Still from the film "Octavia's Visions". Medium long shot. Blue-gray interior, warm light of a table lamp. A person wearing a jacket, scarf and glasses in the center of the image intently works on a typewriter.

Octavia's Visions

Radical Love
Director: Zara Zandieh
Germany, 2021, 18 minutes, experimenta
The film is available online, for free, during the period of September 23 - October 7. It is screened in the original language with Ukrainian subtitles (SDH). English subtitles are available for this film.

In the mid-1990s, the African-American visionary author, Octavia E. Butler published two novels later to be called the “Parable Series”. In “Parable of the Sower“ and “Parable of the Talents” Butler tells the story of a community struggling to survive the environmental, socioeconomic and political collapse of the 21st-century USA. Butler, who died in 2006, created characters and worlds that remain highly topical today. Her complex characters are genderfluid time travelers, atrocity survivors, Black Women and People of Color. Inspired by the Parables, Octavia’s Visions speaks to contemporary themes of environmental degradation, far right extremism, and social liberation. The poetic piece expresses a queer utopian imaginary, a longing to create out of the old something new.

Film screening dates: 23.09.2021 — 7.10.2021
Photo of the director of the film "Octavia's Visions"
Director
Zara Zandieh (they/she) is a filmmaker born and based in Berlin. The stories told through Zara’s projects are dedicated to a decolonial queer gaze that weaves complexities and multilayered representations of post-migrant and marginalized subjects into poetic narratives. Zara’s work has been screened and nominated for awards at various film festivals including International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival, Sheffeld Doc/Fest, Berlinale Forum, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Queer Lisboa, Inside Out, Helsinki International Film Festival, and DOK Leipzig. Zara’s most current project, Octavia’s Visions, was recommended for a Research Fellowship of the Berlin Senate Department for Culture & Europe in 2019. Octavia’s Visions premiered at the 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and won the ZONTA Prize. It will be shown in September 2021 at the Humboldt Forum Berlin. In 2020 Zara received a Rosa Luxemburg Foundation research grant for Fighting This Despair With Joy, a fiction-documentary project (in development). Zara was selected for the 2021 edition of Berlinale Talents.

Selected Filmography: Fighting This Despair With Joy (in development), Octavia’s Visions (2021), The Sea Runs Thru My Veins (2019), Khoshbakhti (Happiness) (2015), under construction (2013)