Landscapes of Forgetting: Six Short Films

Land itself is a record of memory and erasure. Geographies created and shaped by histories of colonization and empire make this especially clear. This program chronicles cinematic efforts at recovery and remembrance across French Guiana, Mauritius, Colombia, Cape Verde, Brazil, Palestine, and the US. Taking landscapes as archival material, these hybrid, speculative, imaginative documentaries confront ecologies of forgetting.

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Écoutez le battement de nos images (2021)
Dir. Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste
16min, DCP

Based on audiovisual archives from the French National Center for Space Studies (CNES), Listen to the Beat of Our Images is an experiment in visual and aural recovery. Sibling filmmakers Audrey and Maxime Jean-Baptiste expose how the creation of a space center in French Guiana came at the expense of the Guyanese population. Told in an intergenerational voiceover, the film restores their presence and challenges the narrative of the colonized territory.

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Landslides (2020)
Dir. Caroline Déodat
20min, Digital

A cinematographic essay/poem by artist and researcher Caroline Déodat finds the spectral traces of ritual erased by colonial history—sega, the Mauritian dance form created by the enslaved. Looking at the landscape itself as an archive of memory, the film was made in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Jean-Renat Anamah.

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Aequador (2012)
Dir. Laura Huertas Millán
19min, DCP

Traveling through the Colombian Amazonas, Aequador unfolds as an alternative history of the colonial imaginaries and building projects which reshaped the region. Through her deeply-researched approach, the Franco-Colombian Laura Huertas Millán crafts what she calls “a parallel present modified by virtual reality, an oneiric allegory, an uchronic dystopia,” directly confronting the ruins of the modernist dream and its consequences for the fragmented present.

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An Aviation Field (2016)
Dir. Joana Pimenta
14min, Digital

A volcanic crater in Cape Verde meets the modernist fantasy of Brasilia’s metropolis in the Portuguese filmmaker’s haunted, speculative short. This hypnotic visual anthropology takes on a mythic dimension in considering remnants of colonialism and the geological roots of other narratives.

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UNDR (2024)
Dir. Kamal Aljafari
15min, DCP

Working through the appropriation of land by way of the appropriation of footage, Kamal Aljafari surveys the historical and physical landscape of the occupation of Palestine. The filmmaker collages archival materials, aerial helicopter footage, images of farmers in their fields and children playing, gliding across ruins and caverns in a visual language of surveillance, observation and witnessing, insisting on remembering the ties between Palestinians and their land.

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Remote Viewing (2009)
Dir. Cauleen Smith
15min, Digital

Artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith’s short is a speculative reenactment based on a radio story. Made in conversation with Land Art, Remote Viewing imaginatively dramatizes historical erasure and carefully explores the ethics of witnessing.