SESSIONS

Session 1: 
Savanna and the Mountain
April 16 - 19.30h at BAK Basecamp
Pauwstraat 13a, 3512 TG Utrecht


Savanna and the Mountain (Paulo Carneiro, 2024, Portugal) is a hybrid documentary that follows the villagers of Covas do Barroso, Portugal, as they creatively resist Savannah Resources, a British company planning a massive open-cast lithium mine in the region, through musical performances and Western-inspired staging.

The screening is organised and facilitated by Salomé Lopes Coelho (Utrecht University) and is followed by a conversation with Aida Fernandes (Chairperson of the Covas do Barroso Communal Lands Council and member of the United in Defense of Covas do Barroso anti-mining association) and Diana Vela Almeida (Utrecht University).

↩︎  GO BACK                             FILM SERIES

Long entangled with visual complexes of European colonial modernity, cinema has shaped what can be made visible and sayable about worlds, their human and other-than-human inhabitants, and their relationships – mapping, measuring, and mediating territories to be surveyed and used, tearing beings from the relationalities that constitute them. Yet it can also unsettle this way of seeing, insisting on the continuities extraction seeks to sever.

The Film Series, Projecting Post-extractivism brings together collaborative documentaries and essay films that, through formal and sensorial experimentation, hold cinema accountable for its complicities while affirming it as a territory of inquiry and political-affective resistance to extractive violence. Working with archives, Indigenous worldviews, and situated struggles, these films trace extractivism as a visual and colonial capitalist regime – from green extractivism in Portugal, to early industrial and oil corporate archives in Iran, and to contemporary illegal mining violence in Yanomami territories in Amazonia – enacting, through cinema, worlds and ways of being, feeling, and knowing that colonial modernity has rendered expendable or extractible. Central to the series are cinema's own capacities, in which formal and aesthetic choices are integral to opening post-extractivist world-configurations — rendering extractive violence perceptible while affectively and collectively composing alternatives. 

The series unfolds across three sessions of film screenings followed by a conversation:


Session 1 – 16 April, 19.30 | Savanna and the Mountain (Paulo Carneiro, Portugal, 2024, 1h17'). Guests: Aida Fernandes and Diana Vela Almeida. At BAK – Basecamp

Session 2 – 26 May, 17.00 | One Image, Two Acts (Sanaz Sohrabi, Iran, 2020, 45') + Scenes of Extraction (Sanaz Sohrabi, Iran, 2023, 43'). Guest: Filmmaker Sanaz Sohrabi (online). At Muntstraat 2A

Session 3 – June | The Falling Sky (Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha & Eryk Rocha, Brazil, 2024, 1h50'). [More details soon]



The film series operates within the Moving [Images] Post-Extractivism year-long programme curated and led by Salomé Lopes Coelho, as part of the ERC project Ecologies of Violence, in collaboration with the Network for Environmental Humanities and the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies at Utrecht University. 

MOVING IMAGES POST-EXTRACTIVISM , A programme by Salomé Lopes Coelho