"The history of cinema is the history of the power to create history".
Jacques Ranciere
Who Knows What Yesterday Will Bring? is a program of films, talks and online content from South-East Europe which brings together stories from different corners of the region with the aim of creating a valuable, necessary and enriching polyphonic critical discourse on our shared and contested histories.
The program’s title is inspired by a cynical maxim from the Stalinist period suggestive of the constant surprises the past holds for us, it’s uncertain and ambiguous impact on the unfolding of our futures, our utter helplessness to predict. The movies selected in this program refer to the history of the 20th century and its indelible imprint on our collective memory, what the historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) called “historical mythology”. He argued that historic ‘reality’ is best understood through the prism of an era and a social class, whilst collective memory is shaped primarily by social contexts.
Using these thoughts as a starting point, Who Knows What Yesterday will Bring? will ask key questions such as how much do we in the Balkans know about our overlapping histories, contested narratives and multiple perspectives? How are these shared histories represented through images and what new urgent stories can we tell? And truly, who knows what else yesterday will bring?
The films selected will tackle, sometimes with poetry, at times out-right humor, curiosity and sense of derision, decisive issues such as common conflicts of the past, how they still undermine regional understanding, alongside how history can be endlessly read, re-read and re-written; how at a moment when civil societies seem increasingly fragile it is important to remember, critique and simultaneously reimagine our future.
The program’s format will include live screenings (features, documentaries and experimental films) and online publications (texts, podcasts and videos) which function as the critical framework for the films screened. Starting in Tavros Spring 2022, this itinerant program will travel throughout neighborhood countries.
A program organized by the non-profit organisations AIN (France) and locus athens (Greece).
A film program curated by Delphine Leccas and online publications curated by Maria Thalia Carras and Delphine Leccas, in collaboration with festivals and art centers such as Dokufest in Prizren, Harabel contemporary art platform in Tirana, The Institute of Contemporary Art – ICA in Sofia, MakeDox and Museum of Contemporary Art-MoCA in Skopje, Subversive Festival in Zagreb and Festival Europe autour de l’Europe in Paris.
With the kind support of Melina Mercouri Foundation and Tavros-Moschato Municipality.
Supported by Goethe-Institut Athen.
