Scattered Bodies of Cinema

The short film program considers the uneven infrastructures of the global archival system that shape what survives, what remains inaccessible, and what is lost.

In 1967, Ahmed Bouanani was reassigned to the archive department of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain (CCM), effectively preventing him from directing. He collected and classified material left behind by the French, and secretly began THAKIRAH ARBA'AT 'ASHAR, constructed entirely from archival footage and tracing Morocco’s history from colonization to the present.

J'AI RENCONTRÉ L'ARBRE À PAIN, the fourth episode of the French television series Botaniques, was filmed in Puerto Limón, Costa Rica. Focusing on the breadfruit tree and its histories of forced migration through slavery, the film foregrounds struggles over the ownership of the commons. The tree’s diasporic histories mirror the material condition of Sarmiento’s exile film archive, whose fragments constitute what Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto calls a “scattered body.” In THE FLOWERS STAND SILENTLY, WITNESSING, Greek-Lebanese-Palestinian filmmaker Theo Panagopoulos encounters a collection of moving images from the British Mandate in the audiovisual archive of the National Library of Scotland. Having to pay for access exposes the unequal ownership structures through which a Palestinian filmmaker is forced to buy back images of his homeland from an imperial archive.

Films:

THAKIRAH ARBA'AT 'ASHAR(Mémoire 14), R: Ahmed Bouanani, Morocco 1971, DCP, 24 min., original version with English subtitles
J'AI RENCONTRÉ L'ARBRE À PAIN (I Found the Breadfruit Tree), R: Valeria Sarmiento, Costa Rica, France 1982, 7 min., DCP, original version with English subtitles 
THE FLOWERS STAND SILENTLY, WITNESSING, R: Theo Panagopoulos, UK 2024, 17 min., DCP, original version with English subtitles

Nikolaus Perneczky is a Teaching Associate at Cambridge Digital Humanities. He is a film and media scholar and curator whose work examines audiovisual heritage, archival governance, and media infrastructures across uneven global contexts shaped by colonial legacies and contemporary inequalities. His work has appeared in Black Camera (2022), Public (2025), and Feminist Media Histories (2026), among others. With Cecilia Valenti, he is co-editor of Restitution and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2026).

Cecilia Valenti is an Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Recent publications include an article on Ateyyat Al Abnoudy and transnational coproduction in public television in Germany (2025) and on the militant film manifestos of the 1930s Workers Film and Photo League (2025). Currently she is working on a book on global-critical perspectives on television and film coproductions. With Nikolaus Perneczky, she is co-editor of Restitution and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2026).