CinemaAttic: Landscapes of Resistance

In October, CinemaAttic presents LANDSCAPES OF RESISTANCE. A programme exploring landscapes and humans and how our surroundings affect the way we live and inhabit this world. From Chinese megalopolis to isolated indigenous communities on the Peru-Bolivia Andean border. From the silent resistance of stateless people in the Sahara desert to the roads of Transamazônica in Brazil.

Blending resistance, dignity, science fiction, religion and mythology, CinemaAttic takes you across the globe to see how communities resist the ghost of transforming capitalism. Is it possible to bring together rocket science, ethnographic cinema, and queer amazonian mythology in one programme of short films? There’s only one way to answer that…

The Aymara community has long lived in the mountains and high plains along what are now the borders of Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina. After the Spanish evangelization campaigns, a second wave of conversions has reached this community in the last few decades. Now the Aymara believe in Heaven rather than Earth.

But when it comes to oblivion, few communities in the world are more ignored than the people of Western Sahara. How does one tell a story of displacement? Director Abdessamad El Montassir in his film "Galb’Echaouf" presents sharaui people unable to talk about the trauma of the past. The breathtaking landscapes of Western Sahara seem devoid of memory. Yet, the eyes of its people bear enduring signs of the tragedy that has marked their existence for decades.

Sometimes the most faithful path to documenting the reality of a community is to use all the potential of its local myths, rites and traditions. That is the case of Curupira. In the Amazon region of Brazil, aisles of roads cut through the jungle, exposing wounds that stretch from the military dictatorship to the present day. Director Janaina Wagner takes us on a magical ghostly journey with the spirit of 14-year-old prostitute Iracema, who goes along the road in search of Curupira, the queer devil protector of the Amazon rainforests. Visually and sonically incredible, the film is at the same time a passionate appeal against deforestation and trans-Amazonian road construction.

Join us on this journey around the world approaching how different communities understand the idea of resistance in their everyday lives, and how the mountains, lakes, skyscrapers and jungles surrounding them affect their vision of the world today. We are what we see.

Make your way in, CinemaAttic is back in town!