United Screens: Think Well Nr2

UNITED SCREENS THINK WELL will manifest its second iteration in February in Tunisia. Over the course of three days, the exchanges will bring together cinema practitioners, researchers and technologists from Tunisia and beyond to rethink questions of film circulation, aesthetics and space in future imaginaries powered by the perspective of the youth. Embracing a hybrid format, we depart from the experiences of the Tunisian cinephilia networks in the 1960s and 1970s and their vast Cine Club and Amateur Film Society circulation cultures to the spirit of post-2011 film production and dissemination technologies. Many of us believe in strengthening collectivities with radical use of technology such that collectivities shape the technologies that they work with and in turn technologies strengthen collective practices. THINK WELLS are conceived as solution oriented incubators for filmmakers, curators, scholars, artists and technologists to design, hosted by the United Screens network. The term “THINK WELL” is a vocal resistance coined by South African writer, playwright, filmmaker Puleng Lange-Stewart diverting from etymology which resonates with overtones of crisis and desperation (think tanks). She urges us to move towards a “well” where we can find respite, collectively. Believing that our groundwaters are connected, United Screens THINK WELLS initiates flows between cinema practitioners, filmmakers from the Global South to imagine a new film ecosystem powered by community-led technological imaginaries.

Our host this time is L’Association de Volontariats, Echange Culturel et action des jeunes (AVEC) – a cultural non-governmental organisation that is leading the project as a youth organization that is interested in creating South-to-South collaboration between Tunisian youth through culture. Primarily having worked on the cultural exchanges between youth in mediterrianian, now AVEC is looking to expand their outreach to youths through cinema.

UNITED SCREENS is a long term research, networking and exhibition project, conceived at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, that intends to create a platform through which a network of community cinema programmers can be enabled to screen quality alternative cinema and video art. These films would be hosted on a de-centrally curated database of alternative cinema/video art. We are working towards a new technology-based platform to distribute independent films produced across the Global South, comprising of African and Asian continents at large, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Indian subcontinent.

Drawing from the combined spirit of the anti-neocolonial Third Cinema proposition of South America, film cooperatives of Indian subcontinent, avant-garde movements of Eastern Europe, as well as, decolonial resistances of the African continent, we at SAVVY Contemporary were inspired to look into cinema practices active in the contemporary “Global South”, and inquire into the challenges and opportunities in their transnational exhibition.

UNITED SCREENS aspires to become a decentralised, yet peer-reviewed and peer-promoted think-tank on film cultures from the Global South.

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