Building on our programming framework ‘Radical Films, Radical Forms’, this programme will not only examine the connection between colonialism and the climate crisis, it will also seek to ask what film forms can help us move beyond the aesthetics of spectacular environmental disaster to something more attuned to the slow and complex violence currently unfurling across our communities and the power structures which enable them. The programme has three strands are loosely organised around water, land and air -  ‘By The Water’, ‘Agri/Cultural Resistances’ and ‘Toxic colonialism’. The online programme featured nine films across these three strands alongside nine original essays that were commissioned for this online programme. This programme was first launched in April/ May of 2025.

💧 By The Water 💧

To kick it all off, we screened three short films which trace the flow of labour and extraction through rivers, oceans and water bodies. Together these films ask how we confront and undo legacies of colonialism and ecological devastation and what we can learn from waters which find their way back. Hope Pearl Strickland joining this screening event which was hosted by Hudda Khaireh. 

🌊a river holds a perfect memory (2024) by Hope Pearl Strickland
Through industrialisation and colonisation, our bodies and bodies of water are disrupted and exploited. Tracing the memory of this oppression in the waterways of Jamaica and Northern England, this film asks whether people, like water, can find a way to resist. 

🎣Night Fishing with Ancestors (2023) by Karrabing Collective 
 On the Australian coast, an indigenous community walk and fish and play whilst recalling harmonious trade with the Macassan - a peaceful moment of early contact between Asia and the indigenous communities. This is contrasted with violent, white colonialism (depicted as a zombie) which extracts, destroys and steals.

🐋4 Rivers (2018) by Arjuna Neuman & Denise Ferreira da Silva 
In this film a philosopher and a filmmaker come together to imagine the possibilities of a world without time, measurement or notions of value – a world free from the destructive consequences of the Western mind. Crossing four waters: the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, the film reminds us that water is also the usurper – breaking-up and dissolving structures in its wake. The geological rumblings of the planet still have the power to overthrow.

☢️ Toxic Colonialism ☢️

On the third and final day of the weekender, we explored colonialism as toxicity. Colonialism as a power structure that spews its poison and contaminates those who are deemed expendable. It will also document the work of those who work to expose and to resist these colonial legacies.

🔍Making the Invisible Visible hosted by Arwa Aburawa

From nuclear waste on Somali coastlines and in Palestine, to air pollution in America’s petrochemical industry around the Mississippi river, these three films examine how colonialism manifests as ecological harm and asks how do we excavate and expose these harms which seek to hide? How do we make these harms and the power structures which enable them visible?

🍃We Have Always Known The Wind’s Direction by Inas Halabi examines the possible burial of nuclear waster in the West Bank whilst grappling with all that is unpresentable on film including the invisible networks of power that control the region and harms they enact

🌊 Mo Harawe’s ‘Life On The Horn’ A quiet and moving film about the relationship between a son and father and the slow catastrophe of harm caused by illegal toxic garbage dumped in the Horn of Africa by former colonial power Italy. The film tells the story of harm, which stretches over generations, almost wordlessly through small and highly sensitive gazes, gestures & landscapes @moharawe

🗽If toxic air is a monument to slavery, how do we take it down? @ForensicArchitecture A stretch of the Mississippi River once called 'Plantation Country' is now the 'Petrochemical Corridor', known to those who breathe its toxic air as 'Death Alley'. Using advanced techniques in cartography and fluid dynamics, the team at Forensic Architecture work to support local demands for accountability and reparations.

💭Collective Conversation at 3pm - Join us for a collective discussion exploring the key themes of the weekender and the films we have seen together, with a particular focus on the role of artists and filmmakers to reveal, challenge, or complicate dominant narratives around environmental breakdown, extractivism, and historical injustice

🕊️Amussu by Nadir Bouhmouch
When a Moroccan silver mine begins to siphon and pollute local aquifers, villagers occupy the water pipeline and refuse to leave. Seven years later, they remain in their ingenious solar-powered camp, weathering arrests and intimidation while waiting for divine justice.

🎶 Evening ended with a special musical performance by composer & sound designer @samielenany
For his performance, Sami El-Enany continues his exploration of tape collage techniques as a tool for listening and reflection. The source material for the tapes are a scrapbook of exploratory recording sessions, off-cuts from his film scores, first-hand field recordings spanning exoskeletons, birds and mammals celebrating the gifts of rainfall in the grasslands of Senegal to the dawn chorus in Beit Jala, Palestine. The collage will be woven live into a conversation between tape and synthesizer.

Images used:

Praying man and hand amongst the olives via 🌿 Vivien Sansour

By the water image 🌊a river holds a perfect memory (2024) by Hope Pearl Strickland

Pink landscape via 🍃We Have Always Known The Wind’s Direction by @Inas.Halabi

Two men in black and white via 🌊 Mo Harawe’s ‘Life On The Horn’

final image is front cover of the publication

This programme was supported by Arts Council England

🌾Agri/Cultural Resistances 🌾

On day two, we explored the ways colonialism's destructive impact is resisted by reaffirming connection to the land, to the wildflowers, to each other and how agriculture can offer a different logic of living and knowing. All this forming agri/cultural resistances to the monoculture of colonialism. 

🌻 A Daily Practice / A Form of Resistance
A screening and tea-making workshop by Saeed Taji Farouky with Gamze Şanlı | Midday

Palestinian liberation is a process of simultaneously freeing the land from colonisation, and defending the continuity of Palestinian culture. Our relationship with wild plants and flowers encapsulates these parallel struggles. This strand presents three films taking three very different approaches to preserving identity and history, and building solidarity, around our relationships with the natural world. Following the screenings, anticolonial artist and performer Gamze Şanlı will lead participants through a tea-making workshop with wild plants and flowers, in which the political and folkloric traditions of the plants will be shared.

🪻The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing (2024) by Theo Panagopoulos  
When a Palestinian filmmaker based in Scotland unearths a rarely-seen Scottish film archive of Palestinian wild flowers, he decides to reclaim the footage.

🌱We Would be Freer (2023) by Rana Nazzal Hamadeh
A short film reflecting on the relationship between native plants and colonized peoples.

🌿Ahl El Thara (2025) by Vivien Sansour
For people still connected to land, to water, and to all human and non-human beings, soil is generosity itself. This is why generous people in Palestine are literally referred to as people of the soil, Ahl el Thara.

✍🏽Witnessing: A speculative creative writing workshop with @landinournames ✍🏽

👨🏿‍🌾 Xaraasi Xanne (2022) by Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré
Based on rare archives, the adventure an agricultural cooperative founded in Mali in 1977 by West African immigrant workers living in workers’ accommodation in France – sheds light on the violence of colonial agriculture & the ecological challenges in Africa today.

Hosted by Abiba Coulibaly