Motherhood on Trial looks at public reaction to the case of Susan Smith/ the young mother who confessed to drowning her two sons in a South Carolina lake after claiming they were abducted by a black man. The documentary combines multiple layers of audio and video to create a complex tapestry of sound and image that emphasizes the complexity of the issues and explores how the background/ experiences and agenda of each character influences his or her telling of the story.

From 4th to 6th November

Decolonizing Vision  - Migrant Knowledge

To decolonize vision would be to return it, to integrate it into the body and the other senses, to integrate it into place, its forces and emptiness... to rescue it from the tyranny of the merely optical and open it up to the “other eyes” of the body and the mind, to make it whole. Also, to open up dialogue with the power of vision that the dominant culture in the West excluded or dissected until it was extinguished.

Toni Serra *) Abu Ali

The selection of videos presented in the Migrant Knowledge project puts forward alternative constructions of thought, analysis, and reflection concerning migrations. It does so through a plurality of views, experiences, memories, and stories that converge in a three-day program live at the Centre Civic Can Felipa, and a two-week online audio-visual menu, based on a selection of videos from the Archives OVNI – Observatory of Unidentified Video.

In the face of an understanding of multiculturalism as a space that is predefined and negotiated by power, the institution, and violence, the “other” is partitioned and enclosed. Thus, it is increasingly urgent and necessary to come together and exchange knowledge and experiences so as to bring about a profound transformation of the notions that have shaped the globalized world. This entails a radical redefinition of the notions of time, work, culture, and of the persistence of a single model with totalitarian tendencies. To start a process of decolonization by deconstructing and transforming the notions and beliefs that have shaped our societies.

Modern colonialism is not only a historical phenomenon, it is primarily an attitude towards life and the world. A way of looking that divides and dissects all things, a way of looking that creates and projects ”otherness”, and sees it as a space to be occupied: as territory, culture, even time, to be colonized. By its very nature it can neither understand nor put into practice an organic unity of things, or of life, let alone of economics. It perpetually needs the “other”, to the point of severing it from itself.

The selected program of videos includes resistances from various origins and languages, which are deployed against the imposition of single, hegemonic thought. Stories that make it possible to think, to build other worlds and to discover existing ones that are often hidden by screens of ignorance and prejudice, and by stereotyped images of the “other.”

The video selection is curated by Toni Cots. The program is organized by Jiser and the OVNI Archives, and is part of the process of reflection carried out by the Migrant Knowledge collective.

Jiser, which means “bridge” in Arabic, is a non-profit association based in Barcelona, whose objective is to promote artistic creation and the use of art as a tool for social transformation in the Euro-Mediterranean space, by carrying out activities that promote the exchange and rapprochement between different artistic and cultural realities in the region.

The OVNI Archives compile and document a three-decade history, from analog video to digital video in the time of ‘social’ networks. The materials contained in the Archives are the result of various thematic research projects, a whole constellation of titles with the common denominator of free expression and reflection on individual and collective fears and pleasures, coming together to build a multi-faceted vision, like thousands of small eyes that deepen and explore our world, or announce other possible ones. A research process in which the main values are heterogeneity, contradiction, and the subjectivity that the Archives spring from. In itself, they are an antidote for cloning and repetition in the era of hyper-connectivity.

Migrant Knowledge is a group made up of activists, artists and researchers who bring their diverse experience and background to a process of critical and collective reflection on the symbolic and institutional violence that affects migrants and/or racialized people. It aims to create communal spaces that draw attention to and fight against the mechanisms that legitimize the exercise of this violence, and create narratives of resistance that support the right for people who migrate to have rights.

This process is woven together by connecting artistic practice and reflection. It is open to a plurality of stories, and it is flexible in its path... It defends not only the exercise of critical consciousness, but also the carrying out of actions that transform situations of discrimination, racism, and inequality.

Thursday, 4th November 18:30h - 21:00h

VIOLENCE <> RESISTANCE

London "I don't call it rioting, I call it an insurrection"

BBC, 2011. UK, VO Eng 5Min.

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!»

Göran Hugo Olsson, 2014. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, USA, VO English,  85Min.

An archive-driven documentary covering the most daring moments in the struggle for liberation in the Third World, as well as an exploration into the mechanisms of decolonization through text fragments from Frantz Fanon’s T he Wretched of the Earth .

Friday, 5 November 18:30h - 21:00h

Le problème algérien et l'economie française

Jean Pierre Gambarotta, 2006. VO French. 5Min.

A French government report explaining the reasons why it was impossible to accept Algeria’s independence.

Pierre-Yves Vandeweed 2011.Belgium, Western Sahara. VO Arab, 74Min.

Drawing from stories of flight, exile, interminable waiting and arrest, and persecuted lives on both sides of the wall that divides the Western Sahara, Territoire perdu bears witness to the Sahrawi people, their land and their entrapment in other people’s dreams. The film juxtaposes sonorous landscapes, black-and-white portraits and nomadic poetics.

Session in collaboration with the Barcelona Independent Film Festival, l'Alternativa.

Lettre à la Republique

Friday 10 November from 19:30h to 21:30h

Auditorium of the Cultural Centre La Marineta, Mollet del Vallès.

Con altri occhi , by Alesssandro Quaranta, 13’ (Italy) (2014) VOSE.

A film of a partisan’s reactions to the images of those snowy landscapes he had crossed seventy years ago. The memory of a place between life and death.

Inner Lines, by Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd , 88’, 16 mm, (Belgium-France), VOSE.

Around Mount Ararat, in Turkey and Armenia, the inhabitants and their courier pigeons move along these parallel paths in search of communities submerged in war. Men and women bear witness to what they have endured, to their shattered lives, to life struggling against death.

Discussion and debate with the presence of Alessandro Quaranta.

Mollet City Council and CRA'P - creation practices and artistic research.

La Marineta Cultural Center

Església, 7, 08100 Mollet del Vallès.

Tarek and Nordin narrate the history and struggles of their organisation. In the midst of the election campaign, their memories of the constant lies and failures of different governments over the last thirty years are put into perspective, somewhat tinged with resentment.

In Benyounes forest, “la foret” as they called their habitants, was the last stage of a long trip for thousands of people coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. Close to the fence that divides Ceuta (Spain) from Morocco, they establish in a variable time, before flank the last obstacle in they way to Europe, looking for a better life. Sometimes running away from wars, politics persecutions, hunger or a precarious economy situation. Lots of times of all of this. In years, the migrants pass across this forest and after some weeks or months they manage to arrive to Ceuta. In finals of 2004, European union start agreements of subcontract Morocco in the control of the Spanish – Moroccan border. The habitants of the forest, started to feel the effects of this agreements: the increase of illegal devolutions, the abuses from the civil police, they install police controls near the forest, they forbid the access to current water, military attacks to the camps in with they made mass arrests and rapes as a war weapon. The border it's close. Systematic violation of human rights, financed with the tax of the democratic European Union citizens. The migrants organize themselves in spaces like this and construct spaces; support nets in Moroccan territory, confronting and resisting this way the European politics. In the forest of Benyounes, they organized themselves from origin communities. In February of 2005, decided between all the community's, record this video, to made visible their situation, in with they report the systematic violation of their human rights, the absolutely abandonment from the NGO's, Associations an Human Rights Institutions, an they demand their citizens condition and they require their rights as human beings.

This is a riveting documentary that examines representations of gender roles in hip-hop and rap music through the lens of filmmaker Byron Hurt, a former college quarterback turned activist. Conceived as a “loving critique” from a self-proclaimed “hip-hop head”, Hurt examines issues of masculinity, sexism, violence and homophobia in today's hip-hop culture.