In Another Place, Not Here: Geographies of Resistance on Film

“Nobody here can remember when they wasn't here.” - Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here

The feeling we take is the persistence of presence amid displacement, the ways histories and memories are carried across time and space, and the impossibility of separating the past from the lives we inhabit today. The programme brings together films that explore geographies of resistance through landscape and imagined place. Moving between fiction and reality, documentation and fantasy, In Another Place, Not Here rethinks how cinema can document and resist colonial erasure, leaning into the in-betweenness of multiple pasts that are not yet past. 

Viewed together, these films travel through continents, through cities, mountains and water, to connect global struggles for relation, vitality and memory in the shadow of colonial world-making. Each holds violence and tenderness in close proximity, prompting questions around the role of beauty in documenting precarious life. 

In Another Place, Not Here presents contemporary filmmakers working with super 8 and 16mm film, engaging the materiality of the form to layer losses onto space and centre poetic memory in our attempts at resistance.

Egungun (Ancestor Can’t Find Me), dir. Cauleen Smith (2017) - 5 mins, United States 

A shell-covered sea creature swims emerges from the Gulf of Mexico and wanders island jungles and shores. The shelled creature we see wandering in this film bears traits of both male (egungun) and female (gelede) ancestors. The chasm of time, distance and violence has severed its link to the living leaving it to look and listen for traces of our lives in an endless disorienting loop. The film references the ancestor-reverent Egungun masking tradition of the Yoruba people who, indigenous to modern-day Ghana, Benin, Togo, and Nigeria, were among the many African ethnic groups captured, enslaved and sold as chattel into the Transatlantic Slave trade. 

O Peixe (The Fish), dir. Jonathas de Andrade (2016) - 23 mins, Brasil 

Located on the Northeast coast of Brazil, a village of fishermen enact a ritual of embracing the fish that they have caught. The affectionate hug that accompanies the ritual marks a passage of death and a relationship between species that is imbued with an ambiguous sequence of gestures of tenderness, violence, and domination. Between fiction and reality, documentation and fantasy, the naturalness of domination hides the root of this relationship constituted by the constant exercise of strength, power and devotion. Originally shot on 16 mm. 

Burnt Milk, dir. Joseph Douglas Elmhirst (2023) - 8mins, United Kingdom  

“When we dream, we dream in patois.” Una (Clover Webb), a Jamaican woman living in 1980s London, reveals her feelings of alienation through a poetic, patois-inflected inner monologue. As she takes a moment of solace to make the popular Caribbean dessert burnt milk, she is flooded with powerful sense memories that take her back home—visualised in an intoxicating head rush of ecstatically evocative, stream-of-consciousness imagery.

Electrical Gaza, dir. Rosalind Nashashibi (2015) - 17 mins, Palestine 

Rosalind Nashashibi’s film Electrical Gaza, 2015, recasts Gaza as an enchanted place behind sealed borders, codified through danger and division, bristling with beauty and life. Shot prior to the Israeli assault on the area in 2014, it images scenes of the region where violence is not at the centre. Viewed in 2025, the film acts as an urgent memory of bustling, everyday life in Gaza. Every so often, Nashashibi’s footage morphs into computer-modeled animations resembling children’s stories. The music, uplifting synth, that frames certain scenes feels foreign to the context and calculatedly cloying. Fixed in these filters, brushed with a knowing sentimentality, Gaza seems an impossible fiction. Originally shot on 16 mm.

A post-screening discussion will follow.

Total runtime: 1hr 12mins