fifth Wall.

Amrita Biswas is a PhD candidate in the DFG Research Training Program “Configurations of film” at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her work has been published in Studies in South Asian Film and Media and Pandemic Media: Notes Toward an Inventory. She was awarded the Erasmus Plus fellowship for conducting research in the department of Cultural Anthropology at Georg-August University, Göttingen.

Sema Çakmak is a PhD candidate in the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. She studied theater and media studies, and French studies at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and cinema studies at the University Aix-Marseille. She graduated in theInternational Program in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies (IMACS) and completed her M.A. at the Goethe University, Frankfurt, the University Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, and the University of Liège. Her main research interests are queer cinema, festival studies and political film cultures.

Sonia Campanini is a film scholar and researcher in film archiving, curating, and global film cultures at Goethe University Frankfurt. As Assistant Professor of Film Culture from 2015 to 2022 she directed the master’s program “Film Culture: Archiving, Programming, Presentation” at the same university. Her present project is titled Remaking Nollywood: Circulation Networks, Memory Constructions and Women Filmmaking.

Erica Carter is professor of German at King’s College, London. She is also the co-founder of the German Screen Studies Network. Her publications on include How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (1997), Dietrich’s Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film (2004), Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory (2010), and the recently published second edition of the German Cinema Book (Bergfelder, Carter & Göktürk, 2020).

Özge Çelikaslan is a media scholar, videographer and archivist. Her works focus on the politics of image, archival networks and digital commons. She completed her doctoral studies at the Braunschweig University of Art, Institute of Media Studies. She is co-founder of the social movements archive bak.ma.

Filipa César is an artist and filmmaker interested in the fictional aspects of the documentary and the politics and poetics inherent to moving image. Since 2011, César has been looking into the imaginaries of Guinea-Bissau’s Liberation Movement and its cognitive potencies, developing that research into the ongoing collective project Luta ca caba inda (the struggle is not over yet). Her work is widely shown in solo and group exhibitions, biennials, and festivals, such as the Berlinale Forum. She lives and works in Berlin.

Didi Cheeka is a Nigerian filmmaker and film critic. He is the editor of the Lagos Film Review and co-founder and curator of the Lagos Film Society—an alternative cinema centre dedicated to establishing Nigeria’s first arthouse cinema. He also serves as the artistic director of the Decasia Festival, which he founded in collaboration with the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin.

Vaginal Davis is a performing artist, painter, independent curator, composer, filmmaker and writer. She has been living in Berlin since 2006.

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator, and author who works from Mumbai and Berlin/Cologne. She prefers to call herself a cultural producer. She was the executive director of Majlis Culture Centre in Mumbai (1990–2016) and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World (ADKDW) in Cologne, Germany (2018–2021). She has initiated several public art and archive projects within, and also outside, Majlis and ADKDW.

Tamer El Said is a filmmaker and producer based in Berlin and Cairo, with an extensive filmography of 17 films that have received numerous regional and international awards. In 2007, he founded Zero Production to produce independent films in Egypt. In 2011, he co-founded Cimatheque—Alternative Film Centre in Cairo, a multi-purpose space that offers facilities, training, and programming for the independent filmmaking community. His debut feature-length film, Akher ayam el madina (eng. In the Last Days of the City), premiered at the Forum 2016, where it received the Caligari Film Prize.

Almudena Escobar López is an independent curator, archivist, and researcher from Galicia, Spain, and an Assistant Professor on Film History, Film Preservation, and Collection Management at the School of Image Arts of the Toronto Metropolitan University. Her interdisciplinary research centers around documentary and artists’ moving image practices.

Mariia Glazunova is a Ukrainian film archivist, scholar and communications director at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Center in Kiyv, Ukraine.

Ulrich Gregor is a film historian. Together with his wife Erika he founded Friends of the German Cinematheque in 1963, which would later become Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art. He taught at FU Berlin and the German Film and Television Academy Berlin and headed the International Forum for New Cinema at the Berlinale for many years.

Olena Goncharuk is the director of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Center in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Karola Gramann is a German film scholar und critic. She curated film programs for various film festivals and headed the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen between 1985 and 1990. From 2006 until 2019 she was the artistic director for Kinothek Asta Nielsen Together with Heide Schlüpmann and Gaby Babić she founded the film festival Remake. Frankfurt Women's Film Days.

Veena Hariharan is currently Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Department of Theater, Film and Media Studies at the Goethe Universität, Frankfurt. After completing her PhD in Cinema Studies from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA, she taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India where she is Associate Professor at the School of Arts and Aesthetics. Her articles and chapters on non-fiction film, the environment and non-human animals have appeared in anthologies and journals. Her book, Embers of Reason: Contemporary Indian Documentary and the Secular Imagination is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

Mohammad Shawky Hassan, a director, writer, cinematographer, and editor, explores the construction of personal identities and collective imaginaries, and their correlation with linguistic systems of popular culture. He also articulates critical approaches towards dominant narratives and histories that destabilize the semiotics of the spoken word and its place of speech, offering new narratives.

