Rita Macedo and Kerstin Stakemeier’s review of the 25th edition of Doc’s Kingdom, titled “A Collective / Inarticulate Harmony: A report on the film seminar Doc’s Kingdom (Odemira, November 14 to 19 2025)”, is out now in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy 2.21:
“It was this gradient of divergent anti-capitalist convictions, reaching from struggles over modernity and the domain over its doubtful progressions, to struggles with modernity and its destitution and primitivisation of local sense/s, that characterised the programme of this Portugal-based film seminar, which took its 2025 title from a poem by Sean Bonney, ‘A Collective / Inarticulate Harmony’ and took place in Odemira from the 14th to the 19th of November 2025. Under the direction of Catarina Boieiro and Stefanie Baumann, this edition dedicated exclusively to collective forms of documentary film making, was curated by Raquel Schefer and Rita Morais. The six-day program brought together the work of six collectives, Grupo Zero, Ogawa Productions, CAMP, Sueli and Isael Maxakali with collaborators, Mujeres Creando and Video Tracts for Palestine, all producing formats of filmic struggle with and over modernity.”
By way of a preamble on the cooperative Cinéma du Peuple active between 1913-14, the review dips into the history of film collectives itself and the promise of a counter history of the relation between film, collectives, and land destitution. Macedo and Stakemeier go on to detail each collective’s work in relation to tensions around land grabs, extractivism, and genocidal violence, comparing their use of documentary film and archives to the historic complicity of cinema has largely had within such brutal processes associated with forced modernization—one that is historically invested in the flattening of the subjects considered amodern (a term Macedo and Stakemeier propose). The review offers analyses and comparisons of the resistance struggles at stake in many of the collectives present in the last edition—and their relation with and against documentary as a record of struggle.
Rita Macedo is a filmmaker and educator who teaches at the Brunswick University of Arts and programmes for the European Media Arts Festival (Osnabrück).
Kerstin Stakemeier is a writer and educator who teaches at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and writes in Berlin.