8 months ago
The Network of Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS) and SAVVY Contemporary’s United Screens are pleased to announce Think Well 3.0: Toward Sympoietic Systems for Film Circulation, a symposium which will take place at Flutgraben Berlin from September 30 to October 2.
Think Well 3.0 continues to take cue from reflections on film cultures powered by community practices. Over three days film practitioners and system thinkers will come together to imagine tools, methodologies, value metrics and network logics for the circulation of alternative cinema and video art. Flutgraben will be our playground to experiment with simulated scenarios, marked with rich discussions, and moments of collective decision making. Think Well 3.0 takes on an immersive game format to help us address issues common and urgent to all of us, and weighs on our collective intelligence and imaginaries to mandate – sympoietically – for a film circulation ecosystem that encompasses a pluriverse of stories.
Think Well is a vocal resistance coined by South African writer, playwright, filmmaker Puleng Lange-Stewart diverting from etymology which resonated with overtones of crisis and desperation (think tank). She urges us to move towards a “well” where we can find respite, collectively. Believing that our groundwaters are connected, Think Well initiates flows between cinema practitioners and filmmakers from the South to imagine a new film ecosystem powered by community-led technological imaginaries.
With keynote speeches by Tiara Roxanne, Jean Pierre Bekolo, and Kwago Publishing, and discussions between Cem Dagdelen and Julio Linarez, Fanny Huc and Mohamed Frini.
Curation by Laura Kloeckner, Abhishek Nilamber, Jowe Harfouche, & Sabine Abi Saber.
Game Design by Pekko Koskinen & Salam Yousry.
In collaboration with Economic Space Agency/ XORG, Wekalet Behna (Egypt), AVEC – L’Association de Volontariats, Échange Culturel et Action des Jeunes (Tunisia), Estación Terrena (Colombia), and ARKIPEL - Jakarta International Documentary and Experimental Film Festival (Indonesia).
The speeches will be streamed via SAVVY Contemporary's YouTube and Facebook accounts.
Established more than ten years ago, NAAS champions long-term collaboration and solidarity among a growing constellation of initiatives and spaces that maintain community around film. With a belief in the urgency of alternative narratives and the experience of watching film collectively, NAAS provides opportunities and resources for the cinema sector to cultivate critical thinking and dialogue among audiences across the Arabic-speaking region.
UNITED SCREENS is a long-term research, networking, and exhibition project conceived by SAVVY Contemporary - The Laboratory of Form Ideas intending to create an alliance of community cinema programmers, both loving independent film and sharing realities of political and economic fragility. Through this project, United Screens aims to critically examine and reimagine technologies, methodologies, value metrics and network logics for community cinema to circulate alternative films and video art across the South. Drawing lessons from the combined spirit of the anti-neocolonial Third Cinema proposition of South America, film cooperatives of South Asia, avant-garde movements of Eastern Europe, as well as decolonial resistances of the African continent, United Screens aspires to be a decentralized, peer-promoted think-well on film culture.
