Practical information

           A presentation of Kurdish films by the Rojava Kurdistan Film Commune (Northern Syria)

OVNI has collaborated with the Rojava Film Commune in a project aimed at researching, screening, and promoting their work in Spain, Italy, and France. A process of investigation through videos, texts, and meetings, in order to listen to their voices and understand their struggle together. We have created a website that you can visit link.

Komîna fîlm a Rojava (Rojava Film Commune) is a collective of filmmakers founded in 2015, based in the autonomous Rojava region in the Federation of Northern and Eastern Syria. The Commune is actively working in the region to rebuild and reorganise filmmaking and film education infrastructures.

The Rojava Film Commune was established to promote local film culture by organising film screenings, facilitating discussions on the role of film within society, producing new films, and setting up a Film Academy. Following the 1960 fire in Rojava’s only cinema in the city of Amude—which saw the death of 298 children trapped inside—the Commune aims to reclaim film as a central space for reimagining society, by democratising and revolutionising the imagination itself.

The Commune has educated a new generation of Rojava filmmakers, organized screenings in cities and villages, and produced new films. It seeks to represent the values and ideals of the Rojava Revolution, but also to mediate and depict the daily struggles in the Syrian civil war and Rojava’s collective attempt to build a new society.

The Rojava Film Academy provides education for aspiring filmmakers in Northern Syria. Founded in 2015, it offers one-year programmes, with courses on international film history, Kurdish film history, film theory, photography, cinematography, script writing, editing, and sound design, taught by local and international film professionals.

The Academy is self-organized and non-hierarchical, encouraging students to participate in every aspect of its organization. Exchange networks have also been set up with other academic, media, and news platforms, and with civil society organizations, in order to engage in broad discussions and create screening possibilities. Considering the influx of foreign filmmakers and journalists to Rojava, it is important for the Commune to reclaim the representation and imagination of the revolution.

After decades of oppression of Kurdish language and culture, the Rojava Film Academy aims to revitalize local film culture, reclaiming the power to narrate and imagine one’s dreams and realities. After the Syrian Civil War started, the predominantly Kurdish northern region declared the Autonomy Administration, creating structures based on grassroots democracy, women’s liberation, and cultural diversity.

The Academy bases its methodology on ‘revolutionary realism’, i.e. a realism that does not merely reveal the current reality in a new way, but also restructures the reality of the possible . As well as finding forms to express things as-they-are, it creates the opportunity to imagine the not-yet-present, the ‘eternal becoming’ that is the revolution itself.

https://rewend.desorg.org/

https://rewend.desorg.org/

Sampat Pal is the leader of the Gubai Gang, a group of women vigilantes from Northern India who wear bright pink saris as a distinctive sign that stands out, like cry in the multitude, to denounce and fight the treatment of women a slaves by a very sexist and classicist society.

Kim, Harold, Miguel Duque, Ratablanca y Cross-T “We say there is social war when everything gets reduced to a plan. All of the possibilities for creation and existence that all of us want for ourselves, what we call life, require the availability of resource this purpose. Symbolic, imaginary, actual, physical resources. If this doesn't happen, then what is democracy? Democracy is a potentiality. Is the urge towards creativity and complexity, which exists as potential in every life, fulfilled or is it not fulfilled' If it is not fulfilled, then what is democracy? The way we see it, democracy means that those who produce the world can produce it entirely. Not that some produce it, and the rest obey”. Colectivo Situaciones, Argentina.

The Egyptian army brutally repressed a demonstration on December 17, 2011. Images from independent sources show the harshness of this murderous repression. Then, mainstream media reports show us a supposedly “balanced” view.

An interview with writer and local resident Darcus Howe on the events that took place in London in 2011. "Have some respect for an old West Indian 'negro' " "I don't call it rioting, I call it an insurrection...of the masses of the people. It is happening in Syria, it is happening in Clapham, it's happening in Liverpool, it's happening in Port-au-Spain, Trinidad, and that is the nature of the historical moment."

Léxico Familiar transforms the all-encompassing intent behind the idea of a “dictionary” into a more modest attempt to compile a few elements of the “family lexicon” that constitutes the language of the new movements. As per Heinrich von Kleist's idea of gradual production of thoughts whilst speaking, this vocabulary is revealed through the course of the conversation, framing and editing, which literally seek to show how thought is embodied. Just as political concepts that lead to dynamics of change (which can be appropriated by other subjects, and which circulate so as to be verified through different practices) don't arise through isolated gestures or thought ex nihilo, but from actual experiences and specific bodies and struggles.

Chavez, elected president of Venezuela in 1998, is a colourful, unpredictable folk hero, beloved by his nation's working class and a tough-as-nails, quixotic opponent to the power structure that would see him deposed. Two independent filmmakers were inside the presidential palace on April 11, 2002, when he was forcibly removed from office. they were also present 48 hours later when, remarkably, he returned to power amid cheering aides. Their film records what was probably history's shortest-lived coup d'état. It's a unique document about political muscle and an extraordinary portrait of the man the wall street journal credits with making Venezuela "Washington?s biggest Latin American headache after the old standby, Cuba."

MOVE first emerged in Philadelphia (USA) in the early seventies. This documentary traces the most important events in the history of the organisation during the seventies and eighties, when MOVE was at the centre of brutal repression that ended with the majority of its members killed or in jail. Eight of them remain in prison to this day. “The work of MOVE is the revolution. MOVE works to stop industry from poisoning the air, the water, the soil, and put an end to the enslavement of life - people, animals, any form of life... The revolution begins with the individual. It begins when a person commits to doing the right thing. You cannot turn somebody into a revolutionary by making them shout slogans or wield arms. The revolution cannot be imposed on others, it must awaken within each person. Somebody may talk about the revolution, but if they still worship money or take drugs or abuse their partner, they are obviously not committed to doing the right thing. Revolution is not a philosophy, it is an action".

We are now moving through a very bleak period in human history - where the convergence of postmodernist cynicism (eliminating humanistic and critical thinking from the education system), sheer greed engendered by the consumer society sweeping many people under its wing, human, economic and environmental catastrophe in the form of globalisation, massively increased suffering and exploitation of the people of the so-called Third World, as well as the mind-numbing conformity and standardization caused by the systematic audiovisualization of the planet have synergistically created a world where ethics, morality, human collectivity, and commitment (except to opportunism) are considered old fashioned. Where excess and economic exploitation have become the norm - to be taught even to children. In such a world as this, what happened in Paris in the spring of 1871 represented (and still represents) the idea of commitment to a struggle for a better world, and of the need for some form of collective social Utopia - which WE now need as desperately as dying people need plasma. The notion of a film showing this commitment was thus born.