We are delighted to announce this new version of the festival, after a year off. This year we focus on the following themes: women’s’ struggles, land struggles, queer struggles and Kurdistan.
The film festival aims to open a window to local realities in the context of current capitalist globalization. More than 30 recent films have been selected to make visible the emancipatory nature of social resistance within global power systems. With discussions, inputs, workshops and a party, the festival wants to be an interactive place of exchange, dialogue and mutual learning.
In the current moment of the capitalist globalization in which we are, fascism in many countries of the world acquires more strength. Germany is not a country alien to this strengthening of fascism: in the last parliamentary elections the neo-fascist party AFD managed to enter parliament. In addition, we are witnessing more and more frequent demonstrations of neo-Nazis in the streets of different German cities and, more recently, the events in Chemnitz warning us that the rise of fascism is increasingly a greater threat. That is why we will show the documentary “The Antifascists” and that the workshop we will offer at the festival will be about this topic.
We are living also with an increase in the gender gap and as a result, greater exploitation and violence against women, particularly black women, women of colour, trans women, working class women and disabled women. This exploitation and violence manifests in diverse way: double work day; precarity at work; increased sexual violence against women, primarily in the context of war and with the most violent consequence being femicide; and in the fact that it is women’s bodies and non-heteronormative bodies and sexualities that suffer the consequences of religious fundamentalism, wherever it is expressed.
The 21st Century, such as we see in the Kurdish women’s struggles, has shown us that women are a fundamental political actor that social movements cannot do without.
The Kurdish resistance represents an important and current benchmark in anti-capitalist struggles. Through the principles of democratic confederalism and women’s liberation rooted in its own context and history, named Jineoloji, the Kurdish movement shows that the liberation of the people goes hand in hand with the liberation of women. Through revolution, it is necessary to build horizontal and democratic grassroots governance systems.
Since its beginnings, capitalism has made use of collective land ownership, as it does with women’s bodies, for commercial purposes. In this current stage of capitalism that we refer to as neoliberal globalisation, the forces of the free market, supported by governments, multinationals and paramilitaries, increases daily the dispossession of land, and the life happening within it. It exercises more violence towards the inhabitants of the dispossessed land.
However, since the establishment of capitalism the struggles for collective land ownership has been ongoing. Indigenous, peasant farmer and afro-descendant communities, particularly in the global south, are bringing about struggles to defend their territory. These struggles are also struggles for dignified and more autonomous lives.
We wish for you a festival full of learning, exchanges and new possibilities to continue our struggle and solidarity.
Globale Berlin Team
A Film Festival for Documentaries Critical of Globalisation