Mixed Bag

Week 51 : Mixed Bag

It’s getting on for a year of programming so weeks 51 and 52 will consist of a potpourri of films that either didn’t fit into a programme or films that I would have shown had I found them in time.

On October 11, 2015, Arabian street artists Caram Kapp, Don Karl aka Stone and Heba Y. Amin broadcast their graffiti hack on the US-American TV series Homeland. A German friend who researched Middle East graffiti extensively was contacted by Homeland’s set production company to give authenticity to the new season’s film set. That is when the idea of an intervention to subvert the message using the show itself was born.

Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache actress and Native American rights activist, represented US-American actor Marlon Brando at the Academy Awards in 1973 and is followed by activist Bree Newsome, a US- American filmmaker, musician, speaker, and activist who, 43 years later, talks about her act of civil disobedience in the aftermath of the Charleston church massacre, in which nine African Americans were killed at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church by a 21-year-old white supremacist, who is now awaiting execution.  Philippine activist and artist Kiri Dalena’spiece is the artist’s transformation of an historic event into a reflection on silencing and remembering. Activist Nemonte Nenquimo, a member of the Waorani nation from the Amazonian Region of Ecuador is the co-founder of the Indigenous-led non-profit organization Ceibo Alliance, which is the first Indigenous alliance between ethnic minorities in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia who are at risk of cultural and physical extinction, and are fighting oil company incursions and contamination in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon region. Kara Walker, US-American painter, installation artist and filmmaker, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Nigerian born Brooklyn-based video artist and filmmaker and Greek Eliza Soroga, a London based performance artist, all explore public space in their unique discursive works, while Natalija Yefimkina, a Ukrainian filmmaker based in Berlin, shows a glimpse of the dreams and hopes of Russian men.

Programme 1 ends with a warning about the consequences of over-eating during lockdown.