Lecture by Filipa César

In 2011, Filipa César first encountered a film archive stored at the National Film Institute of Guinea-Bissau. It had been neglected by the institutions and was almost totally destroyed. The films it contained were part of the revolutionary project of the Amilcar Cabral, leader of the anticolonial struggle.

A year after this discovery, and working with the Guinea-Bissauan filmmakers Sana na N’Hada, Suleimane Biai and Flora Gomes, as well as the curator Tobias Hering, Filipa César embarked on the project titled Luta ca caba inda (The Struggle Is Not Over Yet). This consists of screening these scraps of material at sessions in which European and African audiences join in the discussion. Hence, the cinema becomes a venue for collective editing and an assembly gathered together to think about the conditions of the present. It is an occasion to question the neutrality of history and to weave relationships between the struggles of the past and those of today, an invitation to reconstruct history through images and to open up new spaces for political imagination.

This lecture is part of the course Archives in revolt. Working with surviving images, organized by the Institut d’Humanitats de Barcelona.

The day after the lecture, on 6 June at 6.30 p.m., the film Spell Reel (2017, 97 min.), which captures Felipa César's work with the Guinea-Bissau archive, will be shown at the Filmoteca de Catalunya. The session will be presented by Felipa César.