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SURPLUS CINEMAS [film programming, workshop and collective research] 2021 – present
Feminisms and filmmaking in the context of Greece and intertwining diasporas https://beursschouwburg.be/en/events/surplus-cinema/ Through humour and code-mixing, diasporic sisterhoods, afro confessions, queer joy and mourning, rerooting rituals, cinematic nests and the pleasures of the sensorial, this program seeks to bridge communities and celebrate metasporic ones. Surplus Cinema echoes lived – unresolved, diasporic, wished - experiences. Surplus Cinema invites us to convene around contemporary films, moving image and sound made by women-identifying, femmes and non-binary artists working in or near the context of Greece and intertwining diasporas. The traveling program gathers artists, filmmakers, writers, activists, thinkers and cultural workers to share questions around collaborative filmmaking practices (‘filming with’), camera work as care work and cinema as community action. It centers intergenerational herstories, interrogations of the tourist gaze, filmmaking as activism, collectively authored cinema and works striving towards decolonizing archives and memories. Surplus Cinema is in conversation with Dimitra Kotouza’s book Surplus Citizens (2019) which analyzes the ‘superfluousness of subordinate classes’ within the context of the Greek ‘crisis’, alongside the transformative and subversive potential of collective action. Surplus means beyond the dominant or ‘acceptable’ ways of being, living and making. In many of the films there is a questioning, through the margins, of national identity, reframing stale notions of peoples or narratives in this small border region, between east and west; a borderland, so often used as a pillar to define (and exclude from) the ‘European’. Surplus Cinema questions this very pillar by asking: How might feminist diasporic filmmaking operate as a gesture of unweaving oppressions to create spaces of non-hierarchical solidarity and healing? How can camera work be care work? With a love of hybrid, handmade, messy and minor filmmaking, Surplus Cinema is an ongoing process of making space for crafting cinema as a placemaking and space-taking practice where we can nourish, dream and experience joy together in liberatory ways. The 3-day program includes screenings, public discussions with visiting and local filmmakers, an ongoing program in the Black Box, a workshop and a mistressclass veered at decentering eurocentricism and engaging in feminist lineages of the moving image. 23-25 November 2022@ beursschouwburg, Brussels, Belgium The program for this first iteration of Surplus Cinema is conceived by Maria Christoforidou, Rabab El Mouadden, Christina Phoebe and Elli Vassalou. This program is supported by VGC, Beursschouwburg, Workspacebrussels, LUCA School of Arts and DocNomads.