Shai Heredia is a filmmaker, curator, and founding director of Experimenta, the influential moving image art biennial of India. She has curated film programs worldwide, including Berlinale’s Forum Expanded, Tate Modern, and was the programmer of the 65th Robert Flaherty Seminar. Her films co-directed with Shumona Goel I Am Micro and An Old Dog’s Diary have exhibited, among others, at Guggenheim Museum, Toronto International film festival and International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Tobias Hering is a freelance curator living in Berlin and Mecklenburg, Germany. His work focuses on thematic film programs that deal with questions of image politics and the role of archives. Since 2011, Tobias Hering has been involved in the programming of the Kassel Dokfest. At the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, he is head of the archive-based section re-selected.

Grazia Ingravalle is lecturer in British and Minority Cinemas at Queen Mary University of London. Her research has concentrated on film museums, archives and cinémathèques, ranging from the BFI National Archive to the George Eastman Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, NY. Her latest publication is Archival Film Curatorship. Early and Silent Cinema from Analog to Digital (Amsterdam University Press, 2023).

Ritika Kaushik is a postdoctoral researcher at the Graduiertenkolleg “Configurations of Film” at the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her academic and videographic research focuses on the history, infrastructures, archives, and afterlives of state sponsored documentaries in India. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and an M.Phil from Jawaharlal Nehru University in Cinema Studies.

Philipp Dominik Keidl is Assistant Professor of Screen Media in Transition at Utrecht University. He holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University in Montreal and an MA in Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image from the University of Amsterdam.

Ivanna Khitsinska is a Ukrainian producer and festival manager. She is a member of Board of Ukrainian Film Academy and a founder of Quartos Group, as well as a producer at Babylon ‘13. She studied at National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (2010) and at Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv National University of Theater, Cinema, and Television (2022).

Hieyoon Kim is Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. She is the author of Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea (UC Press, 2023). Her most recent articles have appeared in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Histories, and Journal of Asian Studies.

Laura Kloeckner is a curator and researcher at SAVVY Contemporary where she is part of the participatory archive project RUSHES: Conversations Beyond the Spatial and the Temporal.

Merle Kröger was a member of the group dogfilm from 1992 to 1999 and has been a member of pong film since 2001. As a writer, she works with Philip Scheffner on feature films such as Europe (2022). She has published five novels, most recently Die Experten (2021). These combine historical research and political analysis with elements of crime fiction. The digital archive The Fifth Wall, co-created with Mareike Bernien, was nominated for the Grimme Online Award in 2022.

Asja Makarevic holds a PhD in film studies from Goethe University Frankfurt, where she is now a post-doctoral fellow in the VWfunded project Aging and Gender in European cinema (https:// age-c.eu). Her work addresses the ongoing “post-war” condition of the former Yugoslav countries and concomitant emergence of “non-representational” images of war in post-Yugoslav film.

Nils Meyn is a film scholar with a master’s degree in Film Culture: Archiving, Programming, Presentation from Goethe University Frankfurt. They are managing the porn film collection at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. Since 2023 they have been a doctoral candidate in the DFG Research Training Program “Configurations of film” at Goethe University with a PhD project on queer archives and videotape cultures.

Petna Ndaliko Katondolo is a filmmaker, activist, and educator. His multigenre artistic works are known for their decolonial Afrofuturistic artistic style, which engages historical content to address contemporary sociopolitical and cultural issues. In 2000 he co-founded Yole!Africa and in 2005 he founded the Salaam Kivu International Film Festival. Ndaliko Katondolo teaches and consults regularly for international organizations, addressing social and political inequity among marginalized groups through culture and education.

Rebecca Ohene-Asah studied for a master’s degree in Documentary Film Studies and Production at Hofstra University in Hempstead-New York, under a Fulbright fellowship. She holds a PhD degree in Museum and Heritage Studies from the University of Ghana-Legon. She is the co-founder and director of Benpaali Young Filmmakers Festival, which has mentored young people in filmmaking since 2015. She teaches courses in African film theory and documentary filmmaking at the National Film and Television Institute (NAFTI).

Volker Pantenburg is professor for Film Studies at the University of Zürich. He has published on essayistic film and video practices, experimental cinema, and contemporary moving image installations. Book publications in English include Farocki/Godard. Film as Theory (2015), Cinematographic Objects. Things and Operations (2015, Editor) and Screen Dynamics. Mapping the Borders of Cinema (Co-Editor). In 2015, he co-founded the Harun Farocki Institut, a platform for researching Farocki’s visual and discursive practice and supporting new projects that engage with the past, present and the future of image cultures.

