we are all grievers

we are all grievers is an international short-film selection that portrays the intersection of grief and identity. There are many factors influencing the ways in which we experience and engage with grief and death, making each individual encounter with grief different. Through the films of Cihan Çakmak, Kardo Shiwan, Miku Sato and Tom K Kemp, we are allowed to come close to the personal stories of grief and death and how the identities of those who encounter it influence their experience.

Can fur have memory? The short film explores family memories, melancholy and intergenerational grief. Through a poetic engagement with the topic of grief and intergenerationality we see the lead player in the film run, play tag and dance. The activities are reminiscent of childhood while they are executed by spirits. 

As a child of two cultures, the experience of liminal spaces has always been present in my life. As long as I remember I have been asking questions of where I belong and who I am in many languages - Kurdish, Turkish and Finnish. As a child it confused me but with age I have realized that through language the world expands and is structured in different ways, and for me art creates space to process different questions. For a very long time I felt like a rootless tree swaying in different directions until one day I realized my own roots. Through my parents I can see both visible and invisible roots, roots which go back a long way in time.

The experimental film Where I left you takes us through the memories and emotions of a departure. The film's two characters go through various phases of turmoil and grief in Çakmak's emotionally charged vignettes. The recordings stand on their own, are limited to telling individual actions and gestures, rather than a conventional story. Çakmak draws from the universal experience of abandonment but also points to the personal effects of oppression and family-dividing behaviors that underlie this. At the core of the work, these gestures of political anger and indignation are complemented by autofictionally details of transgenerational trauma experiences (identity shaping), which manifest themselves as narratives of dreams in the voiceover of the film, as well as in the partly whispered, partly broken voice in which Çakmak and the players reproduce this violence. 

The ultimate goal of the Olympics is to promote human development and world peace through sports. In response to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Miku Sato, who currently resides in Amsterdam, decided to look into the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics. 𝘎𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘴 𝘎𝘰𝘵 𝘎𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘴 features a Jewish survivor, Elka de Levie, who was a Dutch women's national gymnastics team member. There were five Jewish girls in the team, but four of them were killed by the Nazis during World War II. This work depicts the life of one of the gymnasts who pioneered in women’s sports and survived the war, moving back and forth between the past and present through her granddaughters narration. The film looks into repetitions: generations, life, sports and genocides.

A group of specialists in systemic change wake to find themselves dead and in a hell of their own imagining. Over a series of meetings, they attempt to apply what they know and believe in to improve societal and material conditions in the afterlife. The underworld, typically a timeless realm of subjects without will, takes on a newfound mutability. Potential projects of deathly reform emerge from an abundance of analysis, blending sincere idealism, societal analogy, behavioral modeling, historical record, and metaphysics. By assigning political agency to the totality of all the dead people in human history, the film draws links between the infernal imaginary and contemporary systems modeling. Ideas of the rational actor, the subject or the agent become unraveled, leading to a shared refusal of both the conditions of the dead world, and ultimately those of the living.

This event is part of the Dear Society, bimonthly grieving circle.