The Continuous Cinema of the Decolonized
An Introduction
The center of the world is no longer Europe. All economic and social indicators converge in showing that the era when the rest of humanity was compelled to believe it owed its existence and continuity to a Western model is coming to an end. This invented and entrenched colonial mindset that has defined for centuries how we perceive the world seems gradually fading. The latest narratives of the West are losing their glamour and persuasive power. We are being forced to realize that Western hegemony over everything hinged solely on economic (and military) superiority. As a result, voices were isolated, traditions erased, world cultures imposed. The imported and brought‑in (and therefore altered) culture — a bastardised social condition with foreign values — sustained among the colonized population what political oppression had already defined.
In reality, however, humanity as a whole has never relied on the great capitalist metropoles to achieve its fundamental cultural accomplishments and goods. World culture entered a trajectory of stagnation whenever it was not allowed to activate all its inherent potentials, and, as Frantz Fanon wrote, “colonialism insisted that everything must originate from it — and only from it.” In contrast, every people has its own level and its own standards of development: there is no universal, singular scale with which to evaluate advancement. The level is set by each society itself and built upon its own traditions and necessities. This has been known and confirmed—anthropologically and sociologically—for decades. The narrative of a single measure that everyone must reach (the narrative of a universal “modernity”), using the very tools that Western modernizers propose for others to complete this process, is an invention of powerful states in order to attribute diminishing characteristics to entire populations, while at the same time obliging them to accept artificial needs and, secondarily, forbidding them to satisfy them.
The cultures of countries that for decades were not allowed an unhindered trajectory did not remain passive in the global cultural confrontation: through political and social struggles, and in our case aesthetic ones, they entered the game and demanded (and continue to demand) full equality of their narrative and expressive choices. This process within aesthetics began at the same time that the political process of independence and de‑colonization began: from the 1960s onward, the film industry—which had served as a tool of commercial aims and manipulation for so‑called First World countries—was conceived and appreciated as a weapon of liberation by peoples of the so‑called Third World.
Today, political, economic, and social developments confirm that more and more countries have entered the game: those that once de‑colonized themselves, developing ever more rapidly economically and socially, laying all foundations for cultural as well as political liberation. The aesthetic voices of these peoples arrive with strength, intensity, and quality, seeking new terms for their relationship with the Western world. They often surpass it. In their artistic cinema one notices an honest appraisal. The years of subjugation accumulated narrative and technical experience, but above all sociological and historical experience. They dealt with the examination and defense of their people’s identity as their main and desired goal. Emotions and ideas matured, and they came to speak with their own artistic language, rejecting the trends of the moment and the conventions of large western multinationals (of course, the majority of commercial films operate within the terms of commerce). They borrowed what was most useful and suitable from the form of modernist art, such as cinema, while assimilating the political essence of modernism and de‑exoticizing their forms and themes. From tools that had been denied to them (or given only as viewing objects and spectacles), they created their own artistic school to speak about their own experiences and lives. The unaltered elements of culture and tradition that survived, the experience of colonialism, of anti‑colonial struggle and de‑colonization, combined with everyday contemporary experiences and issues, came to the forefront. They stopped looking through the eyes of their oppressor. Films from de‑colonized countries have a vast audience to which they wish to speak and cultivate, initially their own whole people, and thereafter potential viewers in other countries who declare themselves open to receiving cultural knowledge that is strange, unknown, displaced and oppressed, through integral artistic proposals. New possibilities unfold on a global scale.
The Criteria
At film festivals, and currently at the 59th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, this search was one of the author’s dominant pursuits: to see and discover cinema not yet seen. Not films that he would simply fall in love with, or appreciate according to personal taste, but recognizing through them trends that concern—or should concern us—on a cultural scale. There are, of course, criteria that are strictly personal, and those that are theoretical and critical. On this second basis I distinguished, and reconfirmed, two major categories:
Major questions and film language: There were movies, as exceptions, which posed fundamental historical, social, political or existential questions and attempted to study and answer them in depth. They overcame plot conventions, operating on multiple narrative and visual levels, harnessing the unique possibilities of cinematic language that no other form of art can reproduce with such formation. That is, there were films that did not merely tell stories, but constituted a cinematic experience in its entirety as they approached the film as a medium of aesthetic and ethical expression with the necessary and corresponding weight in form and structure. These films were mainly from Latin America and Asia.
Clichés, easy topics and predictability: In contrast, the majority of films (mainly of European origin), beyond some exceptions by significant auteurs, relied on familiar narrative models, on “plots” based on cinematic clichés and lacked thematic or formal distinctiveness linked to global circumstances. They were predictable, thematically and visually uninspired. Rather than proposing new cinematic directions or forms, in conflict with what is already given and overused, they reproduced what we have already seen in mainstream cinema. The problematic issues they confront have low narrative risk, with pre‑constructed limits within which any study or critique is set, while they effectively refuse all grand narratives. The symptom of postmodernism has fully affected their artistic and moral language. They seem self‑censored and apologetic, by being unable to go beyond the commonplace and conventional.
