This Land Is Your Land?

If this decade’s been about anything so far, it’s been a reckoning of how the past informs the future and how the decisions of our ancestors are currently wrenching our world apart.

This month we present a film series selected to help frame how we think about the land and our uncom­fortable rela­tionship with the colonial past and present.

Here, our Cinema Programme Manager, Claire Vaughan tells us more about this series of films and discussions:

“Sugarcane looks at the Native people of North America and how a recent invest­ig­ation brought to light open secrets about how their people were treated, allowing wounds to begin to heal. The accom­pa­nying films Blood Quantum and From Cherry English and talk demon­strates how Mi’gMaq filmmaker Jeff Barnaby took this gen­er­a­tional trauma to create subversive worlds that allowed him to reclaim his heritage in a surprising way.

In Gaza: A Story of Love and War we meet Mike Joseph, a Welsh Jewish man whose family had been expelled from Europe and promised sanctuary, only for this act to further displace Palestinian people. With a com­pas­sionate heart he puts away the violent posturing of military leaders and gets to know other humans across the divide.

Finally, we have the exquisite, poetic documentary Dahomey, where Mati Diop looks at the repat­ri­ation of royal treasures from a kingdom which no longer exists. The tectonic movements of empires have erased the land, leaving these powerful objects sitting out of time and place.

A set of beautiful films that we hope will help us all to consider how we move forward with care, because unless we confront the past we are condemned to repeat it.”