'Filming Futures'
Freiburger Filmforum 2023


This special curation in collaboration with Emergent Futures CoLab unfolds a new mode of making and viewing films. Blurring the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, this selection of films pushes us to attend to the processes, ethics, and aesthetics of improvisation and collaboration.

This movement - a new era of filmmaking layered with multimodality - invites us to engage with communities that are imagining and filming preferred futures around the world. Not only do these films center radical hope and build upon the playfulness of ‘ciné-provocation,’ but they also prompt us to act urgently in the face of rising local and global threats of all kinds. These films push us to engage with and mobilize alternative pedagogies of imagination to cope with colonialism, capitalism and climate change on an individual and community level.

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I. Hopepunk

This ‘ethno-fiction’ selection is dystopic and yet full of hope and humor. The perfect pedagogical dose for coping with colonialism, capitalism and climate change on an individual and community level.

II. Filming at the crossroads

Promises, memories, generations and traditions. This selection looks at crossroads in family life where divergent paths are negotiated through the process of filmmaking.

III. (De)Construction

This selection situates the viewer in an otherworldly time where construction workers are wandering through the forest and half-built homes are being taken over by the filmmakers.

IV. Playful Dystopias

This selection invites the viewers to co-perform in their absurdist and playful atmospheres, where filmmakers and actors are speculating future possibilities of self-acceptance. Accompanied by a “climate spa” commercial!