Learning again, or learning for the first time, how to become water – PLJ ONLINE OUTREACH PROGRAMME

As part of its festival outreach activities, Pravo Ljudski Film Festival Sarajevo presents its 1st online outreach programme: Learning again, or learning for the first time, how to become water.

In scientific terms, Water is seen as the beginning of life 3.5 billion years ago, while in the current anthropocentric capitalist view, it’s a lifeless and colourless resource that serves our fallacy of supremacy. We build large and small-scale river dams, embankments, channels and drain systems. And thus, bodies, human, other-than-human and inhuman are drying out as we pump in the earth. Bodies, human, other-than-human and inhuman are drowning in rising seas and rising temperatures as we pump in the air. Bodies, human, other-than-human and inhuman are poisoned and prematurely dying as we pump in water.

Just as humans are mostly composed of water, three-quarters of the other-than-human and inhuman are wet and blue. Water infiltrates and inhabits the air we breathe and the land we cultivate. As humans, we have no exclusive claim to water. We are bodies of water, just as rivers, trees and all other other-than-human and inhuman.

Within the festival outreach programme, we will try to rise to the questions above, through cinema. The diptych Land Underwater and Above 592 Metres, directed by Maddi Barber, focuses on the building of the Itoiz Dam in Spain and the consequences to the ecosystem and the human, other-than-human and inhuman around it. Following the hydropower problem, Carolina Caycedo’s film We River puts in relation to the second-largest hydroelectric dam “Itaipu Dam ” in Brazil with the indigenous community’s resistance and resilience to overcome this unprecedented environmental disaster. Liliana Colombo’s film Icemeltland Park shows the melting of the ice caps just as another spectacle for humans to admire, while the rising of the sea levels which consequently threatens cities to be underwater is the background of the spectacle, and probably all of the human spectacles.

The programme is curated by in-house programmers Kumjana Novakova and Diogo Pereira. It starts on June 9, and all films can be seen on the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival Sarajevo website. All screenings are open worldwide!