BASTA. Films that don’t exist do exist

Performed lecture by Léa Morin

Friday 29 May, 9pm

Casa do Comum — Rua da Rosa 285, Lisbon

(Public event in the framework of The Ongoing Seminar #02)

In this performance-lecture, researcher and curator Léa Morin brings together an assemblage of absent images and marginalised cinematic narratives – the non-existent film Basta by Moroccan left-wing leader Mehdi Ben Barka, Łódź Film School (or the ‘star sowers’ of Moroccan cinema), the missing films of Madeleine Beauséjour from Reunion Island, and manifestos for a post-independence decolonial cinema.

From these interwoven fragments, Morin forms a narrative from which multiple questions emerge: How can we archive films that do not exist? What place can we find in our histories of cinema for breaths, desires, and wounds? How might we care for these damaged or absent works without erasing them or denying the struggles in which they were forged? Through sharing movements and materials—including films, images, documents, and photographs—this is an attempt to trace historical contours and rethink our practices; to move toward the collective and link, associate, compose, and articulate, rather than divide.

Léa Morin is a film curator and independent researcher. She is particularly interested in the circulation (across time and geography) of ideas, forms, aesthetics and political and artistic struggles. Grounded in a political and collective approach to archival work, she militates for the preservation of fragile cinematic archives—suppressed, unfinished, or non-aligned cinemas. She is active in several collectives, including the Bouanani Archives: A History of Cinema in Morocco (Rabat), Talitha, an association engaged in the re-circulation of experimental cinematic and sound archives (Rennes), the editorial project Intilak, and the Research Department of Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian).