In Episode 6 of Season 4 of the DOK Industry Podcast, moderator Rama Thiaw invites renowned film editor Niels Pagh Andersen (“The Act of Killing”, “The Look of Silence”), BAFTA-nominated Libyan-British artist and filmmaker Naziha Arebi, and Tunisian-French independent curator and cultural producer Samia Labidi to engage with the questions of a Pluralistic World Cinema and disruptive practices and creations needed in the face of the dominant Western aesthetics. This discussion comes as Western cinema continues to claim universality across time and space while being largely derived from the values and imaginations of those who hold privilege in the West, in particular white men, and to a lesser extent white women, who boast access to the infrastructure and resources.

The episode underlines the need for the international film industry to open up to a plethora of other aesthetics and cinematic languages beyond the Western narrative and artistic conventions and structures that have resulted in a formal and narrative standardisation of films, often stripped of substance and subversiveness. According to Shiaw, Arebi and Labidi, the discourse on diverse cinematic aesthetics beyond the dominant one is thus far more pertinent and complex than approaching it through a strictly decolonial lens and the colonised versus the coloniser dialectic.

At large, the episode addresses these issues in a comprehensive and inclusive manner, embracing the intricacies of a wider conversation that takes into account manifold political, socio-demographic and economic inequalities that hamper the global democratisation of cinema and its industry. Working towards the democratisation of cinema and aesthetics hence entails inviting filmmakers from varied geographies and backgrounds to create new images and representations that will be the archives of tomorrow.

This discussion ultimately grapples with the broader questions of ownership and legacy and the right to tell stories from the so-called Global South, both as individuals and as a collective. Implicitly, the conversation also probes the current notion of the global democratisation of cinema and its industry infrastructure, prompting the question among the podcast speakers: Is it relevant to describe the current cinema as universal, given that the so-called Global South (where the majority of humanity lives) is marginalised by the Global North?

Rama Thiaw is a Senegalese and Mauritanian writer, director, producer and visual artist. Her work includes award-winning feature-length documentaries “Boul Fallé” and “The Revolution Won’t Be Televised”, among others. In 2019, she launched a multidisciplinary art event dedicated to Black Women and Feminism, “The Artistic Sabbar of Dakar”. She has also been a mentor at numerous industry events and markets (Generation Africa, Durban Talent). She was part of the selection committee of the Berlinale’s Panorama Section between 2020 and 2021.

Niels Pagh Andersen has worked as a film editor since 1979 and has edited more than 250 films, including the Academy-Award nominees “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence”, and the Golden Globe nominee “Everlasting Moments”. In recent years, he has also edited several films for Chinese artist, documentarian and activist Ai Weiwei. In 2005, Niels Pagh Andersen received the prestigious Roos Award, the Danish Film Institute’s grand documentary prize for outstanding efforts in documentary filmmaking. In 2021, he published the book “Order in Chaos: Storytelling and Editing in Documentary Film”.

Naziha Arebi is a BAFTA-nominated Libyan-British artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of art and activism, drawn to stories centring on identity, class and collective power. Her films include “Freedom Fields”, “After a Revolution”, “Untold Chaos”, among others. Next to art and filmmaking, Naziha also works as a programmer, mentor and cultural facilitator.

Samia Labidi is a Tunisian-French independent curator and cultural producer. She collaborates with artists’ collectives and cultural institutions as a consultant for artistic and strategic development. She worked with Rawiyat Sisters in Film, and is currently a consultant with the Network of Arab Alternative Screens (NAAS). She is currently based in Tunisia where she also focuses on the research on arts and culture, in and from the MENA region and Africa.

The DOK Industry podcasts are produced in collaboration with What’s Up with Docs and the Programmers of Colour Collective (POC2), with the support of Docs-in-Orbit and MUBI, and funding from Creative Europe, BKM, MDM and the City of Leipzig.

Listen to the podcast episode: DOK Industry Podcasts