RISE UP! Film – Form – Freedom

The struggle for freedom is a cultural act, Amilcar Cabral prophesied at the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana—a gathering held in solidarity with Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In Cuba, cinema was assigned a pivotal role among these liberating cultural acts: here—as across the Tricontinent—numerous ideas circulated regarding what liberated (revolutionary) cinema could and should look like, differing in whether the moving image was viewed primarily as a reflection, a driving force, or a critique of culture and society. Concepts regarding the political potential of filmmaking spanned a wide horizon, ranging from cinema as a montage (and construction) of reality to cinema as a weapon for liberation from (colonial) relations of dependency.

Forty years after the Havana conference, Peter Sellars commissioned directors to create films for the 2006 “New Crowned Hope” festival in Vienna. Inspired by the work of Mozart, Sellars was interested in how cinema from the Tricontinent could resolve contradictions through artistic solutions. Now, twenty years later, we bring together selected works from these politically and socially distinct eras of Third Cinema, juxtaposing Ritwik Ghatak’s Bengali refugee epic “Subarnarekha” (1962) with Garin Nugroho’s “Opera Jawa” (2006), a staging of the Ramayana epic. We examine the relationship between Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s satire “Death of a Bureaucrat” (1966) and Paz Encina’s “Hamaca Paraguaya” (2006)—a film inspired by Mozart’s Requiem. We also seek to trace the path of Kurdish self-determination from Yılmaz Güney and Zeki Ökten’s “Sürü” (1978) to Bahman Ghobadi’s “Niwemang” (2006). We are interested in contrasting Raymond Depardon’s view of captivity in “La Captive du désert” (1989) with the perspective on retribution and forgiveness in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s “Daratt” (2006). To mark World Children’s Day, a short film program from the documentary series “Children of the World” will be presented.