In this conversation, we’ll start with the Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen, with a historical perspective and overview, of how some specific aesthetics and narrations have been dominant in documentary and fiction over past decades.

In the second part of the conversation with filmmaker Naziha Arebi and curator and critic Samia Labadi, we will address these issues affecting our cinema from the angle that the need to promote aesthetics other than the dominant one seems to be far more exhaustive and relevant than the strictly decolonial question.

Indeed, by placing at the heart of our work the notion of the existence of aesthetics other than those of the Western world, our questioning goes beyond the simple dialectic of the colonized versus the colonizer, to include a philosophical approach to our ‘imaginary’ representations of the human being, both as an individual and as a collective, while placing them in a much greater historical context than that of cinema itself.

Implicitly, this prompts us to ask: is it relevant to describe our current cinema as universal, given that the global South – the majority - is marginalized by the minority – the global North?

Recorded on 16 September and 19 September 2023
Length: 86'09''

Moderator: Rama Thiaw
Music Composer: Marcus Lori
Sound Design: Timon Misselhorn
Editors: Martin Langhof, Anne Rethfeldt

You can find out more about our collaborators here.