Nikolaus Perneczky is a film scholar, critic and curator. His film critiques have been published in various outlets such as Perlentaucher. de. He is member of the collaborative research centre 626 on Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits at FU Berlin where his research focuses on television series as an aesthetic form.

Francesco Pitassio is professor of Film Studies at the University of Udine. He has been Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Notre Dame (2015) and Chaire Roger Odin at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (2021). Among his books are Ombre silenziose (2002), Attore/Divo (2003), Il cinema neorealista (with Paolo Noto, 2010), and Neorealist Film Culture, 1945–1954 (2019).

Constanze Ruhm was born in Vienna in 1965. She studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, as well as the Institute for New Media at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Ruhm works as an artist, author and curator in the fields of film, video and installation. Since 1996, she teaches film and digital media at Austrian and international universities, including the Art Institute of Boston/Lesley University, as well as the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna since 2006. Ruhm lives in Vienna and Berlin.

Heide Schlüpmann is a film scholar and curator. From 1991 until 2008 she was professor for film studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. She is a co-editor of the feminist film journal Frauen und Film and co-founder of the feminist Kinothek Asta Nielsen. Together with Karola Gramann and Gaby Babić she founded the film festival Remake. Frankfurt Women’s Film Days in 2018.

Alexandra Schneider is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. She is a co-founder of NECS—European Network for Cinema and Media Studies. She is a member of the DFG Research Training Group “Configurations of film” and works on questions of film historiographies, amateur media, and digital media cultures. In 2020, she co-edited Format Matters. Standards, Practices and Politics in Media Cultures (meson press) with Marek Jancovic and Axel Volmar.

Girish Shambu is a scholar and film critic. He teaches at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York and is editor of Film Quarterly’s online column Quorum.

Marc Siegel is Professor of Film Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. His research focuses on experimental film and gender/queer studies. He also works as a freelance curator and has co-curated, among other events, the festival, publication and exhibition project Edit Film Culture! (2018), as well as Camp/Anti-Camp. A Queer Guide to Everyday Life (2012). He is a member of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne and co-founder of the artist collective CHEAP.

Can Sungu is a freelance artist, curator and researcher. He is co-founder and artistic director of bi‘bak and Sinema Transtopia in Berlin. He studied film, interdisciplinary arts and visual communication design in Istanbul and Berlin. He gave lectures on film and video production, curated various programs and events on film and migration, and took part in numerous exhibitions. He is co-editor of Bitte zurückspulen – German-Turkish Film and Video Culture in Berlin (Archive Books, 2020). As juror and consultant he has worked for the Berlinale Forum, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Duisburger Filmwoche and the DAAD Artistsin- Berlin Program, among others. Since 2023 he is curator for filmic practices at HKW in Berlin.

Clarissa Thieme is a filmmaker and artist combining documentary and fictional methods to explore the fissures between the languages of individual memory and their translation into processes of historical objectification. In collaboration with the Library Hamdija Kreševljaković Video Arhiv and the UnWar Space Lab, she has developed [ˌɑːkɪˈpeləɡəʊ]—a trans-national archival platform for public space first to be launched in the Post-Yugoslav context.

Mila Turajlić, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, is a filmmaker and visual artist whose documentary works draw on a combination of oral histories, film archives and found footage to fabricate a new reflexive language that confronts memory and ruins with the disappearing narratives of history. Her films include Cinema Komunisto, IDFA-winner The Other Side of Everything and the documentary diptych Non-aligned & Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels. Her video installations were commissioned by MoMA, curated for the 2022 Berlin Biennale and international exhibitions. She is a member of AMPAS (Oscars) Documentary Branch, and a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

Ravi Vasudevan is a film and media historian. With Ravi Sundaram, Vasudevan directs Sarai, the media research programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. He co-founded Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, and is a coordinator of the media module of the International Centre for Advanced Studies: Metamorphoses of the Political (ICAS:MP).

Simone Venturini is a full professor at the University of Udine, one of the founders of its La Camera Ottica lab, and the coordinator of the Udine Film Forum. His research areas include cinema history, film preservation, media archaeology, and production studies.

Ala Younis is an artist working on curatorial, film and publishing projects. She curated Kuwait’s pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia (2013), co-curated the Singapore Biennale in 2022, and co-founded the publishing initiative Kayfa ta in 2012. She is co-director of Berlinale’s Forum Expanded, Artistic Director of Akademie der Kunst der Welt (Cologne), and Research Scholar at al Mawrid Arab Center for the Study of Art, at NYU Abu Dhabi.