In the darkness of a mine in the Congo, where the voices of the workers are usually ignored, we strive to give weight to language. Between national archives and the intimate, unspoken memories of families, exploitation and suffering remain deliberately buried. Through the fusion of memory and resistance, the voices of Angola’s freedom are added to the historical record. The body and the voice are our most precious resources. We exploit them like a mine. Three films that explore the interplay between the body, the voice and extractivism. (Matti Ullrich)
Rooted in an ancestral ecological perspective, the film traces the entanglements between the Congo’s geological landscapes and Black bodies across global circuits of extraction, proposing cinema not simply as representation, but as a listening practice – where the land speaks, remembers, and resists.
Listening to what has been silenced, the film becomes an offering made in collaboration with the unseen, asking what the earth remembers – and whether that memory might still hold the key to a future worth imagining.
… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
- Director: Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
When the filmmaker asks her father about her Swiss grandfather’s gold mines, he answers clearly: all the documents were burned, nothing remains, it must be forgotten. Her grandfather, Hans Mazenauer, was connected to Mobutu Sese Seko and the mining business in former Zaire during the 1980s. As she attempts to retrace his trade, the void in the family archives begins to echo a broader societal question.
The film questions the ethics of inheritance, Switzerland’s involvement in extractivism, and the boundary between remembering and letting go.… >>>
Premiere:
German Premiere
Nominated:
Goldener Key
African liberation reimagined through layered, research-based storytelling, merging memory, resistance, and the reclamation of voices long silenced by official histories. This film presents documentary testimonies from freedom fighters who took part in Angola’s armed struggle for independence from Portuguese colonial rule and the subsequent civil war. Their accounts unfold within a sculptural form inspired by the Black Star – a symbol of African freedom, unity, and leadership – transforming the space into both a memorial and a site of dialogue.… >>>
- Director: Mónica de Miranda
