THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY: DOING ARCHIVES DIFFERENTLY
Screenings, conversations, interventions
„It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.“ – Saidiya Hartman.
The present inherits the past through the memories, texts, images and films that are preserved and passed down, from one generation to the next. In this way, the Eurocentric, imperialist and misogynistic perspectives that dominated the past persist, flattening non-European geographies and migrant realities in the here and now.
In THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY: DOING ARCHIVES DIFFERENTLY, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA and the the DFF join forces with artists, filmmakers, archivists and activists to ask: How do patterns of power travel through film history and film archives? How might these patterns be disrupted? How can narratives be revised and reframed to tell a different story in the future? This two-year project aims to question and update practices of collecting, presenting, and mediating film.
Through screenings, talks, and lectures, the program invites critical examination of existing film archival practices and perspectives. With events taking place in Frankfurt and Berlin across 2025 and 2026, the program aims to challenge the notion of a national film heritage, platform neglected and erased film histories, and create space for post-migrant and transnational voices.
Furthermore, the program will be extended through a reader published in 2026 which will combine commissioned texts, interviews, and creative contributions from a broad range of voices.
Highlighting film as a socio-political amplifier and cinema as a space of sociality, reception, discourse and production, join us as we seek ways of doing archives differently.
THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY is a two-year project by SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA and DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum, funded by the Hauptstadtkulturfonds Berlin and the City of Frankfurt (as part of the project "The Perspective of Migration and the Archives of the DFF," based on an idea by Hüseyin Sitki).