Surplus Cinema invites us to convene around contemporary films, moving image and sound made by women-identifying, femmes and non-binary artists working in or near the context of Greece and its intertwining diasporas. The travelling programme gathers artists, filmmakers, writers, activists, thinkers and cultural workers to share questions around collaborative filmmaking practices (‘filming with’), camera work as care work and cinema as community action. It centers on intergenerational herstories, interrogations of the tourist gaze, filmmaking as activism, collectively authored cinema and works that strive towards decolonizing archives and memories.
Through humour and code-mixing, diasporic sisterhoods, afro confessions, queer joy and mourning, rerooting rituals, cinematic nests and sensory pleasures, this programme seeks to bridge communities and celebrate metasporic ones. Surplus Cinema echoes lived – unresolved, diasporic, wished – experiences.
Surplus Cinema is in conversation with Dimitra Kotouza’s book Surplus Citizens (2019) which analyzes the ‘superfluousness of subordinate classes’ within the context of the Greek ‘crisis’, alongside the transformative and subversive potential of collective action. Surplus means beyond the dominant or ‘acceptable’ ways of being, living and making.
In many of the films there is a questioning of national identity, reframing stale notions of peoples or narratives in this small border region, between East and West; a borderland, so often used as a pillar to define (and exclude from) the ‘European’. Surplus Cinema questions this very pillar by asking: How might feminist diasporic filmmaking operate as a gesture of unweaving oppressions to create spaces of non-hierarchical solidarity and healing? How can camera work be care work?
With a love of hybrid, handmade, messy and minor filmmaking, Surplus Cinema is an ongoing process of making space for crafting cinema as a placemaking and space-taking practice where we can nourish, dream and experience joy together in liberatory ways.
The 3-day programme includes screenings, public discussions with visiting and local filmmakers, a looped screening programme, a workshop and a mistressclass veered at decentering eurocentricism and engaging in feminist lineages of the moving image.
The programme for this first iteration of Surplus Cinema is conceived by Maria Christoforidou, Rabab El Mouadden, Christina Phoebe and Elli Vassalou.
Special thanks to Geli Mademli & Anna Asterinou.
This programme is supported by by the Flemish Community Commission (VGC), Beursschouwburg, Workspacebrussels, LUCA School of Arts and DocNomads.
