ANTHROFUTURE Film Festival: 13-14 June, 2025
How to film temporality/the future?
The ANTHROFUTURE Film Festival explores the potential of filmmaking as a research method to investigate experiences of time and temporality, especially people’s orientations towards the future and their practices of future-making in the present. How can people’s relations with the time and the future be investigated? How can they be represented in cinematographic form? The festival showcases attempts to carve out new lives in virtual and material worlds, addressing hopes and dreams as well as protests, violence, and attempts to reconstruct memories. It includes films made by anthropologists, artists, and documentary filmmakers.
Curatorial team: Sanderien Verstappen, Marie-Christine Hartig, and Manuela Ciotti
All screenings will take place in Hörsaal A on the 4th floor of the Neues Institutsgebäude (NIG) at the University of Vienna, located at Universitätsstrasse 7, 1010 Wien.
No registration required.
All films are screened in the original language with English subtitles.
June 13
Day 1, Afternoon Program: Decolonization and the Moving Image
13:00-15:30
Chaired by Manuela Ciotti, University of Vienna
(Trigger warnings: genocide, death, violence)
Otjozondjupa (Waterberg) by Forensic Architecture (Namibia, UK, 2022), 8 min.
Now known under its colonial name of ‘Waterberg’, Otjozondjupa – meaning ‘place of the calabashes’ in Otjiherero, the language of the Herero people – is the site of what was to be a decisive historical turning point. Otjozondjupa, where the Indigenous uprising known to Herero people as the War of Anti-Colonial Resistance took place, is also where the German colonial strategy turned decisively toward genocide. Around thirty thousand Ovaherero people sought refuge there, joining existing settlements of the Kambazembi clan under the leadership of Samuel Maharero. German colonial troops formed a bulwark to prevent the Herero from fleeing west, forcing them instead into a region known to colonists as the ‘waterless’ Omaheke Sandveld (‘sand field’ in Afrikaans).
Dahomey by Mati Diop (France, Senegal, Benin, 2024), 68 min.
November 2021. 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Along with thousands of others, these artefacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. But what attitude to adopt to these ancestors’ homecoming in a country that had to forge ahead in their absence? The debate rages among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi.
15:30-16:00 Break
Day 1, Evening Program: Youth, Activism, and Education
16:00-19:00
Chaired by Nora Taylor, Art Institute of Chicago
(Trigger warning: death)
A Night of Knowing Nothing by Payal Kapadia (India, 2021), 96 min.
Payal Kapadia’s bold and distinctive debut feature is an immersive and spiritual work addressing issues of artist production as well as the political complexities of contemporary India. A Night of Knowing Nothing is framed by fictional letters from a female student to her estranged lover. The film initially lends itself to investigative fictional storytelling before exploring the political contradictions of contemporary India. Combining a mixture of found footage, sketches and her own material, Kapadia – an alumna of the Film & Television Institute of India – repositions the work of fellow students at other educational establishments, charting the fractious relationship between a nation’s youth, its rigid caste structures, its families and its far-right government. Among many other ideas and leads, A Night of Knowing Nothing also aims to reimagine the role of a film school in this turbulent and often violent political epoch.
June 14
Day 2, Morning Program: Memory and Mobility
10:00-12:45
Chaired by Sanderien Verstappen, University of Vienna
Cool Memories of Remote Gods by Mochu (UAE, India, 2017), 14 min.
Set in the remnants of hippie trails in India, the video draws from the history of 1960s counterculture groups and their appropriation of spiritual ideas as a phenomenon contemporaneous with the development of the personal computer and cybernetics. No longer as active as they once were, these trails still bear the signs of the techno-fictional — overlaid with ancient spiritual regimens. As computers proposed that machine activity could replace the mind, counterculture considered whether religious or mystical experience could be recreated through technical means, as customisable 'internal technologies'. But however, this imagined ‘Empire of Equilibrium’ - the once-aspired-to state of universal harmony - has now been reduced to psychedelic posters, cheap reworks of surrealist paintings and new-age mixes of religio-techno-fusion music. The hippie trails and their associated symbolism reveal a decaying corpse, but one that has a propensity towards some kind of vampiric animation. The nature of this animation and its resurrectionary special-effects form the central schematic of the video.
Horror in the Andes by Martha-Cecilia Dietrich (Peru, 2019), 33 min.
Horror in the Andes is a behind-the-scenes documentary that follows the process of making a horror movie in Ayacucho, Peru. Directed by audio-visual anthropologist Martha-Cecilia Dietrich, it explores how Andean filmmakers use the art of cinema to narrate their community while creating it. Appropriating a global cinematic language to tell local (hi)stories, Horror in the Andes pays testament to the craft of filmmaking and its community. The film is part of a broader post-doctoral project on creativity, uncertainty and artistic perseverance in the Peruvian Andes seeking to reframe cinema-making in Ayacucho.
It Was Tomorrow by Alexandra D’Onofrio (Italy, 2019), 53 min.
