Spell Reel: A Filipa César Showcase

With a series of conspicuously brilliant short works and her 2017 feature debut Spell Reel, Portugal-born, Berlin-based César has emerged as one of the most exciting, rigorous, and conscientious practitioners of the essay film format since the deaths of Harun Farocki and Chris Marker, the latter a key influence on César. Central to her body of work, which includes 16mm films, videos, writings, and extensive pedagogical work, is the history of Portuguese colonial rule in Africa and the African Liberation Movement in Guinea-Bissau. In Spell Reel, for example, César documents the preservation of documentary works showing the country’s war of independence from a revolutionary perspective by Guinea-Bissauan filmmakers—two of whom, Sana Na N’Hada and Flora Gomes, we see embarking on the 2014 mobile tour that helped share their archive with Guinean audiences for the first time. Films displaying a rare diligence and openness to collaboration, concerning the excavation of cinema, the excavation of lived experience, and the link between the two.

Program sponsored by Video Data Bank