Fires in Paradise

Programme

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  Ningwasum (Subash Thebe Limbu, NP 2021, 40’)

  Ningwasum is a Yakthung science fiction documentary film narrated by Miksam, a time traveller from a future Indigenous Nation. Ningwasum follows two time travellers in the Himalayas, Miksam and Mingsoma, weaving indigenous folk stories, culture, climate change and science fiction.
  
  The film explores notion of time, space and memory, and how realities and the sense of now could be different for different communities. Drawing from Adivasi Futurism and inspired by Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism, Ningwasum imagines a future from an Indigenous perspective where they have agency, technology, sovereignty and also their indigenous knowledge, culture, ethics and storytelling still intact.
  
  The work was mostly shot in Sherpa Nation, Yakthung Nation and Newa Nation, in what we currently know as Nepal.

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  The Sounds of Cannons (Tuan Andrew Nguyen, VN 2021, 10’)

  The bombing of several regions in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the Vietnam War (1955 to 1975) by the United States Armed Forces—what is considered the largest aerial bombardment in human history—left hundreds of thousands of unexploded ordnances hidden underground.
  
  The film follows one of the unexploded ordnances and gives it a voice through an animistic transformation. From its drop, to its detonation in the rainforests of Vietnam, it offers closure to a menacing narrative that had been on hold for decades.

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  UNDR (Kamal Aljafari, PS/DE 2024, 15’)

  The camera's eye returns obsessively to the same places, a vertical perspective that imposes control, the possession of archaeological sites, stones lying for thousands years in the desert. The places it observes, however, are not deserted: we see, as if glimpsed from afar, the peasants working the land, themselves transformed into landscape. Something disturbs the stillness of the place: explosions on land and in the sea prepare the ground for new cities with new names, new forests.

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  Salt (Mateusz Miszczyński, JO 2024, 6’)

  Salt features two Palestinian boys - Qais and Firas. Shot on the coast of the Dead Sea, with the view of Palestine across the water, this film is guided by the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. The 'deadliness' of the Dead Sea paradoxically sustains life by bringing it to the surface. The deeper one goes into its depths, the greater the force that pushes it upwards, mirroring the resilience of Palestinian freedoms.