Ali, Mahmoud and Mohamed are three Egyptian men who lived in Italy without documents for almost ten years. Suddenly thanks to an amnesty they finally manage to legalise their status and their future is re-inhabited by possibilities. As part of their need to rediscover their dreams and hopes they decide to take the journey back to the first places of arrival, where they disembarked from the boats that had brought them as teenagers to Italy after crossing the Mediterranean. The film follows them back to the emblematic places of the past, where memories are intertwined with fantasies about what could be, or could have been, their possible new life. Collaborative documentary filmmaking is accompanied by creative narrative processes such as theatre, storytelling, photography and participatory animation.
12:45-13:45 Lunch Break
Day 2, Afternoon Program: Imaginaries and Speculation
13:45-16:30
Chaired by Marie-Christine Hartig, Director of Ethnocineca
Affiorare by Rosella Schillaci (Italy, Portugal, 2022), 20 min.
Like in a fairy tale, the viewer is immersed in the everyday life of mothers and kids living in special places: prisons and custody institutions for inmates with their children. 360° footage at children’s eye level and animations embark us on a magical journey from the iconic Panopticon system of control, to the most recent confinement centres. Like the hero’s journey, the protagonists tell us – in a deep and poetic way - their first impressions of the prison, the smells, the fears, the challenges. Their perception of prison as a submerged world is mirrored by illustrations (made in collaboration with mothers and children) depicting their past memories and their dreams for the future. Animations enhance this surreal world using the metaphor of an underwater world where animated animals are free to move and breathe. A tale of pain but also resilience and hope, at the boundary between reality and imagination, which is able to speak to everyone and connect with personal memories of childhood.
Moskitos by Susana Ojeda (Austria, 2024), 16 min.
Mosquitoes whirr through a dystopian Viennese cityscape in which humans have lost their supposed supremacy. But mosquitoes, the relentless carriers of diseases such as Yellow Fever and Zika, live on here while a ritual ceremony initiates a spiritual journey into a future in which nature will have reclaimed the earth’s territory. Taken over by plants, the walls of the Weltmuseum Wien collapse. Vienna’s Prater and the University of Economics and Business are sinking into the mire. MOSKITOS is a visual manifesto of an archaeology of a failed capitalist civilization.
Painted Diagram of a Future Voyage (Who Believes the Lens?) by Mochu (India, 2013), 5 min.
The video was conceived as a part of a project exploring collisions of orientalism, colonialism and science fiction. It speculates a new landscape composed from the aquatints of India, made by the British landscape painters Thomas and William Daniells (1749-1837). The Daniells' paintings, developed exclusively for consumption in Britain, presented India as a world of pre-technological charm and primitive appeal. In the video, the distorted floating forms create ruptures in this pristine fantasy and form a new universe. The skewed forms recall the Early Renaissance technique of Anamorphosis, where certain elements within paintings were distorted systematically to afford a privileged viewing angle for the viewer to contemplate them. This was simultaneously a way of coding information as well as a device to propel the viewer out of the restrictive spatio-temporal framework of the perspectival gaze implicit in the paintings. In the video, the skewing and distorting tools in digital image-editing softwares have been used to create a visual discontinuity that resembles this older technique. When imposed on the Daniells' paintings that were made with the aid of a Camera Obscura, the digital distortions interrupt the fixed gaze and liberates the viewer from the naturalistic arrest.
A Terrible Beauty by Iram Ghufran (China, 2023), 50 min.
A Terrible Beauty tells a speculative tale of two time travelling companions, Lucy and Blue as they journey through the mysterious “Miracle City" - an intriguing place populated with eternal goods, forever flowers and perpetual persons. Will the travellers find what they are looking for, or are they doomed to wandering forever? A Terrible Beauty is an experimental endeavour to position documentary film in an immanent future, aiming to explore the notion of being human in a complex multispecies world. The film blends documentary observation with science fiction to speak of a post human present/future. It invites us to revisit questions around technology, ethics, mortality and what it means to be human in our times. A Terrible Beauty unfolds within the realm of anthropomorphic goods and objects, such as dolls, mannequins, and androids, and explores the ambivalent state of dread and excitement through which humans encounter technology. It dwells amidst the paradoxes involved in the perpetual making and unmaking of the human and invites the audience to visit a post-human future inhabited by humans and their “companion copies”.
16:30-17:00 Break
Day 2, Evening Program: Representing Virtual Worlds
17:00-19:30
Chaired by Sanderien Verstappen, University of Vienna
(Trigger warning: death, violence, abuse)
Knit’s Island by Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse, Quentin L’Helgoualc’h (France, 2023), 95 min.
Somewhere online, there is a territory of 250 square kilometres, where people gather in communities to simulate a survivalist scenario. The directors of Knit’s Island spent 963 hours inside this video “game”, meeting the people who take part in it. The three of them have created a film within this virtual world, introducing themselves to the “players” as a real team of documentary makers, deploying direct cinema techniques, tracking shots, interviews, and shot/reverse shot techniques. It all results in a fascinating film, with an aesthetic reminiscent of a 2.0 Peter Watkins, taking place in the “zone” of Tarkosvky's Stalker. While physical and obvious, the boundary between virtual and IRL (“in real life”) begins to blur through their encounters. While some participants see it as an escape from their daily lives, others live out their most disturbing fantasies as they make unsettling preparations for an apocalyptic future. The three filmmakers’ dangerous mission becomes an investigation into the virtualisation of our lives, and the limits and possibilities of the metaverse.