About the Film Program
After the end of Imperial Germany, colonial-racist fantasies and ambitions were increasingly transformed into an imaginary coloniality. Their cinematic stagings not only delighted a mass audience, but also led to an ambiguous overlapping of fiction and reality. Not only film sets but film production and consumption also became cultural colonial spaces. This film, lecture and discussion program is a pioneering exploration of the “wild cosmopolitan metropolis Berlin in the Golden Twenties” as a colonial cultural space with (anti-)Asian references. At the same time, the decolonial debate will be expanded to include anti-Asian racism and orientalism, and thus becoming more multi-perspectival. A book is planned for the end of 2023 (Assoziation A).
Speakers
Joshua Kwesi Aikins is a political scientist, co-author of the Afro Census and a research associate in the Department of Development Policy and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Kassel. His research interests include cultural and political representation of the African diaspora, coloniality and the politics of memory.
Sun-ju Choi studied literature at the University of Cologne and screenwriting at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin. Her dissertation, Vater Staat und Mutter Partei: Familienkonzepte und Repräsentation von Familie im nordkoreanischen Film was published in 2017. She serves as an honorary member of the board of directors for ndo e.V. and korientation e.V.
Dr. Kien Nghi Ha, cultural and political scientist, is a Postdoc researcher of Asian German Studies at the University of Tübingen. Numerous publications on postcolonial critism, racism and migration. Most recently he edited Asiatische Deutsche Extended. Vietnamesische Diaspora and Beyond (Assoziation A, 2012/2021). https://uni-tuebingen.de/de/208381
Anujah Fernando is a cultural scholar based in Berlin. Her work centers on topics related to migration and colonialism in research-based exhibitions and publications as well as in documentary film projects. Most recently, she co-curated the exhibition Despite All: Migration to the Colonial Metropolis of Berlin at the FHXB Museum.
Merle Kröger works as a writer and dramaturge in Berlin and is part of pong Film. She is a university lecturer in Halle and Mainz and works as curator for the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art. She has published five novels, including Grenzfall (2012), Havarie (2015), and Die Experten (2021). www.merlekroeger.de
Jürgen Kurz is an improvisation artist. After studying at the Hochschulefür Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin, he made a name for himself as a composer, theater musician (including Volksbühne) and pianist.
Yumin Li is a cultural historian whose dissertation examines Anna May Wong's career spanning several decades on four continents. Together with the collective andcompany&Co. she is developing the theater performance Shanzhai Express, which playfully deals with Anna May Wong (premiere 10.6.2023 at Volksbühne Berlin).
Tobias Nagl is a film and music critic, DJ and since 2007 has been Associat Professor of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. Publications: The Uncanny Machine: Race and Representation in Weimar Cinema (2009) and European Vision: Small Cinemas in Transition (2015).
Dr. Subin Nijhawan is a research associate at the Institute of English and American Studies at Goethe University Frankfurt. He is specialized in didactic research on global justice, cosmopolitanism and sustainable development, including decolonial approaches to world history
Philip Scheffner is part of the Berlin production platform/collective pong. His feature-length artistic documentaries The Halfmoon Files (2007), The Day of the Sparrow (2010), Revision (2012), And-Ek Ghes... (2016), Havarie (2016), and Europe (2022) have been screened worldwide and won numerous awards. He is professor for Documentary Practices at the KHM Cologne.
Qinna Shen is Associate Professor of German at Bryn Mawr College. She is currently working on two monographs: Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion and Film and Cold War Diplomacy: China and the Two Germanys, 1949-1989, as well as co-editing a volume New Narratives of Asian-German Film History.
Dr. Gülşah Stapel studied urban and regional planning at the TU Berlin with a focus on historic preservation. Her research expertise lies in the study of identity and heritage construction in public space and Berlin
urban history. Since 2020, she has worked as an outreach curator for the Berlin Wall Foundation.
Hito Steyerl is professor of experimental film and video at the Berlin University of the Arts. She is a media artist, filmmaker, cultural critic and theorist. Her internationally renowned media-, technology- and culture-critical works have been awarded numerous prizes. Dr. Kimiko Suda works at the Technical University of Berlin on institutional racism in Germany. She is an active member of korientation e.V. and interested in decolonial/antiracist memory culture. From 2011-2017, she co-directed the Asian Film Festival Berlin with Dr. Sun-ju Choi.
