When the government of Burkina Faso started to issue mining permits in 2000, gold fever struck. The people of Kalsaka were promised mountains of gold: jobs for the villagers, scholarships for their children, money for the government coffers, and development aid for the next 10 years. But six years later, these promises rang hollow as the mountains of gold were simply taken away, leaving them with nothing but polluted land. Through the interweaving of fictional and documentary elements, No Gold for Kalsaka reinterprets the tale of good and evil so familiarly depicted in the Western. References to West African griot traditions, cowboys and Ennio Morricone's film music create a Wild-West-like world caught up in the gold rush.

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Abdoulaye Sounaye was trained in Anthropology, Religious Studies and Philosophy and holds a PhD from Northwestern University, USA. His interests lie in the connections between religion, society and the state in Africa. His current research project examines religiosity and the reformulation of the secular on university campuses in West Africa. He is heading the “Contested Religion” research unit at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient of Berlin.

"Our fight for the environment is not just about trees. We are defending our culture, our identity, our lives." In his home country Liberia, environmental activist Silas Siakor tirelessly researches the schemes and deals of international companies and the government. Land theft and corruption can only be prevented if the political elites are also held accountable by the population at large. Silas and his team are using new technologies to achieve this: with the Timby smartphone app, anyone can document human rights violations and make them public worldwide. For more than five years, the filmmakers have been documenting a fight between David and Goliath.

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Hawa Essuman is a graduate of Tom Tykwer's One Fine Day Films training programme in Nairobi. In 2010 she completed her first long feature film Soul Boy (2010), which was screened at over forty film festivals worldwide and won several awards. Silas (2017) is her documentary debut.

Fordlandia Malaise
Susana de Sousa Dias, Portugal 2019, 40 Min.

Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings
Bo Wang/Pan Lu, China 2017, 28 Min.

An Invocation to the Earth
Yeo Siew Hua, Singapore 2020, 16 Min.

Tellurian Drama (Early Cut)
Riar Rizaldi, Indonesia 2020, 27 Min.

Stories from the South features places where the world has ended multiple times already due to colonial expansion. The short film programme explores new forms that escape hegemonic modes of thinking, knowing that we cannot solve the problems of the present within the framework that caused these issues in the first place. Fordlandia Malaise explores the aftermath of Fordlandia, a company town founded by Henry Ford in the Amazon rainforest in 1928. Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings looks at acclimatization efforts during the expansion of the British Empire and exposes the entanglements of imperialism, scientific modes of examining the environment, and the construction of racial boundaries. An Invocation to the Earth confronts climate collapse through the lens of pre-colonial folktales and animistic rituals. Tellurian Drama, of which we will screen an early cut, looks at the material remnants of a colonial radio station in West Java to problematize the notion of decolonization, technology and the historicity of communication. 

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Rosalia Namsai Engchuan (โรสาลียา น้ำใส เอ่งฉ้วน) is a social anthropologist and artist living between Berlin and Southeast Asia. She is currently working with artists and cultural actors in Southeast Asia on artistic-theoretical interventions in problem clusters of modernity that go beyond climate change and the environmental crisis. Rosalia is a 2021 Goethe-Institut Fellow at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwartskunst Berlin and one of the founders of with the rubbles, a space for collective research in Berlin.

Riar Rizaldi is a Hong Kong based Indonesian artist and amateur researcher. His main focus is on the relationship between capital and technology, extractivism, and theoretical fiction. His works have been shown at Locarno Film Festival, BFI Southbank London, International Film Festival Rotterdam, NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, and National Gallery of Indonesia amongst others.

Yeo Siew Hua is a Singaporean director and writer. His last feature film, A Land Imagined (2018), won the Golden Leopard at the 71st Locarno Film Festival and was selected as Singapore’s entry to the 92nd Academy Awards’ Best International Feature Film category.

The starting point of Wild Relatives is  an event that  sparked worldwide media interest: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Global Seed Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of the seeds from the Arctic to Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives caught between these two distant spots of the earth.

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Jumana Mannais a Berlin-based visual artist working primarily with film and sculpture. She was awarded the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award in 2012 and the Ars Viva Prize for Visual Arts in 2017. Her work has been shown in various film festivals and exhibitions.

Philip Widmann makes films, texts, and film programmes at the intersection of experimental documentary cinema, science, and visual art. His film and video work has been shown in various film festivals and art spaces, including Berlinale, IFF Rotterdam, New York FF, Yamagata International Documentary FF, FID Marseille, Videonale Bonn, Wexner Center for the Arts, and others. He has also selected film programmes for Arkipel Jakarta, Image Forum Tokyo, Kassel Dokfest and others. Philip has been a member of LaborBerlin since 2009.

In the 1970s, paramilitary governments in Southeast Asia initiated geopolitically-motivated privatizations along the Mekong. The resulting environmental damage robbed local communities of their resources and sparked interregional conflicts. The ecological imbalances affected both the rural population and the metropolitan areas, forcing them to rethink their needs and reorient their production practices. Mekong 2030 is an anthology of five collaboratively-produced short films (Soul River, The Che Brother, The Forgotten Voices of Mekong, The Line, The Unseen River), which came out of a filmmakers' workshop with local environment activists initiated by Luang Prabang Film Festival.

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Sarnt Utamachote (ษาณฑ์ อุตมโชติ) is a nonbinary filmmaker and curator. They are a co-founder of un.thai.tled, an artist collective from the German-Thai diaspora, with whom they curated the un.thai.tled Film Festival Berlin and Beyond the kitchen: Stories from the Thai Park. Their video installation I Am Not Your Mother (2020) was exhibited at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and their short film Soy Sauce (2020) was screened at OutFest Fusion LA, Xposed Berlin, and Queer East London 2021, among others.

Pham Ngoc Lân (*Hanoi, 1986) studied urban planning at Hanoi Architectural University. His work focuses on the influence of cityscapes on human relationships. His short films have screened at numerous film festivals and art museums, including Visions du Réel, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and Berlinale Shorts. He is currently developing his feature film debut.

Maquilápolis follows the story of women factory workers on the Mexican border, fighting against environmental degradation and the exploitation of their labour at the hands of U.S. and multinational companies. Carmen Durán and Lourdes Luján chronicle their struggles in video diaries, documenting their work as promotoras: community advocates for social justice. The process behind the film is especially valuable, as it actively involved the promotoras in planning, filming, and distribution, as well as the fact that it directly led to the cleanup of an abandoned factory in Chilpancingo.

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Vicky Funari is a documentary filmmaker and teacher. Her films include Paulina (1998) and Live Nude Girls Unite! (2000). Funari is committed to co-creative processes that aim to be of use to the individuals and communities represented. She is a Senior Lecturer of Visual Studies at Haverford College.

Pia Chakraverti-Würthwein & Eirini Fountedaki form a curatorial duo interested in embodied knowledge and collective reflections through film. They co-curated the film series Residing in the Borderlands at SAVVY Contemporary, and participated in the Berlin Biennial 11 curatorial workshop how now to gather. They also co-edited the publication How does the world breathe now? Film as Witness, Archive, and Political Tool (Archive Books, 2021).