This article provides an intermedial history and analysis of Dieter Schidor’s 1985 film Kalt in Kolumbien to trace a small but fascinating history of interaction between German and Colombian film cultures. Examining archival documents, interviews, and the fictionalised accounts of the film’s production in Gary Indiana’s Gone Tomorrow, the article revisits the “golden age” of the Cartagena International Film Festival, Schidor’s trip, and the film’s production process. The essay argues that Schidor brings the icy austerity, queer desires, and cruel humour of the German New Wave to the Colombian city to create a film that is comically brutal towards locals and foreigners alike, as it attempts to highlight the inequalities that allowed its director to eat, drink, and do drugs “like a king” in Cartagena. The essay suggests that Kalt in Kolumbien is a document of the complicated union between Germany and America as a cultural and intellectual centres and Latin America as a peripheral, romanticised source of inspiration.

"This article reflects on a creative research project which utilises audiovisual technologies to foster conversations with feminist activists in four historically related cities— Havana (Cuba) which is twinned with Glasgow (Scotland), and Matanzas (Cuba) which is twinned with Vilanova i la Geltrú (Catalunya). Under the banner “Ragged Cinema”, we are undertaking a project which brings together feminists across the four cities to explore how no-budget, collaborative filmmaking might be utilised to encourage experience sharing between activists in the Global South and the Global North, and develop translocal networks of support and solidarity. By developing a crosscultural project rooted in specific patriarchal states, capitalist and communist, we aim to amplify the often-unheard voices of nonstate actors. In December 2023, a step towards this occurred when work-in-process films made by the activists were presented at the Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana (International Festival

In 1989, Jochen Hick, a prolific German documentary filmmaker, chose Brazil as the setting for the feature film Via Appia, which follows a flight attendant who returns to Rio de Janeiro to find the man who transmitted the HIV virus to him. Despite the low recognition of the motion picture, it is notable in the work of Gustavo Subero that the film continues to be one of the main references in the international context on the crisis of AIDS in Brazil. Starting from a historical survey of Brazilian cinema production addressing the disease in the 1980s, this article proposes an analysis of how Via Appia reinforces foreign discourses and imaginaries about the AIDS crisis in Brazil.

This essay explores the appropriation and creative interpretation of audiovisual archives in cinematic representations of the Iraq war and the Israel/Palestine conflict. It showcases the political possibilities of imperial archives in Testimonies from Fallujah (Hamodi Jasim, 2004) and A Fidai Film (Kamal Aljafari, 2024), two medium-length compilation films that repurpose American and Israeli hegemonic media and fictional footage. Despite their historical, geopolitical, and production differences, the two films share a similar engagement with and against the imperial film and media archive. This essay examines the two films’ archival practices. It argues that the reuse of imperial materials in Testimonies from Fallujah and A Fidai effectively disputes underlying imperial discourses and structures of power in the mediation and filmic representation of the Iraq war and the conflict in Palestine.

In December of 2018, the short film Something Good – Negro Kiss (1898), featuring the first known on-screen kiss between two Black actors (Saint Shuttle and Gertie Brown), directed by Black film director and Selig Polyscope Company owner William Selig, was recovered, restored, and added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Before its discovery, Something Good’s legacy remained threatened by what Claudy Op Den Kamp thus encapsulates in their book The Greatest Films Never Seen: “if [films] cannot be seen, it will become increasingly hard to remember them” (12). Two years after Something Good’s restoration and exhibition, the Library of Congress scholar-in-residence Maya Cade launched the revolutionary Black Film Archive, a living register of national and international Black films made from 1915 to 1979 (now 1898 to 1989) that exhibit and celebrate “the rich, abundant history of Black cinema”. The site itself promises in its mission statement to uplift and make known “historically and culturally significant films [...] about Black people accessible through a streaming guide with cultural context”. This paper examines the placement and impact of Maya Cade’s Black Film Archive within the larger discourse of film history and film historiography.

This article traces Swiss researcher and video artist Ursula Biemann’s use of sound and image in her video works Forest Law (Ursula Biemann and Paulo Tavares, 2014) and Forest Mind (Ursula Biemann, 2021) to understand their aesthetic and epistemic envisioning as a plea for a metabolic documentary. Biemann films with the Indigenous people of Kichwa and Inga (territories of Ecuador and Colombia) who participate in international conferences and workshops on ecopolitics. With the aim of creating through aesthetic practice “new neural synapses that stimulate a more interconnected worldview” through aesthetic practice, these projects encounter Indigenous cosmologies from Latin America. By focussing on how disparate cosmologies are confronted with one another in Biemann’s videos, the article analyses the aesthetic and epistemological ways in which the interconnection of all life is portrayed: while Forest Law observes the hegemonic history of Indigenous knowledge production being suppressed by the Global North, Forest Mind excavates the converging aspects between the Inga’s cosmology and contemporary neuroscience. Reading Biemann’s metabolic documentary as ecocentric cinema, the article outlines the potential of this filmic practice for epistemic justice in the Amazon.

The encounter between Latin American subjects and landscapes with filmmakers from the global North has been studied primarily through analyses of documentary and fiction films, whether it is through the presence of auteurs like Orson Welles, Sergei Eisenstein, or Luis Buñuel in key moments of the formation of filmic identity in countries such as Brazil and Mexico; their use as backdrop in Hollywood or European films; or the different iterations of Jean Rouch’s documentary workshops Ateliers Varan in the region. The theoretical corpus surrounding the ethics of asymmetrical representation proves insufficient when dealing with another perennial form of audiovisual transnational encounters in Latin America: experimental cinema and video art. This article looks at a group of works made in the past three decades by female artists from the global North who have turned to Brazil as a physical, cultural, and symbolic space that invites destabilisations of conventional filmmaking strategies: Um Campo de Aviação (An Avi