Films of the first category
Proxima, which I focused on most, is a relatively new competitive section at the Karlovy Vary Festival (for the last four years), and it seems not yet fully clarified what its distinct identity or direction should be. It is still seeking whether the films it presents should speak with a new perspective towards reality, contribute generally to the evolution of film language, or spotlight the voices of new filmmakers. Bearing this somewhat abstract intention in mind, I valued and gave weight to films that fit as organically as possible into such a spirit, making that prism as obviously justified as possible. Every festival, after all, proposes trends and “politics of gaze” through its sections. Against this actual framework, I considered as the most interesting voice the filmic proposals that came to us from countries that were for years on the artistic and cinematic periphery. Countries that, as stated in the introduction, come to speak about their own experiences in a contemporary,[1] substantive, culturally urgent manner and beyond dominant conventions.[2]
The Anatomy of the Horses (La anatomía de los caballos) by Daniel Vidal Toche is one such case, and moreover a very important one. It is a film from Peru, a purely cinematic experience of expanding and contracting space and time (something only cinema can achieve), a poetic treatise on the concept of land, of tradition, of revolt: the Peruvian anti‑colonial parallel to last year’s Chilean The Settlers (Los Colonos, 2023), with protagonists a man and a woman of the Quechua people who speak only in their own language on screen, and with an incredible final long take merging the notion of historical condition and political time.
This trend that South American cinema proposes—and which can engage with many different genres (which it does not fear nor consider inappropriate for use)—could be called “modern de‑colonized cinematic vengeance” since it is a cinema grounded and rooted in the contemporary political and cultural needs of each people, renewing through the current national perspective universal values that dominant cinema regards as “outdated” or “politicized”, and which mainly comes to confront narratively the already dominant motif of Western cinema’s protagonists from an equal position, openly asserting its own unconventional perspective on ethics, morals, history, and how cinema can represent them. It avenges, in other words, years of imposed silence.
The Anatomy of the Horses is technically a flawless slow cinema, referencing Cinema Novo and Third Cinema, honoring the cultural legacy of South America in global cinema, authentic in its narrative axis, and above all offering contemporary cultural knowledge. Peru does exist: it has history, needs, thwarted moments, aspirations for a politically and socially different future.
In a similar logic, Brazil’s Future Future (Futuro Futuro) by Davi Pretto is of huge interest, where a new trend in Brazilian cinema is explored: with the enormous class and national stratifications and oppressions, low budget (a constant reference to Third Cinema and often a necessary condition of low-cost film production) meets unapologetically politicized dystopian sci‑fi. Likewise valuing cinema as an aesthetic proposal of visual and sonic experience—not merely storytelling—it manages to bring to the forefront the modern problems of the majority of its people through a clever premise and through an even cleverer cinematic depiction: a poor man, K. (a reference to the Kafkaesque tradition), has lost his memory in floods that destroyed the city where he lived (based on the real 2024 flood disaster in Brazil that killed dozens, left hundreds missing, and displaced hundreds of thousands), and finds solace in an AI system that reconstructs (and constructs anew) memories.
The clever aspect of the film is that it uses AI‑produced scenes not for budgetary reasons (although they in practice reduce the film’s budget) but purely for narrative and conceptual reasons: those few scenes function as memories or nightmares or imposed expectations, constructing in the mind of the character (and of the viewer) an ideal utopia at a moment when we know the cause that he survives in a dystopia of misery, poverty, social devaluation, and loss. It therefore places AI under a substantive critical inquiry regarding its objective and function: what happens if it is used for political purposes—at the moment when it can fully revise reality and truth and validate a plausible lie on a mass scale?
The meeting point of those two films, above all, is cultural and linguistic representation in political terms: those two films are rooted in large, under‑recognized populations and communities under‑represented in mainstream cinema, both linguistically and culturally. They give voice to people, places, and perspectives we rarely see or hear in dominant cinematic discourse. At present these voices stand independently, since we know that full independence is won when every possibility and attempt on the part of dominant cultures to assimilate others culturally disappears. These films interrupt the influence of “the internalization and epidermalization of the oppressed people’s inferiority”, as Frantz Fanon would say. They are films that define pathways for the completion of a condition of cultural rejuvenation on a universal scale.
[1] Sand City (Balur Nogorite) by Mahde Hasan from Bangladesh, Proxima section.
[2] From the non‑competitive section Imagina, the narratively significant experimental film Partition (Taqsim) by Diana Allan stands out — a work about the history of Palestine under British colonial rule, prior to 1948, using solely archival material held by the British colonizers.
Christos Skyllakos
Edited by Ela Bittencourt
©FIPRESCI 2025