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Sunday, October 4
POSTSCRIPTS OF MODERNITY
PART 01
Introduced by Harris Chowdhary
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
- Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers - Taking Back the Legislature, 2020 (45 minutes)
- Bahar Noorizadeh - After Scarcity, 2018 (30 minutes)
PART 02
Introduced by Alma Chaouachi
- Nadir Bouhmouch - Amussu, 2019 (100 minutes)
The promises and outcomes of modernity—nation-states and capitalist economies, along with their alienating and extractivist logics and infrastructures—have produced immeasurable catastrophic damage to peoples and living environments across racial and class lines. Throughout their reign, these violent systems have not simply been justified by the values of universality, individual freedom, and liberal secular democracy; they have been produced through them, eliminating and exploiting all that does not measure up or conform to their suffocating parameters.
Central to modernity, and to modern discourse more broadly, is the capture of technology as a transhistorical practice and its transformation into a supposedly modern conception governed by the logic of progress. Postscripts of Modernity is a film program that engages these catastrophic and violent legacies while demonstrating how film, itself a modern technology, might visualize and facilitate other social relations—in other words, how existing at-hand technologies, currently governed by the reign of capital, might be appropriated and subverted to achieve ends nonsynchronous with their intended uses. The works by Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers, Bahar Noorizadeh, and Nadir Bouhmouch disavow modernity’s violence not by returning to an imagined precolonial or precapitalist past, but by insisting on a kind of crude presentism. Their diverse aesthetic interventions within the political contexts they respectively work in embrace whatever tools are currently available within modernity as material for the struggle against it.
Introduced by Harris Chowdhary
Hong Kong Documentary Filmmakers - Taking Back the Legislature, 2020 (45 minutes)
July 1, 2019—the 22nd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to China after the end of British Imperial Rule—marks a critical moment in the region, considered, on the one hand, as a celebration of the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and, on the other, as an occasion of mourning, anger, and mounting political frustration for pro-democracy groups, eventually culminating in an unprecedented act of social upheaval. As protesters question the effectiveness of months of non-violent demonstrations against the proposed extradition law, a group begins to contemplate a more radical course of action: storming the Legislative Council. Filmed from within the movement by anonymous filmmakers on handheld cameras, Taking Back the Legislature follows the protesters through the escalating hours of confrontation. The camera captures heated debates among demonstrators over the risks of occupying the building, as well as their encounters with pro-democracy legislators who urge them to reconsider their actions. As frustration gives way to determination, protesters equipped with helmets, masks, and makeshift tools eventually break through the Legislative Council's defenses and enter the chamber.
Introduced by Harris Chowdhary
Bahar Noorizadeh - After Scarcity, 2018 (30 minutes)
Can computational utopias offer a way out of the techno-capitalist monopolization of the present? In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, cyberneticians imagined computers as machines of communism, and cybernetics as a way to address the mounting difficulties of the planned economy. After Scarcity follows cyberneticians such as Viktor Glushkov, among others, who proposed that networked computers could overcome the vast bureaucratic inefficiencies of central planning and make possible a fully automated planned economy. If history, at its best, is a blueprint for science fiction, then revisiting these contingent histories of economic technology might open a path to the future beyond the speculative binds of the capitalist order.
The work reconstructs this socialist cybernetic history through a deliberately futuristic visual language. Digitally generated landscapes, partly built from LiDAR scans, move through swarms of floating points that trace monasteries and city streets, compressing decades of history into a speculative space. These contingent pasts become prototypes for fictive futures, suggesting that digital socialism was not alien to the communist project, and that computation need not condemn us to the techno-capitalist present. The result is less a conventional historical documentary than a simulation of an alternative technological history with the past appearing as a prototype for a future that never arrived.
Introduced by Alma Chaouachi
Nadir Bouhmouch - Amussu, 2019 (100 minutes)
The people of the Moroccan village of Imider may live alongside the largest silver mine in Africa, but they have reaped few of its benefits. The mine’s encroachment upon their communal life has rendered their existence increasingly precarious, contributing to water scarcity and threatening the community’s almond orchards, oasis, and traditional ways of life. In 2011, the villagers responded by shutting down a pipeline supplying water to the mine and establishing a protest camp around it, inaugurating a struggle that would last to this day. Rather than centering scenes of confrontation, arrest, intimidation, and police violence, which are all part of the fight against the infrastructures of this pipeline, Amussu turns its attention to the everyday life, resilience, and creativity of those who sustain the struggle. Conceived as a participatory filmic project, Amussu was produced through collective decision-making guided by the community’s Agraw protocol, while community members not only learned to operate film equipment but also participated directly in filming. In this sense, the film constitutes both a formal and methodological intervention into the practice of radical independent cinema. Years after the initial uprising, the protest camp has evolved into a small, largely self-sufficient community, where music, theatre, poetry, and other artistic practices have emerged as a revolutionary vernacular. These forms of expression do more than accompany the struggle, as they become part of its infrastructure, sustaining collective memory, solidarity, and an ongoing demand for land, water, and a life lived with dignity.