Images and Independences
Screening of Festival Panafricain d’Alger by William Klein followed by a conversation between Habiba Djahnine and Viktoria Metschl. In the framework of the class The Cinema of 1968 by Christian Kravagna.
The film Festival Panafricain d’Alger by William Klein (1969) marked and was marked by Algeria’s political and cinematographic history. The film was situated at a specific and important moment of drastic upheavals in the history of the African continent and the colonized countries worldwide. Its images tell both: struggles of the past and the struggles to come.
The entire production process was realized as a collective project, the cinematography bears traces of multiple individual approaches. Those have been spreading and diversifying over the years. Our discussion reflects on the relation between images and independence(s). A relation that is a tireless questioning put forward in Habiba Djahnine’s films, since Habiba Djahnine’s entire work of documentaries retraces the continuation of liberation movements in Algeria until today.
Habiba Djahnine is an Algerian film producer, documentary filmmaker, teacher in filmmaking and poet. She is founder of the film festival Rencontres Cinématographiques de Béjaia and the documentary workshop Béjaia doc .
Viktoria Metschl is a film scholar. She recently curated the Sarah Maldoror retrospective at the Filmmuseum Vienna.